Lessons Born of Virtual Violence

The ancient World War II weapons take a little getting used to, and Kurt Chiles, 17, fumbles with the German rifle, even if it’s just a rifle in a video game. It’s not the heavy futuristic weaponry the Venice High School senior usually hauls through digital dungeons, hunting demons, in his favorite game, Quake III. All around him here, in a darkened room behind a computer store in Torrance, a dozen other men (and one woman) tap on their keyboards, calm amid sounds of warfare: airplanes screaming overhead, bombs exploding. The computer screens glow with bullets tracing yellow paths through the air, soldiers scrambling toward a dynamited hole in a wall.

“Air strike!” yells one player.

“Run for cover!” yells another.

In this room behind Tony’s PC Parlor, in the days after President Bush announced what he called the first war of the 21st century, Kurt masters an old gun in a new game, and he prepares, in a way that many his age have been preparing, for war. Indeed, the often-demonized digital diet of America’s youngest generation, which has grown up during a time marked by peace, prosperity and rampant entertainment, may give Kurt a strange ability to handle the coming conflict on its many levels, from dissecting news to tracking moving targets.

“Kids don’t understand their lives in terms of stories anymore,” says youth-culture guru Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Playing the Future: How Kids’ Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in the Age of Chaos.” “They understand them more in textures and moments. They listen to rap and rave music rather than Neil Young.”

Teenagers who grew up in the ‘90s spent so much time engaging with visually rich, complex and brutal media that they see the messages that adults miss, he says. They see right through advertising, spin and propaganda, looking for a deeper, more complicated truth, he says.

While the WWII and even “Brady Bunch” generations knew narratives with good guys and villains, today’s kids see things from more angles, as if inside the digital wonderland from “The Matrix,” where the reality rug is pulled out from underneath you, over and over again.

“This war we are experiencing right now, this great moment of discontinuity, is making a lot of adults retreat to older stories,” says Rushkoff, citing politicians’ references to Pearl Harbor and the Crusades, “while kids are having a hard time believing what they’re told.”

News, religion, fantasy, gore--little is taken at face value by the most media-literate teens. This, he says, is the lesson of kid media, of MTV, of the Web, of even bloody first-person-shooter video games such as Unreal, Quake and Half-Life.

“I heard that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was actually shot down,” says Collin Davis, 14, skateboarding home from Wilson High School in Long Beach. He gets most of his news from chat rooms, from friends on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean he believes it. “Everything I hear like that, I go and check it out somewhere else, on some other Web sites.”

He turns to his friend Ryan Rodriguez, 16, and says, “What was that thing with the planes and the numbers? Something about how all the flight numbers, when you look at them all, how they mean something?”

Replies Ryan, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Never mind.”

At the weekly gaming get-together called Netzwork Terror, Kurt has joined a dozen others in playing a demo version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game to be released in time for the holiday season. The setting is an eerie, sober interpretation of D-Day, familiar to many of those here not as the turning point of World War II, but as the opening scene from “Saving Private Ryan,” the closest thing to actual combat they’ve seen.

Kurt’s too young even to remember well the Gulf War, much less Vietnam or WW II. “Vietnam? My grandfather was in it, I think,” he says. “My step-grandfather. We don’t see him much.”

Each player here controls a soldier, choosing either Axis or Allies, and fights on a common digital battleground. Kurt’s character lies bleeding beneath a barbed-wire fence, a German grunt taking shallow breaths, waiting for a medic. He’s been hit, and the other players start trash talking, saying that he’s no good. He shrugs it off. He’s one of the best here, in fact, having logged dozens of hours a week on Quake and Counterstrike--rescuing hostages from terrorists, defusing bombs--since he was 12. He won a $1,000 Quake tournament at Universal City a few years ago. Soon, his soldier is up again and discovering secret rooms, picking off Allies on the beach, hiding behind a wall, waiting for a good shot.

“I don’t like this game as much,” he admits. “I’m more into the fast-paced killing action.”

And it’s this addiction to fantasy carnage that, during a now-distant time of peace and prosperity, gave ‘90s teen media such a bad name, drawing fire from congressmen and activists who charged that games and movies turned high school seniors into killers.

Anti-violence advocate Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former U.S. Military Academy psychology professor and author of “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill,” has made a name for himself testifying, writing and speaking about how simulated carnage helps kids kill other kids. In an interview from his home in Jonesboro, Ark., Grossman cites study after study that claims to prove that media violence is a “toxic substance,” akin to crack and tobacco, and that in a time of relative peace, teens were still exposed to the worst humankind has to offer, psychologically scared by interactive images of combat.

“There’s a generation growing up that the media has cocked and primed for draconian action and a degree of bloodlust that we haven’t seen since the Roman children sat in the Colosseum and cheered as the Christians were killed,” Grossman says, serious, disgusted.

Shoot-’em-up games, a small but visible sliver of a $6-billion industry, not only make kids quicker to violence, he says, but make them better shots (the military uses similar programs to train soldiers). Add to that the amount of time and patience gamers devote to waging monthlong campaigns in dark tunnels with heavy weapons and, he says, “we may actually be raising a generation that is more equipped for a long-term, sustained operation than any before.”

This may work in favor of the military, says Grossman, but that doesn’t excuse such lessons being taught by what he skewers as unregulated, dangerous entertainment products. “This overall phenomenon has the potential to pay off for the military,” he says, “but it is definitely a double-edged sword.”

Luke Barthez, 15, from Long Beach, uses his vast, inherent knowledge of complex media to counter guys like Grossman. “Only idiots can learn from a video game,” he says. “I play soccer, and I only wish I could be as good as the goalie in the [Nintendo 64] game.” He gets much of what he knows about war, conflict and mass, nation-sponsored death from the History Channel. It’s better than what war looks like on a computer, which, he insists, isn’t even close to real. It’s “a prefabricated idea of what somebody wants me to think combat is like. It’s just what they want me to see war as. It’s not real.”

The players at Netzwork Terrors--most of them older, in their 20s and 30s, as are the majority of hard-core gamers--gather in this room every week for 12 to 18 hours, from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning. A sustained campaign.

One of them, Jesse Shannon, 23, a Santa Monica College student, also works as a tester for Activision, which makes Wolfenstein. He sometimes gets paid to play their new releases eight hours a day, for weeks on end. He can endure, he can emerge victorious, but, despite what Grossman says, he’s not willing to take or deliver a real bullet. Playing games has convinced him, as firsthand stories taught young men of previous generations, that war is hell.

“You get to see what combat’s like without risking your life, satisfying this inherent curiosity,” he says. “In an intense game, your heart is racing, you’re sweating, but you’re never scared. Honestly, I don’t want to know any more information about what it’s like to be under fire.”

Shannon describes himself as “suspicious of media” and wonders why mainstream news outlets haven’t explained the reports he’s heard about Osama bin Laden being trained by the CIA. He relies on CNN only about as much as he does Slashdot.org, a tech-geek news site obsessed with Linux, digital freedom and the evils of Microsoft. He also gleans war news from an e-mail list for ravers.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of conspiracy bull in that,” he says. “You have to trust your own judgment.”

Just as he and Kurt and the others don’t believe that Coca-Cola really makes you any happier or that Afghanistan is The Enemy, explains Rushkoff, they don’t believe that playing Quake makes you kill. “It’s very hard for them to accept absolutes like good and evil,” he says.

In Torrance, there is scattered machine gun fire, as if in the distance. There is another air strike, a series of explosions, the sounds of spent rounds falling onto cement.

“Go, go, go! It’s clear!”

“Sniper!”

Kurt, too, is levelheaded about this war he’s heard so much about. Just days after hijackers flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the players in Torrance gathered as usual to fire weapons in the dark. They didn’t take a break. Being there felt right. “I didn’t have any anger,” says Kurt, thinking about that night, “I didn’t imagine that there were terrorists in the game. I didn’t have any feelings of revenge. I just had sorrow.”

A week later, lost in this new game, switching from his SS-issue rifle to a knife, then to a flame thrower, Kurt stares into the familiar stereotype of the Good War, unsure what to do next. From behind, he’s hit by an Allied soldier, and his avatar goes limp. Overhead, he can see the smoke trails of grenades and hear the sinister whistling of bombs. “Come on,” Kurt says to his teammates, pleading into the noise of battle. “Let’s play something else.”