Trigger Happy
360
a T-34C Turbo Mentor, the aircraft used for primary
flight training.
But what does it mean to say that a videogame can
train
you to kill? I think it means rather less than critics
want it to. When I was in school, my favorite sport was
fencing. I was trained to wield my preferred weapon, a
saber, with great speed and precision. The swords we
used were blunted, and we all wore protective clothing
and face-masks. But I was perfectly equipped, if I so
chose, to sharpen my blade and use it to hack limbs off
my classmates with a few swashbuckling moves. There
is no doubt that my potential capability to kill was
enhanced by my fencing activities. But that had no
causal, motivational effect of the type that is implied by
the idea of “training.”
Similarly with videogames. In Time Crisis, for
instance, the player wields a plastic gun that responds
very accurately to light—you aim the gun at the screen
and shoot the enemy. A person who is very good at
Time Crisis will probably be a good shot with a real
gun. But no convincing explanation is available as to
why such an otherwise well-balanced individual would
want to make the move from play to murder. The
soldiers who practice teamwork with Doom are not
