See, I get where you’re going with this, but it just doesn’t follow. We know of no studies that link videogame violence to real world violence, which does not directly invalidate what you’re hinting at here, but it is not unexplored territory.
I’ll use FPS as a stand in for whatever you mean by killing simulators.
Cultural influence is complicated but we can infer something from how both of these types of games are marketed, and the example that best supports your position that I can think of is call of duty 4 modern warfare, which came out in the PS3 era, that’s a game that was leaning into realism a bit too much for my tastes, here’s the trailer for it from 2007.
The most important bit is right up front:
“The following trailer consists entirely of actual gameplay”
There is a real sense that the context in which we should experience this is of real war in real places against real threats. The enemies on screen are caricatures to be sure, the bad guys irredeemably bad and your intervention is a good thing, all of this is fantasy but not far off from fantasies real world people had about real wars at the time. An argument could be made that these types of videogames could shape impressionable minds the wrong way, but that would ignore the most obvious flaw of that argument, this video game aspires to recreate the feeling of how war was perceived at the time. Not playing this game did not change what you thought of as real about war or violence or who the bad guys were or the righteousness of the violence in the real world.
No, I don’t think this is a net good for society, but this is as bad as it got and it didn’t last long, let’s look at another game that aspires to realism
This time, at the start we get “captured in real time in 4K”, followed by “Powered by satellite data and Azure AI”, not a direct allusion to reality but they are letting you know that this is not pre-rendered footage, and of course can also be interpreted to mean that it is not real world footage either but that it is based on reality. Nothing here is cartoonish. In the extremes, we can look at the types of controllers that are commercially available for flight simulators like those in this video.
There is nothing even remotely similar for FPS games.
Now. lets look at how modern FPS games are marketed today.
“Actual in game footage” this does not allow the same level of suspension of belief as in the flight sim, we are told this is a game and the visuals are from the game.
Cliched lines like “fine line between right and wrong”, a cigar chomping, grizzled looking team leader “going dark” followed by what looks like a movie trailer, the visuals are certainly impressive but they’re offering the movie experience of war with heroic/dramatic musical cues and what feels like a narrative with clear cut good guys and bad guys. This is not meant to be understood as a real war fight against a real world enemy. IT is the movie version of war.
I have not described the gameplay experience, I have only looked at how these games are sold, which is how they convince people to pay for the games themselves, the sort of experience people are buying.
Because most people don’t actually buy these games to feel like they’re killing people, the way people who play flight sims want to feel like they are flying a plane. People who want to kill people may buy these games and are unable to differentiate real life from fantasy, but it doesn’t follow that this sort of behavior is learned by playing games or that any real life skills for killing people can be gleamed by playing.
Sure, but that’s the problem with larger pictures, there’s a lot in that picture besides FPS games, there’s despair caused by global warming and too much money trying to stop us from addressing it, hatred stoked by politicians for power and money, general feeling of unease because the rich get richer and everybody else is just getting by. Looking at the bigger picture, would you go so far to say that violent video games are cause or effect? Or is it even more complicated than that?
Edited for typos and clarity.
