It’s not a secret within our society that the human mind can be conditioned. In order for the mind to be conditioned the brain has to go through long periods of being subject to a certain discipline or repetitiveness of a certain action. I’m just a writer and have absolutely no training or experience in matters of psychology. What I do have is an inquisitive mind.
The recent tragedy and senseless killings at the elementary school in Newtown, CT, started my inquisitive mind to ask questions about, “Why?” Like most people in this country, I’m heart-broken and have a serious desire to understand how and why such an act could be carried out against a few innocent adults and even more disturbing, the taking of life from what were six and seven-year old babies. The following is just one possibility as I’m sure there are going to be many possible scenarios and this post is just one, but a plausible one.
I titled this post, “Gaming”, and my intention is not to say that gaming is the reason the killer did what he did that day, but rather a quick examination of one mind conditioning possibility that could come from endless hours of gaming. The only reference that I personally can relate to about repetitive actions is the ability I have to do what I’m doing right at this moment, and that is typing. I know learning how to type was a combination of a muscle and mind memory action, but my mind was only conditioned to type. However, there are conditions of the mind out there that could possibly cause people to do harm with the right combination of mental imagining and hours, and hours, and hours of repetitive actions. I personally think that, “Gaming”, could possibily be one of those contributing factors that could, and I repeat, could, be an instrument.
The following is a very real scenario played out all of this world on a daily and yearly basis.
The new age finds parents accepting their children disappearing into their rooms for hours and hours of gaming on X-Box’s, PS3’s and so on. They feel the practice is just what kids do these days. Though there is much truth about the practice of playing games hours on end, many children and adolescent teens aren’t playing Mario Brothers or Pac Man anymore. The games today are extremely violent, mostly first-shooter games. By first shooter I’m talking about walking around in the game as the person that normally does all the shooting. More often than not the games are structured to kill people under the guise of war, crime, etc. There are plenty of games where people are abused, robbed, kidnapped and the list goes on.
My point on this subject is that I took two consecutive years of typing in high school to get proficient enough to type 60 words a minute without errors. During those two years I was in typing class one hour a day, five days a week, and average four weeks a month, for around nine months a year, times two years. Total hours doing repetitive mental and muscle memory actions, I typed for a total of 360 hours. As far as I know, learning to type didn’t put me in a catagory of needing to be analyzed for whether that practice could possibly make me do harm to another human being, nor did typing give me an altered since of reality.
Gaming on the other hand has much more potential and I say again, “potential”, to cause an altered state of reality, though it is also neccessary to elvalute one’s mental acquity. Now young children or teens playing the violent games as often as they do has the potential to cause some kind of worry about their young minds developing something other than an ideal, harmless individual. Just as an example and the equation could be much more in a large group of gamers but for average sake, I will use these numbers. Say a typical gamer loves to play very violent games on average three hours a day and for some reason the gamer only plays six days a week, and four weeks a month times twenty-fours months. Total time spent gaming on games with very violent content = 1728 hours, and I believe the figure is much, much higher in a lot of cases.
This entire post is just one of many things our society should take a look at. I’m smart enough to know that as with guns, in almost every case, guns don’t kill people, people do. The same can be said with games. But my point is that as parents we should stop looking at violent games especially as a good baby sitter for our children and keeps our children out of our hair. Parents need to start paying more attention to what’s going on with their kids, nourish them more, be involved more or if not you might need to take a look at what children are all about and whether your going to have some for the right reasons. Just saying!
terryfrost 
Very well said my friend. Thanks you for your thoughts. I myself believe that there are a few people in this world that will kill no matter what is available to them to use as a weapon. Games do not condition people to kill, just as being a woman does not condition a woman to be a mom. Circumstances condition certain people to be certain things. How can someone deal with death as often as a clergyman or doctor or nurse and still have compassion for the sick and dying? How can police officers that deal with the worst of the worst at times, still go home to their kids and love them like there is no tomorrow? Some people are wired to do what they do, some are rewired to do it. Snipers come back from wars and live great lives. Navy Seals become great men, would you be my neighbor? People that kill do so out of some strange reason that we might never know. People will always kill. It has always happened, always will. Until the media stops glorifying it, and the health care system starts identifying and treating those that need it, the mass killing will continue.
It may have seemed that I was totally blaming gaming but that wasn’t my intent. I would think that doing “anything” repetitively could condition a young mind in negative ways. My gaming post was to be just one avenue that should be checked into. What makes people kill innocent people takes a compliation of things tied together to make them do such a horrific act. I don’t think you would argue that someone that can do such as the young man did to those little children diffinetly had by our definition some mental problems. I like your take on the problem though and thanks for being my very first blog reader my man.