The Difficulty of Killing 150 Clones

I got up this morning and played some video games. State of Emergency is an interesting game about urban riots following a corporate take-over of the government. There are plenty of missions in the game where you fulfill tasks for the local resistance movement, but there's also a chaos mode where people can just add to the mayhem. That in itself should be disturbing enough, but after you get a few high scores in Chaos mode, you can unlock something called "Last Clone Standing." In it, your task is to kill each of 150 defenseless "clones" which are these faceless humanoids, running frantically around a shopping mall. At first I thought it was kind of fun, but I was bothered by how much they acted and reacted like humans--they run, they scream, they plea for mercy. As I shot them, blood would spray against the wall and sometimes body parts or organs would go flying. While playing, it occurred to me how difficult it would be to actually kill 150 people in a mall and then, a shudder coming over me, I thought of how people might want to carry out such a gruesome act and use this game as a simulator for such plans.

Now, I don't think that a game could be held reasonably responsible for hurting anyone, and I believe in our rights to free information. This game is rated M--the equivalent of an NC-17 movie--so no reputable retailer would sell it to a minor. Still, I worry that there's a desire for this type of entertainment, or that maybe just by making this available, we create a stronger desire for it. This game isn't going to cause people to kill, but could it be changing us in different ways?

Wendy and I are having a nice day. The weather is beautiful, again, though still pretty cold. I think the high today might be in the upper 40s. We went to the library and did a few errands. Now we're cutting down some overgrown brush to make way for a new fence in front of our house. Tonight we're going to see Nina Frenkel's art opening at Artemis gallery.