"As of right now, I have one kill and zero deaths," Nick Averna, 15, said nonchalantly as he sat in the den of his family's home in Orange, Connecticut. Joystick in hand, headset in place, he was playing Socom: US Navy Seals, a video game described by the gaming Web site IGN.com as the "king of the military shooter genre."
As he navigated the sandy terrain of a digitally rendered Iraqi desert that looked eerily realistic on a 150cm screen, he could hear other players on his team -- assembled randomly from those who had logged on around the world -- react to the action. In response to the permutations of the battle, he could draw on an arsenal of weapons like those available to soldiers currently at war in Iraq.
It was Saturday afternoon, less than 72 hours after the real war began, and the peace of Nick's home in the bucolic town between New Haven and Bridgeport was undisturbed by the action on the Sony PlayStation2 console. Nick had the sound effects, as booming and realistic as the images, turned down for a visitor.
Typically Nick and five other neighborhood teenagers log on from their own homes and form teams with others online for combat. This time they gathered at the Averna home, showing a reporter how the game worked and talking about the war.
"I haven't made a connection between this and the war, until you asked," Nick said. "You control these guys on the screen with a button. I would never want to do this for real. I would be too afraid." Text flashed at the top of the screen: "You were killed by 2X Comcast with a m63A."
"Kill or be killed" encounters are, of course, at the core of a stream of video games, from medieval fantasies to contemporary military simulations to more lurid fare. Even with a war in Iraq unfolding on live television, the shooting in dens and game arcades goes on with little pause. The question is whether there are new lessons to be drawn.
Rob Smith, editor in chief of PC Gamer magazine, said a case could be made for war-themed video games as a kind of pedagogic device, a tool to help young people become more familiar with the armaments talked about on television. After all, the Army itself has created a free game called America's Army as a recruitment tool. But Smith contends that games, and their enjoyment, are altogether distinct from the realities of war.
Fantasy versus reality
"There is a war going on with real people dropping real bombs," he said, "and the connection between that and games is such a monumental leap it's difficult to make a correlation."
Indeed, one of Nick's fellow players in Orange said it was easy to separate the two. "Real war you can't control with a joystick," said Mike Epstein, 15, who his friends agree is the best player of the game in their neighborhood circle (although they also agree that he plays it too long and too often). "When you die, you die."
Another friend, Brian Skinner, 16, quoted a character from a movie who had served in a war but was now a football player: "Someone says to him, `It's going to be a war out there on the field.' And the guy says, `I've been to war. This is just a game.'"
In other game-playing households, though, perceptions vary.
Lisa Jacobs of San Diego, a mother of four whose husband is a special-operations lieutenant colonel on duty in Kuwait, said she worried about whether children can make a distinction between reality and the violence of games.
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