"Regrettably, they're so realistic," said Jacobs, the daughter of a retired admiral. "There has to be a desensitization. I remember the first James Bond game. I went downstairs, my in-laws are sitting there with the kids, who are playing this game, shooting things up. I thought, `Oh, my God, I hate this.'"
In the 12 years since the Persian Gulf War, she said, video games have become even more realistic, and with the popularity of home consoles, more pervasive.
Jacobs said she realized that shielding her children from exposure to guns and violence was practically impossible -- not just because of her husband's line of work, but also because of the pervasiveness of those things in American culture. When her children, ages 8 to 15, were smaller, she and her husband did not let them play with squirt guns. Still, one of her sons nibbled on his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and made it into the shape of a gun at age 3.
Now they play games standard to many American homes, from Max Payne, about a weapons-wielding undercover cop, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, a thriller in which players must protect national security, to The Lord of the Rings, based on the Tolkien classic.
A rating system established in 1994 is supposed to help parents filter out games with unsuitable content. Socom: US Navy Seals, for instance, is rated M, for mature viewing by those 17 and older. But that designation does not deter under-age players and is rarely enforced by game retailers or arcade operators.
On Saturday night at the Westfield Mall in Trumbull, Connecticut, about 8km west of Orange, another group of teenagers was having its own combat experience. Kevin Martin, 17, was shooting with a red plastic gun tethered to an arcade game called Area 51.
In the upper left-hand corner of the console was a tiny warning label reading "Animated Violence: Strong."
As he played, he seemed unfazed, his face serene and friendly. He was killing time, killing aliens, before meeting some friends.
Three games elapsed, and Kevin wandered away. In the last week, he said, he has been consumed by the images of war on television. He said he found the war sad and felt that it had "cropped up out of nowhere."
The war was not on his mind, however, as he battled figures on the screen at the arcade, he said. Nor has it inspired him to play the games he has at home whose action is strikingly similar to what is unfolding in Iraq, like the military strategy game Command and Conquer, he said.
Kevin said he disagreed with the industry's efforts to limit younger players' access to certain games. "I'm used to the violence," he said. "It's more real than you would think."
He and his friends said that the violence in video games is not to blame for real violence.
"The average person would not play and then go shoot someone," said Chris Carolino, 16. "It's the person, not the game. People are too quick to blame."
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