Learning to love mass murder

I'm not a violent guy. But I just cheerfully burned an entire marching band to death, then kicked a woman's head downstairs. OK, it's all virtual slaughter, but I'm starting to scare myself.

By Peter Olafson

Mar 31, 2004 | The head bounced down the concrete stairs. When it bounced, it made a hollow thump, and where it bounced, on every fifth or sixth step, it left a roundish red stain. At the bottom, it rolled in a silent, bloodless arc across a dirt path and came to rest tilting face down. Its dead face wore an expression, not of horror or pain, but of incomprehension.

This expression might have been my own.

I had separated the head from its body with a shovel I found near the dilapidated trailer that served as my home base in the computer game "Postal 2." Then I gave it a running kick -- as if it had been a soccer ball in a wig. It ricocheted off a dirt slope, skidded off the top of the stairs, and began to bounce.

Initially, I did not understand why I had done these things. It's not like me at all. I am usually gentle in games. Or rather, since games rarely encourage gentleness, I am as gentle as games allow me to be. In strategy games, I often build farms when I should be building military barracks. In role-playing games, I'm happiest when I'm just exploring. And in action games, where death is the official language, I kill only people who would kill me and, taking it on faith that my targets are bad people, those I've been ordered to kill. I don't usually attack innocent bystanders.

And yet, on my second day in the fictional town of Paradise, Ariz., in a space of less than five minutes, I killed 13 of them in the most brutal ways imaginable.

I was startled at what I had done and appalled at how I had done it. Even now, months later, I am a little appalled.

But I also found the experience oddly exhilarating. I couldn't seem to stop. And I can't be sure I won't do it again.

Killing is a familiar task to people who play computer and video games. In 23 years of gaming, I must have killed hundreds of thousands of enemies. Maybe millions. I have dropped bombs on them, blasted them with artillery and run them over with tanks. I have shot them with guns and arrows, slashed them with swords, and beaten them with clubs. I have punched them and kicked them off high platforms.

Typically, I haven't had other options. To make progress in most games, I have to kill my enemies. (It's only in the last few years that we've seen a steady flow of games, like the "Thief" series, that allow the player to sneak past them.) No moral ambiguities accompany their deaths. It's them or me.

But recent years have also seen games like the "Grand Theft Auto" series that permit the player to kill noncombatants. These are not bad guys. These are people just walking along the street and minding their own business.

I've occasionally attacked innocent characters, but usually by accident or for semi-practical reasons. Just recently, in the computer game "Call of Duty," too lazy to look in the manual, I shot one of my fellow Allied soldiers in the leg to gauge how careful I'd have to be with friendly fire. (Pretty careful. The soldier's health dropped a notch, and he flinched and complained.)

And in "Grand Theft Auto III," I hunkered down in the enclosed yard of a posh house and fired on passersby to draw out the police. I knew from experience in the first two games in the series that bad behavior produced an escalating response from the authorities -- eventually, they send in the Army -- and I wanted to see if the pattern would repeat. (It did, and I wound up stealing a tank.)

Even then, I stopped when the Washington-area sniper attacks began and game life and real life seemed too similar to each other.

I can claim no such excuses for killing the people in "Postal 2."

Next Page: "I did not kill the young woman who cut into line ahead of me, or the police who responded to the robbery"

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