Halo 4 came with the box, so I’ve been playing that. My understanding is that moderate amounts of video game playing–perhaps an hour or two a week–is good for cognitive development. I can certainly see how this would be, given the complexity of the interactions between the controller and the game.
Most of these games come with stories. For those who have not played them, they are in some respects literally presented as movies. You get credits at the beginning and a literal rolling of the credits complete with music at the end of major story lines.
Halo 4 begins with a discussion between a doctor who apparently took children at an early age to modify them mentally and physically, so as to create the perfect storm troopers to suppress an apparently incipient rebellion. Her interrogator is questioning the morality of this, but within the story line these storm troopers intended for one purpose were retasked to fight aliens, and were successful. The main character, apparently, in all the Halo iterations is Master Chief.
The interrogator asks if Master Chief is a sociopath, and his “creator” responds that he is calibrated to succeed and even thrive in the most hostile environments. The interrogator asks again: but would you not agree that in some important respect he is not right?
We then get a cut scene, and fade to a space battleship under attack, and we wake up from suspended animation as Master Chief.
Would it be too much to call this brain washing? Perhaps.
But as I have from time to time, I would suggest that the emerging figure best adapted to modern life is the sociopath, who is devoid of the emotions of mourning the past, who lacks all sensitivity to what is being lost in terms of interpersonal connection, who is in important respects a machine who can be plugged as a gear into a massive colossus which, the faster it moves, the less it cares about any deep purpose in human life, other than conformity to a role within the machine.
Take an aspiring CEO. That person, in Stanley Bing’s infamous formulation in “What would Machiavelli do”, cares about three things: work, weird sex, and golf. Self evidently, none of these are intrinsically meaningful, even if this person might be enormously economically productive, may see his or her picture on the covers of magazines, may be lauded as a pillar of the community for making politically motivated charitable donations.
We do, in my view, need to worry about the emotional disconnections of many of today’s youth, their callowness, hollowness, unreflective cruelty. Perhaps it has always been like this. For recorded history, violence–actual violence–has been a constant.
Still, emotionally detached and alienated kids are fertile ground for cultural nihilists, and never before in human history (other than the past century or so) have there been so many people who long so desperately to betray and destroy their own culture, their own people, their own countries. The Mongols left literal mountains of bodies, but they never despised themselves, even if they fought among each other. There was always a tribe which was connected to the past.
The tribe we need fear today consists in precisely those who want to destroy the past, and in so doing destroy the future. They want an eternal moment, where no freedom need be feared.