Call of Duty

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, my father's uncle was hit with bullets from a German Browning machine gun as he was climbing off his Higgins boat, in the freezing ocean water, just off the beach in Normandy France.

The same uncle he used to sit with in his backyard, drinking root beers and talking about baseball.

On the other edge of the world, his twin brother was in the Pacific, sweating and scared, climbing through island mangroves with his M-1 Garand carbine.  While this twin survived, he was never the same, having lost his sanity and his brother while the war raged throughout the world just a single generation ago.

William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over."

And although the real visions of the war are dimming with time, they can still be seen.  In faded tattoos on veterans - the pale ink images of ships, symbols and companies on wrinkled and spotted forearms.

They have witnessed what most Americans will never see. Incredible, extreme violence and suffering. The core or warfare - eliminating the enemy by causing their death.

Perhaps they have earned metaphysical retribution for those indescribable moments of terror in their lives - a new life, after the war, which is sweeter, more valuable, and more poignant.

But as those real memories blur in the distance, the newest generation of children all over the world have been recruited into an electronic, virtual reality version of that experience - the "Call of Duty" computer game.

It started it's existence as an interactive version of D-Day, but evolved to include many battlegrounds and killing fields, a menu-driven cafeteria of war's death and destruction.

The latest version is the seventh installment of the game.  Within 24 hours of going on sale, more than 7 million copies were sold. A Japanese version was also released.  The total sales of the 2010 version alone exceed 25 million copies. Just six weeks after the release, Activision reported Black Ops had earned $1 billion in sales.

And all over the world, we are now losing a new generation of children to World War II - again - but this time it's the cyber version.

Black Ops (Call of Duty) is mesmerizingly and almost medically addictive and disturbingly and shockingly desensitizing.  It has graphic images of limbs being blown apart by high caliber bullets and blood being sprayed from torn arteries.  Points are collected and tallied on screen for each measure of carnage and gore.

Internet versions of the game allow players to join the virtual battle from anywhere in the world - one  click on an X-box icon and they appear on the other player's screen instantly. A 15-year-old in a basement in Ohio can engage in a real-time virtual fight with a 17-year-old in Kiev.

For the players, the hours seem to be mere seconds. On the surface, it appears to be just a video game. But complex social, psychological, and neurological effects are all in play.  It's anything but a harmless video game.

"Game players have some or even many symptoms of drug addiction, in that some players become more concerned with their interactions in the game than in their broader lives.  Players may ... gain or lose significant weight due to playing, disrupt sleep patterns to play and suffer sleep deprivation as an effect, play at work, standing in the middle of nowhere looking into space for a considerable amount of time, avoiding phone calls from friends and/or lying about play time." (1)

I have heard countless stories of college student addictions.  Having had academic success in high school under the watchful eyes of their parents, they falter in college under the spell of Call of Duty.

Move over marijuana and Miller Lite.  C.O.D. is the new headliner, featuring all-night sessions, sleepless weekends, and an indifference to college academics. In 2008, one of the five FCC Commissioners, Deborah Taylor Tate, stated that online gaming addiction was "one of the top reasons for college drop-outs."

And 20 something women know all about the perils of Call of Duty. There are Facebook sites, blogs, and support groups for women whose boyfriends have become Call of Duty zombies.

Constant exposure to three-dimensional geospatial views within the game are also potentially harmful, and can trigger epileptic and other types of neurological disorders.  So extreme are the jarring changes in perspective that many adults cannot view the game for more than seconds without experiencing vertigo or nausea.

So, 67 years after allied forces landed on the beaches of Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah, and Sword, the memory and the pain linger.

And we are fighting a second battle, part cyber and part social .  Parents need to understand the truth about Call of Duty and its effects. It has a clear effect on the social development, physical, and behavioral health of teens and pre-teens.  It can strain adult relationships.

It is clearly and undeniably addictive - and tens of millions of copies are sitting in disk drives all over the world.  Addicts are as anxious to spin them as they would be to hold a lighter under a spoon.  

America has to begin saying "no" to the uber-cyber Call of Duty.

It is not harmless.

It is as destructive as the fifty caliber shells that rained down on the real soldiers in Normandy, on that fateful date in June, 1944.

1) Grüsser, S.M.; R. Thalemann, M. D. Griffiths (April, 2007).CyberPsychology & Behavior (Mary Anne Liebert, Inc.) 10 (2): 290–292.