Symbolism?

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare essentially won every single game of the year awards for 2007.  In Gamespy's article they sum up all of the reasons this game deserved to be the game of the year and how it essentially had no flaws.  Personally I find that these games gain so much acclaim scary.  Now I want to make sure before I continue on this argument that by no means am I justifying the argument that video games are causing crime.  My worry is much deeper.

Most of the video games in competition with Call of Duty were also what is considered to be a first person shooter.  These are video games in which the prime focus of the game is essentially killing other people.  And this is not the type of killing in the classic Mario games with that classic death music that is more funny than it is scary.  This is killing done by guns in video games that are acclaimed for their realistic graphics.  These are video games in which the motive is killing as many people as possible before your character is killed, generally this motive is even more fueled in setting the game up in a war-like setting which pits the US versus other countries.  And again my complaints do not lie with the video game manufacturers because they will make whatever it is that they can sell the most of. And they can sell the most of these first person shooter video games.  My complaint is with us, the consumers.  And to be honest I'm confused about why these are so popular.  I've played most of them and the stories are generally nothing special.  Why is this fake violence so intriguing to our people?  Especially my generation which has never really been involved with a real war until a couple of years ago and for the most part the youth are against this war.  Why is it that we buy all of these things that we dislike in real life?  Maybe there is some psychology major that knows the answer to this because it escapes me.  I don't doubt that Call of Duty 4 had the best graphics of any video game made last year and that it was a well deserved award.  But there is no way that it would have won the award had it not been one of the most popular games purchased.  Millions of Americans, some very young ones I may add went out and spent around fifty dollars on a game so that they could go home and represent whatever country they wished to in World War 2.

I talked in my first post about using video games for educational purposes.  And I still firmly believe that this method can be the future of video games.  The problem I see is that these games have no redeemable value. With the exception of possibly remembering the names of a few battles, nothing positive about World War 2 will be remembered.  In fact it probably has some huge holes and biases involved in it.  Apart from the natural skills learned in video games, competition and problem solving with others, the fact that these games sell in such high volumes speaks darkly of who we are as a nation.  Possibly this is just me, but there is no way my child will play video games that portray pure violence when the valuable skills I think they can learn from the virtual world are available in thousands of other games.  Maybe its  just the government trying to prepare the young generation to go to another absurd war, I don't think that this is true, but it is a mystery that these games sell so much comparative to other video games.  Maybe we have a strange want to do be able to do things virtually that we can't do in real life?  Whatever the reason, my problem isn't that these video games are made, but that they are selling at such incredible volumes when they portray things that our society generally deems as unethical.  It truly is fascinating what the video game industry has been available to accomplish.