Things That Go Boom

I'm not much for first-person shooter games. Way back when the whole Columbine thing came to pass, I had a demo version of Doom on my computer. If you haven't spend your own requisite amount of time sitting in front of a screen, chasing monsters and ghouls with shotguns and assorted automatic weapons and killing them in ghastly ways, then you wouldn't have to worry about deleting it from your hard drive when your conscience woke you up in the middle of the night.
I was never one of those who felt that video games were to blame for any shootings, high school or drive-by. By that measure, we should have many more professional football players and rock guitar prodigies, based on the sales of video games. The reason I retired from the dungeons of Doom was that I didn't feel comfortable hunting humanoids in what was then a moderately realistic setting. I didn't make it a campaign of any sort, and when it came time for my son to ask if he could play the Star Wars version, the one where you could zap droids and Wookies with your T-16, I felt the need to talk with him about the difference between fantasy and reality, and how seeing things on a screen is different from seeing them in the real world.
To which he replied, "No duh, dad."
Now the video game shelves are chock full of war: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty. You can go around the world and across time to be part of an army that shoots, stabs, and blows up other humans to generate cyber-victory. It brings to mind the moment in "True Lies" when Jamie Lee Curtis confronts her super-spy husband Arnold Schwarzenegger about all the people he has killed in his career. "Yeah," the once and future governator sighs, "but they were all bad." And that's what we can do to tell ourselves that this experience is completely harmless. Unless you recall the dustup when a version of Call of Duty was released where players could control Taliban units.
And suddenly I'm transported to that moment when my son finished reading "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. If you missed this one because you were too busy playing first-person shooter games on your PC, it concerns a future where the best and brightest of Earth's future are trained via computer simulation to deal with the invasion of an alien race. Since that time, my son has left the guns and ammo behind, preferring instead to focus on driving fast through city streets in fantastically expensive cars. In a video game. The good news is that if the Formics land on our planet tomorrow, he might not be available to eradicate the insect hordes, but he will be able to drive away. Really fast.