In 2003 alot of the US Forces returned home from Liberia after the official resignation of president Charles Taylor, that's when we the UNMIL peacekeeper-Force stepped in.
They told us in the following months that so far the project had "Only 15 casualties" and several hundred wounded, it did NOT feel that way when we saw the hospital at Force HQ. It was a bizarre feeling like "Haven't I seen this before? and what the hell is that smell?". When I first visited my brother in Philadelphia a few years before, I also had that funny feeling, everything was so familiar yet it gave me the strangest feeling. Imagine watching a lot of movies your whole life and it's always the same setting, the USA. Now imagine if all you watched were star wars movies your whole life, and in the end you finally got to go there. That's what the feeling was, I was in this fictional country with fictional people, in Liberia it was fictional dead people and fictional wounded, it was surreal. Well, I won't ramble on now since I've probably lost half of the people reading this so far, so this is my point. When I remember those events and I play a game like say... Call of Duty where the violence is so close and intense yet so far away, it makes me feel as though they're trivializing violence itself.
There's no blood, they only react as if they were hit with paintballs except there aint even no paint in there, I always ask myself if this wouldn't do more harm than the exadurated violence of Gears of war for example, at least u see reprecussions of your actions, not people falling asleep as a result of your relentless paintball attacks. I first saw a dead person when I was 6, and a bomb went off at the shopping mall we were in on Manilla (philippines), I don't remember what the story around that event was but I remember that this was not a pretty sight. I just kinda stood there for a while stunned, you know when u feel as though u can move but nothing really happens, your brain kinda works but it disconnected itself from the rest of ur body. I don't feel this has affected me in anyway this many years after, and i don't see why we can't show the truth of the world to young one's, I'm not supporting selling m rated games to minors or something, I'm just saying if ur gonna let a kid go around killing ppl in a game, at least show the whole truth, show what really happens when you do put a knife to someone's throat, do not trivialize it!