Eugene F. Provenzo Jr.

About the author: Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. is a professor of education at the University of Miami and the author of Children and Hyperreality: The Loss of the Real in Contemporary Childhood and Adolescence.

"First-person shooter" games such as Doom and Quake allow players to simulate the act of shooting people. The more people you can kill in these games, the better your score. These games effectively act as teaching machines that desensitize players to violence and make them better at killing. As computers become more sophisticated, the realism of these virtual-reality murder simulators will only increase.

Editor's note: The following remarks were presented to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation at a March 21, 2000, hearing entitled "The Impact of Interactive Violence on Children."

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