Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Kate Lynch, Phil Thomas, and Andy Hunter. In honor of our second full year of doing this show, we start a deep dive into a guy who may be the single most influential figure in the violent video game discourse over the last 30-odd years: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. Starting our six-month (don't worry, we'll take breaks along the way) deep dive into the self-proclaimed killology expert. Today, we start with Dave's early life and start looking at his most influential work on how we thing about video game violence: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), and how a lot of the violent video game discourse is based on a bad book.
Topics discussed include: The horrifying thought of soldiers not killing people (and how we allegedly "fixed" it), some sketchy wheelings and dealings among our panelists, Dave Grossman warns those nasty video games are teaching kids to kill (citation needed), and Andy tests the gang's knowledge on Pokémon and prescription drugs.
For more on the evolution of the public perception of the American soldier between World War II and the Vietnam War, check out Andrew J, Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008: https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Image-Soldiers-American-Culture/dp/0807858382.
Theme Music: Occam's Sikhwee by Sikh Knowledge (Free Music Archive: https://bit.ly/33G4sLO), used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US (https://bit.ly/33JXogQ)
More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com.