"I got a nephew," continued Arnie. "Eleven years old. He's all about comics and his remote-controlled cars and Rob Schneider movies. But a few weeks ago, I come home and see him sittin' on the couch, leaning forward like he's entranced. I mean, I never saw concentraion like that on a kid's face. Never. And he's got this plastic thing in his hands with buttons on it and he's just hammering away. And then I turn to the television set and I almost get sick. There's just a gun barrel on the screen, at the bottom, muzzle flash shootin' out the end and people getting ripped to shreds. Sprays of blood everywhere. And I realize, with a feeling like I ate something rotten, that he's controlling the gun. He's sitting there operating a damned murder simulator and his mom comes in and tells him to say hi, that his uncle Arnie is visiting and she glances at the TV like it's nothin', like it's perfectly normal for a kid to do somethin' that used to make new recruits puke back in the war. To look at a human shape -- and the people on the screen looked like they were real as you and me -- to look at a human shape and pull that trigger and watch it go down and not even flinch, to not feel that instinctual twinge at causing a death..." Arnie wiped sweat off his brow. He said, "I served next to some coldhearted bastards in the war, guys who had that stare, you know, kids from the street, kids who got beat before bed every night growin' up. And even those guys, those hard characters would freeze up the first time they had to pull the trigger with a living thing on the other end."

I said, "Well, they're pretty violent, but they're just games--"

"Open your ears, Wong. I'm not tellin' you these games have been around and I'm such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn't exist before last month. And now they're everywhere, on every TV set and, hey, ask around and people say they've been common for years and years. I'm a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn't sell these game boxes before, I know they didn't because it's insane that they do at all. But I started seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that's training them. Tell me it ain't. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hour and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside. That's conditioning if I ever saw it. And in your world, this version of reality that played out, nobody finds that strange. Really?

John Dies at the End by David Wong