The last shot by Adam (left) was reportedly “dank.”
Supporting claims levied by parent groups for the past two decades, researchers published a study on Wednesday that showed violent video games may cause children to be desensitized or even accustomed to the sight of dope headshots.
The study included girls and boys falling between 12 and 16 years of age and first and sixth prestige in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. Subjects were shown a series of YouTube videos featuring both in-game and real-life “savage headshots,” and asked a series of questions measuring the players’ empathy for the victims.
Jennifer Stanton, the mother of participant Adam Stanton, said that she volunteered her son for the study because she was “worried that Adam was spending too much time on the game.” She added that her biggest concern was her son “getting too used to dicking on noobs.”
“In the real world, you can’t solve all of your problems by spawn-trapping the enemy team with a badass attack helicopter,” Stanton explained. “I would feel awful if, in the future, he felt that the only solution to conflict was a savage noobtube triple kill.”
The primary investigator, Amy Hitchcock, said that most of the subjects displayed “reduced emotional reaction to sick pwnage and subsequent teabagging.” Hitchcock speculated that “with the current rate of desensitization, in ten years many of the children may not even scream in joy at getting a righteous cross-map game-winning killcam on an unsuspecting nerd.”
“In the end, this issue is really just about how we treat dope headshots in our society,” said Hitchcock. “I think we need to restrict these kids’ access to video games before one of them brings a gun to school and 360 no-scopes their whole classroom.”
