MOM: Violent video games not a safe outlet for aggression, doctor says

While his small hands may still have been a little chubby and clumsy with the controls, Jarret Millet remembers playing "Grand Theft Auto."

He says he was 6 years old when he started playing the video game in which you become a criminal shooting at cops, hiring prostitutes and killing them while rising in the underworld.

Now 17, Jarret has played some of the most gruesome video games for more than a decade. And only once was he a little disturbed by an image.

"When I was playing 'Manhunt,' and you're killing a man with a brick in slow motion," he said. Other than that, he says, the games haven't affected him negatively at all. Quite the opposite, he says.

"You can come home and play 'Halo 3' and go kill a group of people," he said. "That's stress management."

Nintendo's Wii, which hundreds of thousands of families have bought, recently released "MadWorld," an M-rated game (Mature) in which players can use the remote to simulate using a chainsaw to saw an opponent in half or decapitate a victim with a golf club.

The game appears in black and white, until you make the kill, when red blood spurts on the scene. Players can yank a beating heart out of the character's body and crush it. You can impale an enemy with a signpost or rusty spike.

Not to be outdone, "GTA 5: Chinatown Wars" seeks to provide players with the most realistic, emotional experience in a portable system.

Jarret's friend, Fletcher Brown, remembers playing "GTA" with his dad when he was 6 or 7 years old.

"It's a high. You get the adrenaline," he said.

That's exactly what game manufacturers aim to do. They've helped create a generation of boys whose brains connect images of violence with excitement and arousal.

Dr. Douglas Gentile runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University, where he studies media's effects on children and adults. He says there have been hundreds of studies about whether media violence can actually help reduce aggression by giving players a "safe" outlet for aggressive fantasies.

None of the research bears that out, he said. In fact, they almost all show an increased risk of aggression right afterward, he said.

"It's not how the brain works. You don't forget something by watching it again — you learn it better," he wrote by email this month. "Catharsis doesn't happen, yet it feels like it does because we feel physically tired after all the adrenaline of playing a violent game."