For all those who persist in arguing that computer games are inherently educationally valuable: motivating, relevant, interactive etc etc and seem not to consider there may be psychological issues and risks, I would suggest taking a thoughtful look at one of the saddest news stories of recent weeks. It seems a large proportion of prisoners in UK jails today are ex soldiers, some estimates say as many as 9%. Sadly this wasn’t at all news to me. One of the things I discovered when I carried out my own research into computer games in education a couple of years ago, was that the leaders in this field are of course the military.

Traditionally, infantrymen have never been very efficient tools of war. It seems human beings aren’t really programmed to inflict mortal damage on each other, which is why gladiators wore masks, but what the advent of computer games enabled the military to do was combine the technology with operant conditioning to produce a much more effective killer. Today’s US and British infantrymen is a much more effective weapon than he ever was. Sadly, no one stopped to consider the effect on young men and if you listen to the item on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme about one of these, you will hear a lucid and tragic account of that effect. The thing that most moved me was this ex-soldier’s unfashionable determination not to blame anyone else. He knew exactly what he was doing when he broke the law. The terribly sad thing was all he did was exactly what he had been taught to do.

The army’s job was to train him to be lethal and it did this very well, but without any reference at all to the real, flesh and blood effects but more importantly, the psychological effects. I have no doubt that for millennia, soldiers have returned from conflict and struggled to cope with normal life, but surely in this day and age, someone should have cared enough about the computer gaming experiment they were carrying out to consider the possible effects on young recruits after they had stopped being what the military wanted them to be?

I am very happy to accept that some computer games can play a useful part in a child’s education today, but I also have no doubt that anyone who uses them without doing everything in their power to interrogate their content and understand all the possible consequences, is just irresponsible. And just to add a highly relevant cultural dimension to this issue. Yesterday, at the Virtual Worlds Conference in London, I was speaking to an American who works for the one of the leading companies who provide computer software for military training and when I asked him why the US military got so heavily involved he said it was not only about cost, specifically the cost of travel, but because they believed they couldn’t educate their recruits with traditional tools anymore (he mentioned Powerpoint!) because these young men and women have grown up expecting to be engaged and entertained.