Abstract
This article uses general semantics and somatics to evaluate the age-appropriate use of violent first-person shooter computer games. The paper argues that the natural development sequence for children and teens is from physiologic language to natural language, and from somatic-emotional patterning to higher level cognitive abstractions. Reversing this natural sequence can create psychotic breaks in which semantics become separated from somatic reality. References are made to Alfred Korzybski's examples of semantic breakdowns in Science and sanity (1933) and to discussion of the role of mirror neurons in somatic-emotional development (Ramachandran and Oberman, Scientific American 295: 62–69, 2006). Seung-Hui Cho of the Virginia Tech shooting spree, who compulsively played computer games, is used as a case study.
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