Source: http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=132280&ran=13962

Video-game generation may be desensitized to NFL injuries
Bob Molinaro

I IMAGINE THERE'S a large segment of NFL fans that envisions pro football to be the embodiment of the video games they love to play.

Perhaps most of the NFL's popularity can be attributed to the interests of gamblers and fantasy fanatics. But I've got a feeling that a certain percentage of males, those whose senses have been bombarded by video violence all their lives, are attracted to pro football by the slickly edited TV images that are a variation of their virtual-reality experiences.

This makes me wonder if the catastrophic injury to Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett will make any real impression on the desensitized adolescents and adults raised with the cartoon violence of "Madden '08" or "NFL Blitz," or the absurd blood-and-guts scenarios associated with other Xbox games.

On a human level, there may be no more important or heartbreaking development in the NFL this season than the spinal-cord injury suffered by Everett on Sunday. Yet, I suspect it won't resonate as it should.

The NFL, after all, has a well-programmed audience. The league's crass packaging of its product anesthetizes us to the violence. The men inside those jerseys sacrificing bones and ligaments and risking paralysis aren't really people; they're interchangeable laundry.

Nobody stops to ask what price the athletes pay for our amusement until years later, when former players are hobbling like tables with one leg shorter than the others. Or they suffer brain damage brought about by the very collisions that vicariously thrill us as we sit in our family rooms.

One of ESPN's most popular features with football fans is a program highlighting the biggest hits from that week's games. Former NFL players sit around a desk guffawing as video of freight-train collisions are played one after the other.

With each hit, the panelists raucously exclaim, "He got... jacked up!"

Somehow, with a young player clinging to life in Buffalo, getting jacked up doesn't seem so funny.

The NFL is best enjoyed from an emotional distance, and by that, I don't mean people shouldn't root for their favorite teams. Just don't get too attached to individual players, any one of whom is one snap away from being lost for the season. The first week claimed an impressive list of casualties: Redskins offensive tackle Jon Jansen, St. Louis offensive tackle Orlando Pace, Dallas nose tackle Jason Ferguson, Chicago safety Mike Brown, and Miami safety Yeremiah Bell. All are finished for the season; one and done - a bitter shame, but business as usual in the NFL.

The roll call of walking wounded is even longer, and the schedule is only 1/16th gone. Though most of the credit or blame for how a team does goes to coaches and quarterbacks, it's injuries that usually determine the season's pecking order. The best teams are often the luckiest; unlucky teams fall victim to attrition. No other sport is quite as unforgiving.

Injuries are one thing, but most of us manage to remain comfortably numb to football's most horrific risks - until a player suffers neurological paralysis. Then, if we can bring ourselves to think of the players as real human beings and not simply cogs in a machine, we're reminded that the NFL isn't a cartoon world in which we can laugh at an anvil falling on the head of Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder if any of this hits home with the very large and growing demographic that comes to football through the make-believe violence of video games. In that world, jacked-up players always bounce back, returning as good as new when the game is switched on.

This week, more than many, we're reminded that in real-time, real-life football, the violence and its consequences are all too real.

And people like this gets paid for spewing garbage...

Hi, I get paid 10 million a year to play 16-20 games of a sport I grew up loving. People will write articles about how important it is when I get injured despite a larger number of construction workers and other people doing jobs that have a visible impact on the world who get injured far more frequently and get no mention. Also often don't have financial backing or insurance or, millions of dollars to ensure a comfortable life post injury.

This means that I am important. For playing a game. But hey, I wouldn't be paid this much if people weren't paying rediculous prices to do something I would do for free for love of the game!

misleading thread title...he says that it makes us not "feel" the pain on field because we see it to a much higher degree in our games. The writer is completely off base of course.

That being said, I have watched the video and the hit doersn't look that bad. I have seen worse including people getting hit midair and doing somersaults and land on their backs...then get up and walk away. Of course I have also seen players misstep on stroturf and ruin their entire careers. I think if anything this particular incident doesn't look that bad because ...."it doesn't look that bad". Not because blitz or madden showed us any different.

And i guess the NFL players who have dog fights and kill dogs by their own hands are not guilty and its all video games ;)

Plus NA football is very tame compared to other games, i'm sure everyone has seen rugby.

 But Americans are not champions at Rugby, so we lie that the game is slow and boring, like Soccer, which we also suck at.

I think everyone can tell the difference between getting HIT in the NFL and getting HURT in the NFL. If you get HIT in the NFL, then thats normal. If they have to bring out a stretcher, you got HURT, and everyone can agree that getting hurt really sucks.

Even though I play videogames where I shoot people with guns, I would still freak out if someone got shot right in front of me in real life. You can only become so desensitized to actual violence.

Are these people trying to suggest that, before around 1980, every time a sports player got injured, the whole nation mourned? Nobody has EVER cared, because they see risky behavior and injuries as going hand-in-hand.