Dear John, I couldn't agree more with your comments concerning the more insidious ways the media promotes violence,  and I think that you and I are agreeing on the form/content distinction as well.  Martial arts is a great example.  Imagine there was an extremely talented trainer in a given martial art who, unfortunately, incorporated actually killing people in his training; Now, because he is a great trainer and he is teaching people martial arts, his students gain the benefits that come with learning those set of skills.  However, when he gives public lectures and he attributes his student's skill acquisition to the 'killing' aspect of his training, he is engaging in the sloppy thinking that I intended to point out. I'm not blaming anybody, and I don't believe that in this case it is a conscious manipulation of data or research.  I do think it is easy to slip into the kind of thinking that losses track of the formal characteristics of a given phenomena and focuses, instead, on the given F2 content, like "killing".  I used rescuing children not because I considered it a nicer alternative (well, not primarily) but because I imagine a rescuing game could provide the requisite intensity that might be an important variable in the learning associate with the particular set of skills the researcher was investigating.  It is relevent to know that it is visual processing phenomena that the researcher is looking at. For example, people who play the first person murder games demonstrate a higher capacity to pick out detailed information from their environment than those who do  not play such games. J Rose