But this is not your father's cowboys and Indians. Over the past two decades, computers have enhanced electronic shoot-'em-up games with Surround Sound, full color and digital ammunition. Virtual gunning comes with simulated sniper scopes, crosshairs, laser-guided sights and pools of blood for technology as portable as the Game Boy or the Palm.
Wal-Mart removed the computer game "Sniper: Path of Vengeance" from its shelves in the Washington area Friday, in response to the series of sniper attacks there that began Oct. 2. A sniper has killed nine people and wounded two in the area, and officials are investigating links to a Saturday night shooting at an Ashland, Va., restaurant.
"We have removed them from our shelves based on the sensitivity in the area," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burke. "I don't think [the game] has anything to do with what is going on or with this kind of behavior. It was just the right thing to do."
Dozens of titles like "Sniper" make up the "first-person shooting" video game category, where the screen view represents a player's eyes. Simulated sniper scopes pervade the first-person shooting market, whether on personal computers or game consoles like the Sony PlayStation2.
"This particular genre has a long and respectable history, going back a good 15 years or so now," said IGN Entertainment, a San Francisco-based company that analyzes the electronic game market.
In 1987, Nintendo computerized the idea with a "light gun," a plastic toy connected to a game console and aimed at a TV screen. The genre took flight with "Duck Hunt," a whimsical game in which birds were the target.
Last year, $6.4 billion worth of computer and video games were sold, according to NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. The first-person shooting segment represented 3.5 percent of video game sales, while other shooting games claimed 5.6 percent of the market. Sports simulations grabbed the largest market share with 22.2 percent.
But the quaint innocence of "Space Invaders" has been replaced by video games that add the macabre element of, say, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the realism of CNN's greenish night-scope views of Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War.
In the early 1990s, "Wolfenstein," "Doom" and "Quake" enabled players to obliterate opponents with a cache of testosterone-induced weaponry from the comfort of their homes. In the current arcade game "Silent Scope EX" ("EX" stands for "extreme"), with versions available for home consoles, players peer through a simulated sniper scope mounted on a huge toy rifle. The mission: Take out terrorists who have taken hostages in a downtown high-rise.
"Bring him down with one shot!!" the slogan screams off the top of the game cabinet at Dave & Buster's in Marietta.
Through the scope, players watch terrorists weave among the hostages. In a climactic scene, the main bad guy pulls a woman from the lobby of an office building onto the sidewalk. The "commander" orders you to take him out. When you fire, the bullet glides through the air in slow motion until it explodes the bad guy's head.
The arcade edition is so realistic that Derrick Bartlett, president of the American Sniper Association and director of a Florida company that trains police snipers, theorizes that the D.C. shooter could have learned tactics from such games.
"They could give you a feel for tracking moving targets," Bartlett told The Washington Post. "They could desensitize you to the idea of killing a human being."
But Smyrna businessman David Capilouto, national vice chairman of the American Amusement Machine Association, finds that notion preposterous. Capilouto's multimillion-dollar, third-generation family business, Greater Southern Distributing, supplies Silent Scope and other arcade games to customers throughout the Southeast.
The amusements, he said, are nothing more than diversions.
"Any video game today is a big improvement over games that were manufactured 10 or 12 years ago," Capilouto said. "But I don't think, for instance, that playing a NASCAR game makes you qualified to drive in a NAS¬CAR race."
That hasn't stopped psychologists and others from speculating about a possible connection between video games and school shootings, such as Michael Carneal's rampage that left three classmates dead and five wounded in Paducah, Ky., in 1997.
Carneal said there was no connection between the shooting and the video games he played. But Jack Thompson, a lawyer representing Carneal's victims, suggests that video games helped the youth, who had never fired a gun before his onslaught, hit all eight victims with single shots.
Thompson has been among the most outspoken opponents of first-person shooting games. He's particularly critical of Silent Scope.
Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, discounts such a link.
"The notion that using a mouse or controller in a video game can teach people to be a sharpshooter is absurd," Lowenstein said. "Video games available to the public differ from combat simulators used by the military and could never effectively train anyone, physically or psychologically, to kill."