It used to be that girls had cooties, and boys were icky.

Budding sexual feelings were played out in games of “Girls Against the Boys,” capturing each other after breathless, thrilling chases.

The playground battle of the sexes still rages, but in the age of graphically violent video games, how children unleash this tension has changed. And it is a change that worries parents, even though experts downplay the links between video games and extreme, Columbine-like violence.

In “The War of the Boys and Girls: One Winning Team, Many Losses, Tons of Deaths,” girls are annihilated with a variety of weapons, only to pop up and be dispatched all over again – a mirror of many video games popular among school-age boys.

But it’s not a game.

It’s a book written by four fifth-grade boys at McKeown Elementary School in Hampton Township, N.J., raising alarm among the parents of female classmates who are the book’s victims. It also raises questions about the media’s effect on how children process these developmental milestones, and their future behavior.

“It blows your mind that 9-, 10- and 11-year-old boys are even thinking things like this,” said the parent of one of the girls in the story, who did not want his daughter identified. “If the teachers caught it before it became Columbine, great for them. That’s what we’re mostly afraid of – we don’t want another Columbine up here in Sussex County.”

The boys are to undergo psychiatric evaluations.

While the parents’ reaction might be understandable, experts said there’s no probability the boys in question are destined to become psychopathic killers. There’s ample research showing a link between violent video game playing and aggressive behavior, but no research tying it to overt acts of violence.

In fact, as video game playing has skyrocketed, youth violence has decreased, according to Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern California who has studied youth behavior.

But violent media, such as video games and movies, do influence how children process their worlds, said Michael Rich, the director of the Center for Media and Child Health and an adolescent medicine pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“It means “I’m confused and I don’t know how to deal with confusing feelings I have about girls and I’m expressing myself in a format that I know,”‘ he said. The book “is imitating a video game in its structure. Any one of these games set up an environment where the only way you can deal with something is trying to kill whatever the “other’ is until it goes away. But it never does, because more come on and you go to the next level,” Rich said.

The book was written over more than two years by the boys. It named 11 of their female classmates, including two of their own sisters, and a female teacher as the victims of assaults. The victims meet gruesome endings; they are beheaded, eviscerated and shot, with military weapons like miniature howitzers and flame-throwers. The book is in four sections, starting in elementary school and moving on through middle and high school and college – similar to levels of increasing difficulty in most games.

While Rich stressed he is not familiar with the case, he said the psychological evaluations may only serve to stigmatize the boys. But counseling might help them sort out their feelings.

“It’s overkill to have these kids psychiatrically evaluated. They’re not doing anything but mimicking what they are consuming for entertainment,” Rich said.

“We as a society say this is entertainment, this is what you do to have fun. We think that kids go to school and learn about Abraham Lincoln and photosynthesis and then they come home and switch their brains off when they play “Halo,”‘ he said, referring to a popular video game that is rated M for mature, but is played by many younger boys.

“They’re sponges, they pick everything up. You may be separating these boys out from a whole bunch of kids with the same feelings who didn’t have the creativity to make the book or the stupidity to bring it to school,” he said.

Sternheimer said she sees creating the book as a kind of male bonding.

“They use the narrative they’re familiar with in video games to create some kind of shared culture: “”I’m one of the guys … I don’t like girls,”‘ said Sternheimer, the author of “Kids These Days: Fact and Fiction About Today’s Youth.”

While she said psychiatric evaluations might be “overboard,” the incident provides an opportunity to talk about gender and how girls are devalued in the culture. What’s troubling, she said, is that the book is a reflection of that. “That’s one of the things I would be targeting with these young boys,” she said.

Rich said the boys’ parents might want to take a hard look at what kinds of video games, movies and other entertainment the kids are consuming.

He said he empathized with the girls named in the book, and that they might benefit from talking to adults about it, too. The fact that the boys targeted their own sisters, however, indicated to him these attacks were not meant to be taken personally.

“If I’m confused and frustrated about my powerful feelings about females, you are the closest one to me. You are the icon for all femalehood,” he said of the sisters.

JM END O’CROWLEY

(Peggy O’Crowley is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She can be contacted at pocrowley(at)starledger.com. Star-Ledger staff writer Jim Lockwood contributed to this report.)

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