From the moment I walked into the video arcade and saw the crowd, I knew what had happened. The recent flap in Washington over a couple of especially violent video games has given them more free publicity than the manufacturers could ever have dreamed possible.

Is anyone out there surprised that business is booming?

After all the bad press it got in newspapers and on TV, I was especially curious to see Mortal Kombat, one of a couple of games considered so violent that a Senate panel was convened to consider their damaging effect on the minds of America’s children.

Despite the ear-splitting screech of electronic bells, grunts, whoops and explosions that assaulted me at the entrance, I found the Mortal Kombat machine instantly. It was the only game in the joint with a dozen mesmerized youngsters huddled around it, craning their necks to get an eyeful of computerized blood and guts. I stood at the back for a while and watched as a young hotshot at the controls murdered villain after villain with amazing speed and dexterity.

It should be pointed out, by the way, that there are no good guys in Mortal Kombat, no white hats out there risking their lives to save the world. In the category of Ninja-warrior games known to video arcadians as “punch-and-kick,” every character is a sadistic monster whose mission is to beat his opponent to a pulp. Mortal Kombat and the graphically improved Mortal Kombat II are no different, except that they have managed to take the bloody battles to new heights of near-photographic grisliness. And the kids who frequent video arcades, or rent the slightly less gory Nintendo and Sega cartridges of such games, can’t seem to get enough of it.

While the other kids looked on admiringly, Adam, the 14-year-old whiz at the controls, pounded the buttons and rammed the joystick frantically on Mortal Kombat II. His fighter, Cage, kicked and punched and generally made short work of a nasty named Scorpion. When Scorpion had been beaten senseless, the screen lit up with the command “Finish him!” As Adam pounded furiously on the buttons again to deliver the “fatality,” Cage reared back with his fist and struck a blow that ripped Scorpion’s head from his body in a gusher of bright-red blood.

“There’s a computer glitch or something that lets you punch the same head off twice if you go real fast on the controls,” said Adam, a genial youngster who wore baggy khaki pants, a hooded sweatshirt, and his baseball cap turned backwards.

Adam, who said he once spent as much as $20 in a day on Mortal Kombat, proceeded to beat the tar out of an ugly brute named Kano. After the vanquished enemy was beheaded with a punch, his bloody body tumbled from a ledge and was impaled on a bed of hideous-looking spikes.

As another one of his fighters skewered an opponent, who twitched creepily at the end of two swords, a 15-year-old at the nearby Mortal Kombat machine touched off another bloodbath by tearing an opponent’s head and spine from his body as easily as Julia Child debones a chicken.

Adam’s new fighter then pulverized Sunya, a shapely blonde warrior tumbling around in an aerobic-exercise outfit. To finish her off, the fighter plunged his hand into Sunya chest and tore out her heart, which continued to beat as it was held aloft.

“That’s probably the most gruesome fatality,” said Adam, who finally lost a game and gave up his spot to the next eager kid with 50 cents.

Every youngster I spoke with at the arcade had heard of the controversy among politicians and industry representatives over video-game violence. Not surpisingly, none of the kids agreed that it was a harmful form of entertainment that could lead to violent behavior.

“Depends on who plays it,” said a young teen-ager who waited his turn to play. “It might make you violent if you’re a violent kind of person already. Otherwise, it doesn’t hurt you.”

Adam nodded without taking his eyes from the screen.

“I just come in here to play the game for fun once in a while,” he said. “When I leave, I’m not a different person. It doesn’t have a bad effect. Besides, you wouldn’t believe the range of people who play it. One guy’s gotta be 50 years old and he plays all the time. But it’s real popular with college guys.”

Just then, an 11-year-old boy in a football jacket wandered in. He wormed his way to the front of the pack of bigger kids to watch Mortal Kombat II. I asked him if he had ever played the game before. When he said “not yet,” I thought he meant that his parents considered him still too young for such things.

“I’ve only played regular Mortal Kombat so far,” he said as he watched a leggy brunette named Kitana being sliced-and-diced on the screen. “My mother lets me play it at home. She doesn’t think it’s bad because it’s only a video game.”

And that, of course, is the problem we all have to wrestle with these days. Does the make-believe violence of video games, movies and TV beget violence in the real world? Dozens of studies have failed to make the link conclusively, so who knows? Maybe the youngsters are right when they say violent games only adversely influence people who are prone to violence in the first place. For the rest of them, maybe it is just cartoon gore that they can walk away from when their last quarter is gone.

Yet the eyes of a young child told me differently. I was just about to leave when she came into the arcade and stood beside the 11-year-old boy, whom I presumed to be her older brother. As they stared at the game, the boy nudged her and said, “Watch this.” On the screen, the victor hurled a fireball that turned the defeated warrior into a screaming human torch. The child’s eyes did not grow wide with fright, as one might expect of someone so young; instead, they narrowed with awe and fascination.

“Cooool,” she said in a long, slow breath.