I’ve gamed since I could walk, and this is games like Soldier of Fortune etc… I would never commit a violent act against a person, or do anything morally ambiguous. In fact even in the game I tend to not try hurt civilians, keep as many men alive in an RTS as possible, though when facing an alien horde, they better watch out

No connection.

I game online, offline and play military sims on weekends… and I have never been convicted of a crime… :devil:

i like racing games and had to spend a night in jail for speeding with 208km/h on the highway – wonder if there is a connection

No seriously… I’m the opinion that violent people tend to consume violent games and violent movies because they are fascinated by the topic anyway. But I don’t think that movies or games raise violence because adults are able to differentiate between virtual and real things. It might be different with kids – therefore age restrictions are needed.

All the statistics I have seen show a steady decline in violence among youths over the past couple decades. If video games caused violent behavior, voilence would have increased. Parental care is what really shapes a person (with rare exceptions).

Right, time to stir up the pot a bit.
If an individual has an inbred psychological defect, resulting in him/her not being able to distinguish real-life from fantasy, right from wrong, etc, then any medium – whether it’s videogames, movies, music or even books – in which a particular strain of behaviour is sensationalized, and to which the individual is continuously exposed, it will more than likely influence the individual to exhibit extreme cases of said behaviour.
Now in this situation there really are 2 things to look at: Firstly, the fact that the individual already had a psychological defect before coming into contact the medium, which upon contact was just aggravated. This would imply that gaming was not the cause of said behaviour.
Secondly though, is the fact that this medium is sensationalizing behaviour which is considered by many to be abhorrent. Because let’s face it, as much as we love gaming, it is populated by a fairly large amount of titles that glorify violence.
I’m not saying that this glorified violence is turning all ordinary Sunday-school attending kids into katana-wielding psychopaths, but it’s also not helping when it comes to these already disturbed children.
Now would it be fair to ban all violence in videogames, when its clearly only the vast minority of gamers that are being affected negatively? Of course not. We are all individuals, we cannot be painted with the same brush. However we also can’t defend our hobby with such blind patriotism that we ignore the pitfalls of it as well.
This is nowhere near as easy a debate as most well-adjusted gamers make it out to be. Just saying “I’ve been a gamer my whole life, and I’ve never killed anybody.” cannot be our sole argument. There are aspects of this hobby which are blatantly exploitative, and in most cases, unnecessarily so. Think back to a game like Soldier of Fortune, where the entire selling point of the game was the ability to dismember your opponents with bullets. Or a game like Manhunt, where you were rewarded based on how gruesomely you dispatched of people. Poster-children for excessive, gratuitous violence.
Now look at the Call of Duty franchise. A game that when it’s stripped down to it’s core, is really just about shooting hordes of other people with large caliber fireams. But the difference between this and the previous 2 games is that it isn’t simply violence for violence’s sake. The violence is there to draw you in to the reality of warfare, not simply as a vehicle for pent-up bloodlust. To remove the violence of a game such as this, would actually detract from it. Would the famous Russian Airport scene in Modern Warfare 2 really have had such a strong emotional impact if you were firing foam darts?
Now I know that I spoken ambiguously in a few places, with an ever-wavering standpoint, but that is unfortunately the reality we are faced with. There are pros and cons to both sides of this debate, and it will take some fairly agile mental gymnastics to eventually boil down to an answer that satisfies all parties. The only way we can reach this answer is if both sides start to listen to each other, which unfortunately is something that happens very seldomly.

well no… there is no connection , get over it buy a ps3 and get little big planet and then become the sandbag killer and prove me wrong….
ps all really good posts up here , although my 20 odd yr old brain struggles to comprend all this info….ah where did i leave my copy of MAN HUNT now ???