[Den]

Originally Posted by Coda

Counterpoint: Having a venue to act upon negative ideas that doesn't have an impact on the real world is a healthy thing. It's valuable for emotional growth to be able to make a distinction between fantasy and reality and to explore scenarios and mindsets outside of the milieu of day-to-day life. It's actually UNhealthy to insist that fantasy worlds should be held to the same standards as reality, because that removes a point of distinction between the two environments.

Certainly there's a developmental risk in exposing children to violent imagery without moral feedback. There's a reason that such games are rated T or M -- it's not just some socially acceptable threshold of "it doesn't make us feel weird for a person this age to see these things anymore" but an actual thing that has measurable effects on emotional and social development.

But in an adult -- someone who has passed these formative years of development -- who has a healthy grasp on the difference between the real and the fictitious, there is no observed causation suggesting that performing "evil" acts in a fictitious context translates into performing "evil" acts in reality. There IS a correlation going the OTHER direction -- people who are emotionally troubled or naturally violent are more likely to gravitate towards these fantasy worlds. But being cruel in a game is ultimately no worse than playing a cruel villain in a movie, and we don't deal with actors going on rampages.

There was a study done a few years back where they had participants play violent video games... They found that it actually made the participants more empathic, and better people overall.