Personal experience: I've been playing video games like Grand Theft Auto since I was 10-12, somewhere between there and Super Mario in the SNES days and then Mario 64 in the N64 days (Mario is violent, admit it) and not once did I want to stomp on turtles or run over prostitutes or gun down police. I can tell the difference between reality and fiction—violent video games did not turn me into a raging killer like the young people who killed and had games blamed on it.
Grand Theft Auto if people are not aware is a series of video games developed by branches of the Rockstar Game Company or whatever they're referred to. No relation to the energy drink... I don't think so anyway... Back on topic: The series let's you control a character, who does various tasks for people like drug lords, gangsters, crooked cops, a crooked land developer, a porn director, etc. You're also free to kill cops, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, prostitutes, SWAT, the military, shop owners etc. in any way you see fit. Mostly done with guns including but not limited to handguns, submachine guns, RPG's (rocket propelled grenade) and flamethrowers but you can use cars if given the chance. You can also play pool in local bars, bet a NPC, lose then kill him with the pool cue you got from playing and then go ahead and whip out your AK-47 and take out the entire bar in a blood fueled frenzy... Maybe video games can bring out the worst in us but it doesn't always lead to real life murders as we get back on topic.
There have been murders over video games, a couple of friends won a trophy I think for winning a contest, let's say Halo because I can't think of what game it was and one murdered the other friend for the trophy though a game was not blamed for it. A teen went and killed a cop because he wanted to know what it felt like outside Grand Theft Auto. A couple of teens did the same sort of thing: killed someone, perhaps another police officer because they saw it on Grand Theft Auto (GTA does not have a good rap in case you haven't noticed by now). Games have caused deaths because they became addictive; someone was addicted to World of Warcraft and went days without eating, sleeping or even going to the bathroom and died because of it.
As of now, one of my top 5 games is "Postal 2;" a game where you can control a serial killer to complete daily tasks from picking up milk and voting to escaping a napalm factory that caught fire and fighting through a meat packing plant to collect a few steaks. You can use gasoline, your standard handheld guns (pistols, machine guns) to diseased cow heads, a napalm launcher and an RPG. You don't have to kill anyone if you don't want to, you can ignore the rude citizens, the video game protesters, book protesters, rednecks and postal workers who want to kill you after certain points, and just rush in to do what you came to do and leave (be sure to carry lots of "health" pipes which resemble crack pipes and damage you if you do not take another every now and then). There is a limited bit of gore from decapitated heads but if you download/buy "A Weekend in Paradise" it's got added weapons and gore so you can then throw scythes which go so far before stopping, a machete that acts like a boomerang and comes back after being thrown and sledgehammers that destroys people's heads after being hit. The former two can also slice people in half, take their heads off, cut off limbs etc. Same effect can be done with explosive weapons also.
__One Month Later__
Fast forward a month since I wrote the first part of this, I'm now playing Fallout: New Vegas a "post-apocalyptic simulator" which is based mainly on violence. Your character, The Courier, starts off in year 2281, being shot twice in the head, gets a poker chip-shaped storage device stolen and you're tasked with finding and receiving the chip from the man who shot you. Along the way you are tempted with murdering innocent civilians, blowing up a monorail and assassinating the president by aligning yourself with the tyrant Caesar (based on Julius Caesar even using Latin names for his army and speaking Latin at times), helping the autocratic Mr. Robert House to expand his rule over the New Vegas strip by eliminating the competition and raising the robot army he created before the "Great War" 200 years prior (he also found the way to prolong his life hence why he's alive after 200 years without being mutated), unite the factions of New Vegas to eliminate Mr. House, Caesar's Legion, and the NCR and support an independent New Vegas (also known as the Mojave Wasteland) or ally yourself with the democratic New California Republic and help hold the Hoover Dam from Caesar, destroy Legion camps, assassinate Caesar and protect the president from an assassination attempt. All of which is optional depending on who you side with but that doesn't stop you from unleashing your inner monster and blowing up small towns or stealthily killing a bunker full of heavily armoured Brotherhood of Steel (a techno-religious group) members. This is way off topic but I was hoping to illustrate violent games that are not heavily under fire like Grand Theft Auto is (you an also decapitate people, tear off their arms and legs and obliterate their bodies into tiny little pieces in Fallout too by the way, forgot to mention that) but still have plenty of violence like killing NCR Military Police and destroying prostitutes with a minigun, missile launcher or just a simple 9mm handgun (hopefully people can relate this to GTA).
Back on track; recently, I haven't heard much about video game controversy relating to deaths of people or carjackings and joy rides but it's bound to pop back up some time, we just need to wait for Jack Thompson to bring up a lawsuit claiming that children will be corrupted by playing a future Super Mario game which will never happen but just imagine that day. Until then, I'll just be using my gore-ridden video games to vent frustrations and speed up my days waiting for upcoming video games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
