[Skybird]

What goes in, so goes out.

True for food and body.

Maybe also true for sensory input, and mind...!?

Such games have a certain influence. I have no doubt. Such games have an influence at both directions: reducing inhibitations, as well as serving as a valve to ease the pressure and relax - they can disinhibt you over time, but also can take pressure out of your internal system. On this I also have little doubt. Excvesisve gaming can chnage your habits, your behaviour, your social life. It has been demomnstrated so many times - and I do not think of amok runs here, but much more profane everyday things.

But that regular, " normal" consumation is the only and the decisive variable deciding whether or not somebody turns into an amok runner - that I have severe doubts on. Where it does, the individual either had excessively consumed such stuff, also in other media formats (films, TV) already before, or had mental problems anyway.

Learnign by social examples, old news in social psychology. Kids that see their parents drink a lot tend to be vulnerable for alcohol abuse themselves later on. Drug abuse constantly being downplayed leads to an increased vulnerability to consume drugs in health-damagign amounts.

Killer games in a funny social envrionment with itnact friendshiups and relations and social integration balancing the time at the como90uter, probbaly are a harmless entertainment. A perosn with problems and an already unstable perosnality and a deranged social life - may reatc difefrebtly, may even flee into the alternative world of such games. And then, when severla othert factors beside killer gaming fall into place as well - then it may indeed result in harm being done.

Making killer games a generalised argument, is nonsense. But completely throwing the argument out of the window, also is inappropriate. Because truth most likely is: things depend on several factors, not just one. But the discussion about killer games mostly is led by extremists and black-or-white thinkers almost exclusively. Or political populists with little time and the wish to do quick decisions to fish for voters.

I am much more concerned about how the need to submit to working rules and habits you have to follow in order to allow the computer to understand what you want it do, and how the new media and their omnipresence in general, affect people's thinking patterns, their cognitive schemes and intellectual pattern building. They way you got taught to think, and how to call up memorised knowledge for example, gets affected by how you get asked, how you stored that knowledge (how you learned), and how you are demanded to call it up. In an exam: Getting a question and needing to freely answer it, and getting the same question in multiple-choice format for answers, are two totally different things, and I think the latter spells desaster, while the first demqands mucz more of the student. The way you arrange information to make it processable by a computer software, changes these raw data already, and the way they get their inherent second-degree information out-read (=the inherent info for which you collected the raw data in the first). Its just not the same, and the way it gets done, forms and influences the way you use your creativity and intelligence (or are unable to), and it decides about what ways to use your thinking in are available to you, and what ways get blocked. BTW, I am strictly against multiple choice format tests, and computer assisted lecturing should be strictly overwatched. I am not against the latter - just against exaggerating it. It can help for better education, I experienced that myself with an astronomy study course by Pearson I took - but it can also right prevent better education (like you do not learn math by learnign to handle a picket calculator). Like all technology, there is not only goods, but also risks and bads. Demonising it is as m islead, as uncritically embracing it and just being optimistic, hoping that all will be well in the end. The correct way is: check things out, and always be on your guard.