Cav's Place

Yet again, certain people in positions of authority fail to understand that game worlds are not actually real. They also fail to understand that gamers are generally not like them in that aspect. Or they could just be pretending in order to appear like they actually have something to do and therefore justify their paycheck, of course. That in itself could be somewhat less of a problem if they’d be the only ones having, or pretending to have, such beliefs, but what makes it worse is that certain other people, especially those who are over a certain age and have minor children or grandchildren, end up believing them as well.
Yes, it’s true that a very small number of people may actually make this confusion between a game and reality, but we’re talking about thousands, if not just hundreds, out of the hundreds of millions who play games. In such situations, the person is the problem, not the game. Such people could also be driven to act in certain ways by movies, books, stories they hear or even their own imagination, so they should be kept away from the rest of the population for safety reasons. The rest, however, know the difference quite well, and if some of them try to justify their actions by saying that they were trying out something they saw in a game, that’s just an attempt at avoiding responsibility for their own actions, sort of a modern variant of “the Devil made me do it”.
A special case is that of very young children, who may make this confusion in large numbers. But we’re mainly talking about children under two, or at most under four, who would be quite unable to play games anyway. Only a serious lack of education could make this confusion persist past this age, which means that just these parents, grandparents and other authority figures would be to blame for the situation, because they didn’t adapt the educational activities to present day realities. But even without such education, a human brain that’s not severely malfunctioning will quickly learn to clearly make this difference on its own, so this exception can only be stretched to cover at most all children under four and those children under six or seven who have completely unfit parents or guardians. Past those ages, you simply can’t claim that more than a tiny fraction of one percent of people can confuse games with reality.

People’s actions inside game worlds can be an indicator of their morals, but that’s not a rule, and these virtual actions don’t have to reflect what they’d actually do in real life situations even when they do reveal their morals. A reasonably (or even just marginally) sane individual can use games to release negative emotions, performing violent or otherwise harmful actions in a virtual environment in order to lower the risk of outbursts in real life situations. A curious individual can use games to try out certain actions without needing to use real situations, and real people, to do so. And even a person who has a certain desire to cause harm can find a safe release inside a game world and decide against actually acting on that desire in real life, where being caught could have serious consequences. So, just because game worlds are not real worlds and gamers are fully aware of this, allowing harmful actions in games can actually have beneficial effects in most cases.
On the other hand, a lot of games do penalize unnecessary harmful actions and lead players towards fighting for the greater good. That’s not a general rule, but it’s what usually happens. Perhaps some could argue that there should be a stronger bias in this direction and that the penalties for harmful actions should be greater, but the truth is that games must first be enjoyable. Actually, it must first be possible for a game to be successfully completed, and solving many situations that arise in games would be impossible if the laws and regulations of real life would apply in full. Plus that, while a certain kind of realism is very much desired, a game tends to become less enjoyable if it’s too similar to real life. After all, many people play games (or watch movies, or read books) just for the feeling of escapism that these activities provide.
As such, if games would start implementing these laws and regulations in full and perhaps even stop allowing certain harmful actions altogether, they’d become much less interesting for people. That’d mean that far fewer people would play them, or at least that far fewer people would feel involved in the action while playing them. In this situation, all those beneficial effects I mentioned above would be greatly diminished, but the people who are deranged enough to be unable to tell the difference between a virtual world and the real one would still have plenty of opportunities to act on their insanity. In other words, it’d be a lot of pain for little or no gain.

I wish people would stop worrying so much about what may happen in a virtual world and focus more on what is actually going on in the real one. And when they do think about games, I wish they’d try to make them better, more diverse, more involving, more interesting, more entertaining and easier to obtain for all people instead of adding even more limitations.
That’d be a good use of time and resources, while this is a waste of both at best, and likely has the potential to cause even more harm if more people will learn that they can just blame games for their actions and therefore avoid taking full responsibility. Not to mention that it also provides parents and guardians with an excuse when things go wrong with their children, offering them something to blame for their own failings. After all, we all know that you can safely blame a game for anything and everything you want. It won’t fight back because, you see, it’s not real.