Penn and Teller on First Person Shooter Video Games

Seeing how there hasn't been any huge rise in youth shootings given the 10 years FPS games have been around, and that they're very popular and sell millions of copies, I'd say anyone trying to claim they make people violent is taking the piss. It's really been too long to try and claim any effect.

Guns in video games don't teach you a damn thing about using them in real life. About the most you'll get out of it is learning that to reload, you remove the magazine, put in a new one, and pull the charging handle. That doesn't help you know how to use a bolt hold-open device, or clear misfires, or any of a number of other things. There's a lot of difference between pointing a crosshairs at a character with a mouse and actually aiming a gun.

Furthermore, video games usually encourage shooting enemies in the head, which is actually a bad idea in real life for almost any situation. Since guns are lethal enough to kill or severely wound a person with a shot to the torso, aiming for the head just means the shooter will miss much more often. In this fashion, violent video games might decrease the effectiveness of murderers who got their ideas about guns from games.

According to the US Beaureau of Justice, the rate of violent crimes has been dropping dramatically since about 1994, over which time FPS titles have only become more popular and more realistic. That's kind of like the OPPOSITE of what you'd expect if they made people violent. Teens who grew up on Doom and Duke Nukem 3d are now adults with jobs and marriages.