avianflu wrote on Apr 30, 2012, 10:01:
Australia's far right political conservatism is always surprising to me. It's in the middle of nowhere strategically and no one on the planet wants anything that it has. It is not a particularly religious country. And yet they are successfully passing more and more laws restricting content in the marketplace.

Ummm, this sort of casual correlation is the worst kind of way to support your hypothesis. There is no attempt to explore the role of the United States/USSR arms race and cold war, the first gulf war and 911 (both prior to the advent of high realism FPS games) which have resulted in an ongoing requirement for huge global military presences. You don't address the bizarre need for Australia to try and match the US in quality (if not quantity) of military hardware (Abrams tanks, F35's etc), or to send our forces in to engagements which have zero to do with us, which would account for our ridiculous expenditure.

Further, you don't address why our armed forces numbers haven't swelled dramatically since these games came out, or why casual people (such as myself) who have played these games for years aren't gun nuts or wannabe soldiers.

Anders Breivik may well be sane, but he's not a balanced individual. He's an extremist and a terrorist. What he used those games to accomplish is a symptom of his psyche, not a result of the game making him in to a killer.

What can be stated with some degree of certainty is that violent people are attracted to violent media, including violent games. Violent media does not necessarily make violent people, and none of the wowser 'studies' presented thus far that I have perused have come close to conclusively proving this.