1 hour ago, frob said:

I'd put the arbitrary line at the point where it begins to interfere with 'normal life' or disrupt someone from doing the activities they wish, although that too is arbitrary.

That's pretty much the psychology definition. If it's harming you  it's a disorder. If you can't identify any harm then you're just eccentric

The scary trend with modern gaming isn't violence, it's gambling. 

We've had a generation grow up playing violent games now and no link has been proven.

However, mobile games have spiralled into the free-to-play-but-please-keep-paying model, where the aim is to dig hooks into a small percentage of your users and hypnotise them into paying for the game over and over again. From a purely business perspective, it's a very good thing if you can get players to become addicted... What's worse is that these companies are better at that goal than ever. The gambling industry now has decades of experience in making addictive video games, and those skills are directly transferrable to our industry (e.g. video slot machines are being made with Unity)... And that's scary as hell. Worse still, we've now got unprecedented access to data on player behaviours -- what used to require an expensive focus test run by behavioural experts can now be achieved by an off-the-shelf analytics service. Scientific experiments are routinely conducted on players, grouped randomly into trial and control groups without their knowledge, to test whether a game tweak will increase spending or addiction. 

And it's not just mobile gaming either, all this monry-making knowledge and practice is being appropriated by every part of the industry, and meanwhile traditional betting agencies are moving into e-sports. You've got kids who start out betting in-game tradable items on the outcomes of e-sports matches, who then graduate to real money (often with their parent's credit card).

Large scale exposure to violence is such a 90's fear. Large scale exposure to addictive gambling is the new concern

I agree with others who question the survey, I tried to answer it and found the questions ambiguous and/or leading. In my case, I abandoned the survey part way through due to these issues. Even if this were fixed, if the majority of the survey respondents are people who have an active interest in game development, that will likely skew the results (unless your aim is to measure beliefs in the game development community specifically).

In my personal opinion it seems unlikely that playing violent computer games at an inappropriately young age is a common cause of real world violence. Sadly there will always be a few outliers, and the sheer novelty of it will attract undue media attention and make it seem to the causal observer that there is a much bigger "problem". While I'm thankfully sheltered from day to day experiences of violence, the little that I have seen anecdotally I would correlated with poverty, lack of education and opportunity and I would speculate that there are cyclical aspects where the individuals were raised in difficult circumstances (e.g. abusive parents).

I find it curious that there is such a focus by some on computer games in connection with real world violence. One possibility is that it serves as a distraction that diverts attention away from the more fundamental issues that would need to be addressed to reduce violence, measures that might be unpalatable to people in power (wealth inequality, etc). Another is that the people who drive these conversations are earnest but have (IMO) "simpler" view of the world, driven by emotionally vibrant anecdotes rather than statistics and seeing direct cause and effect where other people might see co-incidence or mild correlation. Yet another might be that these people object to the existence of the violent computer games and don't mind exploiting tragic circumstances to demonise them in order to regulate and/or censor the games.

There are really a lot of media out there which definitily makes people more violent and aggressive - this includes music, movies and games and books as well. Even the newspaper can make people violent and agressive.

Also there a lot of games or movies which are really violent but dont need it for telling the story. As a matter of fact, some media makes their story unbeliebable when they overuse violence a lot.

Killing robots or aliens or doing unrealistic stuff is just fine when you mostly dont get the idea about reality. But seeing in a military shooter how the bullet shoots through a humans head with a ton of blood and brain splattering around, seeing all the details or watching humans or animals gets tortured badly: Such things are not needed and will eventually make people really angry, aggressive or violent and some may just go out and do that stuff for real.

There are really rare cases when extreme violence is required to make it more believable.

I think the world would be a much better place, when the violence is used more wisely or be near no-present at all.

2 hours ago, trjh2k2 said:

[citation needed]

All of the previous discussion has pointed out that no studies have shown that media causes violent behavior.  If you're going to say the exact opposite, you're best to back it up with something. 

This is a pretty serious claim though, and would have pretty important implications if it were the case.

Causing is the wrong word, its not causing but rather amplification. People with bad tendencies (No friends, no job, no purpose in life, serious depression, bad parents, you name it etc.) gets violent amplificated more than others. So i cannot see that violent media has no effect at all. As a matter of fact, it will have effects when coupled with other stuff.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting

Violent media in that case may not be the cause, but it was definitily a amplification added to others.

But @ferreiradaselva is right, the OP gots his survey and got a lot of answers, so we should close that.

The reason why i posted in the first place was i got the impression from all the posts here that violence in games makes no difference from non-violent games at all - which is not true. It makes a difference.

5 hours ago, Finalspace said:

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting

Violent media in that case may not be the cause, but it was definitily a amplification added to others.

Not definitely. Speculatively.

You could also speculate that he was a violent person and used airsoft and counter-strike as a coping strategy to deal with his impulses, and that they've helped to avoid similar incidents elsewhere. But that's just speculation...

Be careful confusing your intuition with certainty.