Anneleen is right in some ways, but maybe she could have been a bit more thorough?

These problems are more complex than just psychological, because the cause of them are not just limited to one person. The place where you grew up, your family, neighbours, and culture all play a part in what kind of person you become.

Usually childhood traumaus and other incidents can lead to a destabilized person, but other factors must also be included, for instance economic problems. Other people's psychology also have an effect on you, because this determines they way they act towards you.

Now take the US as you so eloquently used as an example. Immediately you can notice one thing; that there is no gun control in the country. People fear each other like no other place, your neighbour has three locks on the door and several alarm system, many people carry guns and have them in their homes to 'protect themselves' from intruders, even if they are their neighbours.

The whole country is so on-edge, that it is no wonder a large number of people commit crimes like you mentioned. The whole society is the reason for these killing, not a single video game or movie.

Do you see this behaviour to this magnitude in any other country in the world? No, you don't. Because again, it is the way society in the US has developed.

I just want to say I'm sick of everyone blaming games for what people do. I had a great childhood and have been playing violent games for most of my life and I turned out ok. :p

Ditto Imposter :p

lamo

Yeah dont play games or you'll end up in prison... o_x

In the latest edition of the magazine Eos there's an interesting article about the relation of gaming and violent behavior etc. Eos is a rather reknown scientific magazine with close ties to Scientific American, the magazine let's specialists from some of the bigger universities shed a light on the subject rather than your average ignorant zealot.

Anyway, violence on tv or in computer games doesn't automatically endorse or cause violent behavior. It is however a fact that the sense for realism changes slightly (researchers agree on this). With television the duration someone's exposed to violence has a direct influence on the severity of change in his reality, whereas with gaming researchers could prove there was no similar time/perception relation. As many of you know, and this is a thing the researchers mentioned as well, the people participating in the experiments never felt as if what they were playing was anything close to reality. No matter how realistic the graphics are, in fact, if there's any measurement for reality in games it should be the storyline (dixit researchers), but "luckily", storylines have slowly started their retreat from games :)

Anyway, boils down to this, games don't feel real. Gaming doesn't make people believe killing other people is normal. Even though it might effect borderline personalities, there's no reason to claim gaming is the cause of violence.

People are always looking for someone/something to blame in case of what happened in Belgium recently. Games, music, movies are all easy targets. Culture, political climate and a host of other reasons are more likely to have an impact on the behavior of people like the guy that shot those people in Antwerp.

You are all right and i think this thread is awsome :[)