(I was more responding to Salone's "people who torture NPC's for no reason are mentally unstable" thing than anything else. You are correct in your statement - I was stating that justifying it as something along real moral values is potentially flawed...I don't know if I typed that correctly)

So, as a query, with many people seeking improved realism and making real-life things based on fiction, is that healthy or obsessive?
(Not so much expecting an answer, but is a theme I am trying to look into.)

I have fun killing random NPCs in video games and I certainly wouldn't consider myself mentally unstable. In real life, I'm a pacifist and I don't believe in any kind of violence, but I play characters who are violent or even psychopathic all the time. In one of the D&D campaigns I'm playing right now, I have a character who is obsessed with blood and enjoys killing things. That's just who the character is.

My guess -- though I don't have any studies to back it up -- is that it's healthy as long as moral feedback remains present and the cognitive separation of fantasy and reality remains intact. That said, I could easily imagine that a child playing a sufficiently realistic game (VR?) without moral feedback (earning points for doing evil things?) could gain some depersonalizing mental patterns.

That effect was only found in adults. A separate study showed that they heightened aggressiveness in children and that the effect lasted several hours, whereas the heightened aggression in adults only lasted a few minutes after the end of play.

I was thinking more "person tries to make a flame sword, and a kid gets a hold of it and you have a burned kid" issue, or one of the things I like to say which is "Dragons may not be real, but we could one day make them!" (I know that is an exaggeration)




VR will be interesting to see how it develops. I am not sure how great an effect it will actually have. It may be of use in dangerous or automated lab conditions, and improves gaming, but I am unsure how it will change communication. And yeah, it may confuse a child who has not developed a full sense of the world around them, and could result in them trying a "game thing" (like flying) irl.

Agreed, but that's why children need supervision -- because they DON'T have a good separation of fantasy and reality and they need to be taught.

I think that Coda explained it very well. As I read your initial post his words were pretty much what was coming to my mind. So...I don't have anything to add except to say "Good work Coda."