Studies have linked violence and sex in video games to the exemplification of negative ideals within our society

The American Medical Association came close in 2007 to adding "video game addiction" to its list of conditions considered to be mental illnesses.  Eight years later we as an American society have seen the effects of this mental illness in drastic proportions.

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The small town of Columbine, Colorado was among the first to witness the power of violent video games when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 and shot and killed 13 innocent students and teachers before committing suicide.

Three years prior, the two boys enjoyed playing the seminal first-person shooter game called Doom.  

Doom was the fist of its kind.  It popularized the style of gameplay in which an armed main character traverses a world violently fighting and destroying anything in its path.

The two boys created a website through which they could hold competitions based on the game, and soon added a blog to their site.  The blog in particular harbored evidence of the mental deterioration of the two boys via entrancement with violent video games.  They often posted on the blog, making numerous death threats, , and elaborate plans to hijack planes, and often posting about their desires to "kill those who annoyed them."

Eric Harris received medication from a psychiatrist on multiple occasions to treat his depression, anger, and suicidal thoughts.

The New York Times reported that after the attacks, Jerald Block, a psychiatrist and researcher in Portland, concluded that the students acted as they did after their parents took away their ability to play video games.  He said, according to the Denver Post, they "relied on the virtual world of computer games to express their rage and to spend time, and cutting them off in 1998 sent them into crisis."

Studies link video game usage to negative behaviors other than violence

A study at Brock University focused their attention on video games whose main characters depicted acts of killing, maiming, decapitating or mutilating other characters.  Researches studied 13- and 14-year-olds from seven schools in Ontario attempting to understand the relationship between the type of video games played, the time time spent playing, and how it might affect the adolescents.

Mirjana Bojovic and his colleagues found that the "moral maturity" of teenagers may be delayed when they develop habits of long-term violent video game usage.  They concluded that "Spending too much time within the virtual world of violence may prevent gamers from getting involved in different positive social experiences in real life, and in developing a positive sense of what is right and wrong."

An entry in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology follows a Dartmouth study that suggests the same video games associated with increased violence may also lead teens to experience an increase in reckless driving, police stops, and a willingness to drink and drive.

"Up to now, studies of video games have focused primarily on their effects on aggression and violent behaviors, says the Geisel School of Medicine's James Sargsnt.  "This study is important because it is the first to suggest that possible effects of violent video games go well beyond violence to apply to substance use, risky driving, and risk-taking sexual behavior."

The study focused on the playing of violent, risky video games like Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, and Spiderman.  Results suggest that games like these, especially ones with anti social protagonists, are associated with changes in a wide range of high-risk behaviors due to change in the players' attitudes, values, and personality.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olsen, in their book Grand Theft Childhood, recorded and analyzed the results of their comprehensive survey of school-aged children.  In conducting a survey of 250 middle school and high school students from various schools, they found that the real association was not between video games and negative behaviors, but between M-Rated video games and negative behaviors.

M-Rated games are defined by the Entertainment Software Rating Board as content that may contain violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language.

The focus of many new studies, like those in Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria's Rated M for Mature, have begun to focus less on the violence aspect of these games and more so on the explicit sexual and sexist content that they display.

Sex and nudity in video games reaches an all-time high, gaining attention from critics and "corrupting our youth."

BMX XXX, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Mass Effect are just a few of the video games on the market today that contain multiple, easily accessible plot lines through which a player can view and interact with explicit sexual content.

Today, the biggest controversies with video games seem to arise whenever the topic of sex appears.  The public has began to "get used to" the idea of violence and gore but sexual content seems to be a bit harder to swallow.  Many critics, like Wysocki and Lauteria, argue that this is because of the extreme ideals that are inherently displayed and even taught in M-rated games.

"Nice Guy Syndrome" and "button-smashing video game sex" are among the many social inaccuracies that the book describes.

The idea that a man can achieve or "win" sexual relations with a women via a systematic pattern of simple choices and presses of a button is exactly what critics claim has started corrupting our youth.  Simply being a "nice guy" is in no way relevant to the long, emotional, selective process of real life relationships.

Studies cited by Yao, Mahood, and Linz have found that over two-thirds of the female characters in video games are portrayed based on a gender stereotype (i.e. damsel-in-distress and cheerleaders) or subject to physical objectification.  Their paper, entitled Sex Roles, also speaks to games like Dragon Age: Origins that attempt to portray the actual act of sex.

Sex in video games, when portrayed on screen like in Persona 4 and Tokimeki Memorial, is almost always the product of "button-smashing."  Design graphics and computer programming have yet to achieve such technology where a virtual world can actually possess a meaningful or realistic sexual intercourse scene.

Games like Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat are moving in the opposite direction of our society in terms of how they portray sex and women.  The sensitive, delicate subject will continue to exist inside many mainstream video games being regulated by rating; critics, however, will not stop until they figure out a way to change the negative stereotypes and unrealistic expectations that they pump into the heads of many teens for 4-5 hours a day.