This is an interesting topic to me because I find my own experiences go against what people say should happen. I like action movies, let's-find-something-and-blow-it-away console games, and have never been upset by graphic violence in either. (I often find extremely graphic scenes to be unnecessary, boring and/or stupid, but not *upsetting*.) My reactions to all the scenarios you mention would most likely be the same as yours.

However, I have also been exposed to a reasonable amount of genuine gore -- most recently one night last week, when I spent 15 to 20 minutes waiting for the police boat while in the company of various loosely-connected human body parts. This was easily the most traumatic incident I have ever attended; I've had two flashbacks since then, I haven't been able to eat meat or look at people drinking red wine, and I even have some trouble with looking at people in swimming pools. I'm not mentioning this for sympathy -- I'm getting over it about as quickly as I expected to -- but to point out the interesting fact that if I had seen the *exact same image* in a movie or game, it wouldn't have affected me at all. I have seen far worse things (objectively speaking) in movies and found them ordinary or even amusing, simply because I knew they weren't *real*.

It's not that I've been desensitised to unreal violence by seeing real violence; I simply see them as two completely separate things. Equally, my reactions to real violence are apparently undiluted by years of enjoying the unreal sort.

I think movie romance is a valid comparison. Do people who watch romantic movies find romance in the real world to be unsatisfying, because their experience of it might not include the perfect happy ending, expensive costumes, gorgeous bodies, exotic locations, passionate soundtracks and/or Leonardo DiCaprio? I don't know, maybe some of them do have problems because they get "desensitised" to the way the world really is. But on the whole, I think most people manage to divide their personal mindset into "the way things are for me" and "the way things are in the movies".

However, I don't know the mechanisms whereby people first *learn* that division. I don't know how *I* did; I just know I did. So I can see that it might be a problem if children grow up filling their heads with nothing but fantasy violence, and if this affects their ability to react naturally to the genuine article. I think maybe it has more to do with caring about people and other living things, and having a basic ability to empathise with others to some extent. If kids develop that the way they should, a healthy mental outlook probably follows, whether they play violent games or not.