I don't see much correlation between violent video games and real life violence, but I have noticed that gamers tend to gamify life, reducing existence to a series of challenges and rewards. It can go from amusing to very dehumanizing. The best example are "nice guys"/pick-up artists who view a girl as both challenge and reward and are trying to find cheat codes to override her very justified, instinctual resistance toward dating such people.

Some would argue that life is a game. And I guess, yeah, in many cases it is. But if that's all life is to you, that's pretty sad.

I used to play Skyrim everyday and I noticed I began thinking about life in terms of the game. I started visualizing my city as a series of locked rooms with treasure inside. It is...something. It establishes a pattern of thinking that you're compelled to apply to other portions of life because it dominates your mind. Playing video games regularly releases serotonin when hardly anything else does.

I don't necessarily think gamifying parts of life is terrible, but when applied to people it can be grossly dehumanizing. Also it's a way of opting out of life, because life sucks. It truly sucks right now. And so people enter these virtual worlds and just stay there. It's an incredible form of escapism, unlike anything else before it. It makes the dystopia we're living in bearable and is that a good thing?