Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are process

Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are processing this as reality" and how much of it are you going to throw away and assume the player is not processing as reality? In most cases, those who want to see games as dangerous assume, with zero justification, that the player identifies all digital characters as full human beings - but every single aspect in which those characters differ from human beings is totally ignored. Why some aspects, like mortality, ability to feel pain, desire to retain property, would be assumed by the player to be identical to reality, yet the ability to respawn, the lack of friends, family, society, ability to speak, etc should be completely ignored is never explained. It seems entirely self-serving. Ignore the obvious profound flaws and disproofs of any actual claim in the argument, and simply rely on a dumb vague emotional association between concepts to trick people. It's a grossly unethical and intellectually bankrupt discussion in most cases. If the player entirely buys into the reality of the game, then every character not killed was brought to life by the player. Creation of life must be given equal weight to ending of life, shouldn't it? And what lives are these? Mindless drones typically walking eternally in a loop. No family. No friends. No change. It is a desperate hell if considered reality. And the polygonal structure, the low resolution textures, all of those technical limitations, those have to be being processed as reality too, right? (If not, why not?) What consequences does that have? How about the altered physics of the game world? Shouldn't players have great difficulty simply getting around if they accept the physics in games and attempt to act in the real world in accordance with them? Games draw an awful lot from film. Film is an artform that laces together absurd lies and unreality into an experience that the audience can accept as 'real.' It's a very fascinating subject. If you take a camera, and you point it at two people having a fightfight, do you know what the response of the audience will be? 'Meh. Doesn't seem real.' But instead add a musical track that didn't exist in reality, add cuts in perspective that are impossible for any body/brain/eyes combo to accomplish, take out the meat-slapping sounds of landing hits and substitute in recordings of snapping celery and carrots, and blammo, the audience is on the edge of their seat saying "now that was a REAL fight." Except, of course, no, it wasn't. It is precisely because it bore so little resemblance to actual reality that it worked and the audience were able to maintain their willful suspension of disbelief. The audience is engaging conceptually, but not viscerally. Games crank that up even further. And they do such a good job of it that is causes us language problems. When people talk about games, they talk about the concepts as if they are real. It is primarily the analysts of games that are least capable of dealing with them in any capacity aside from accepting the concepts as real, while ignoring the real material facts of them. It's like they're so totally un-real and there is so obviously no question at all of their unreality that people just ignore it and proceed on a level of "but what if their CONCEPTS were real and people couldn't tell the difference? Not people like me, of course, but maybe worse people, like young people!"