I have no feelings on it either way. Of course having seen that same scene before, including being edited down and used as part of other videos (including close ups of the guy's head being emptied with the gun being used as a forum signature) it's not something that paticularly disturbed me.
To some this would make the point about being desensitized to violence, but as I said in response to Jim's video, humans are inherantly violent, predatory creatures, we wouldn't have survived or continued to thrive without these impulses (if your curious, read my response in response to The Jimquisition). Someone who gets deeply upset by something like this is unusually sensitive to violence, probably due to being conditioned by first world morality and living standards, being largely isolated from the rest of the world and reality. Your typical "Ivory Tower" liberal which goes along with the general political and moral sentiments in these forums, people will hate this point of course, but the bottom line this is exactly one of those forums where I'd expect an unusually strong reaction, which comes more from the crowd, than video games making people more sensitive.
That said, I did have a stronger reaction to things like this when I first ran into real violence and death. Time living in the real world and dealing with the kind of crap the majority of people on forums like this try and convince themselves aren't issues or don't exist, has however desensitized me to this type of thing, and lead to my "the world sucks, and it's actually going to have to be made to suck worse for it to get better" attitude which has made me (in)famous in non-gaming discussions on these forums.
That said, none of my sentiments came from video games or the media. If anything I tend to criticize "mature" gaming material for not going far enough, because of how unreal and one-sidedly idealistic it usually is.
Arguements by academics also tend to misjudge the sheer jump needed to go from fantasy, to actual action. It's not a simple matter of "I see people being shot in a video game, so I'm going to go shoot them in real life" or "Grand Theft Auto makes crime look fun, so I'm going to try it in real life" as soon as you stand up from your chair you can see how differant reality is compared to the way people move and the ease with which they do things in video games. Not to mention the numerous steps needed to get a gun, learn to shoot accuratly (which isn't that hard to achieve basic proficiency with, but it does take time), and other assorted things that these arguements don't consider. Then there are the realistic bits of planning something like this that don't come up in video games, since in real life you can't say walk down the street with an assault rifle slung over your back, and enter buildings with the same level of imputiny you can in video games and other works of fantasy. Not to mention even if you argue people become desensitized to violence and the suffering of others, even total sociopaths put value on their own life, unlike video games YOU do not come back with a simple "reload" or selecting "continue", it's that kind of immortality that makes a lot of what you see in video games work... if you think about how many times your character dies in a video game, they are hardly something that encourages this kind of thing in real life where there are no second chances. People who citicize crime games for example tend to look at the violence, not how pursuit magically disappears when you enter the right kind of business, or how often these rampages result in the death of the protaganist character.
Speaking for myself I think a much bigger "threat" if you want to go there are books and various terrorist training manuals like "The Anarchist's Cookbook", "The Black Book Of Dirty Tricks", and "The Poor Man's James bond" that provide a more practical and realistic guide to mayhem (though to be honest, I wouldn't follow some of the instructions for chemicals or explosives too closely). Books like that largely fueled the left wing terrorist movements decades ago, with groups like the SLA (who "abducted" Patty Hearst) and numerous "one hit wonders". The truth is pretty much every left winger was a closet anarchist back then and had copies of crap like this, and far more of them seemed to turn to actual violence once they had material like this than you see today from video games. If you ever want to feel dirty take a look at some of the liberal terrorists that were under consideration for pardons by The Clintons during their administration as well.... even with this stuff though I don't think the information should be illegal, and if I support "urban gueriella manuals" (part of my support of the Second Amendment and it's spirit) obviously I'm not going to have any problems with video games.
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Also I'll be honest in saying that if you agree with Jim that Hollywood violence doesn't come close to the real think, I'd say that you've probably watched the wrong movies. Video games aren't up to that point yet, but there have been some understated horror movies where the violence almost exactly matches the real thing. Largely because there are directors and such who have sat down and watched a lot of those interrogation and execution videos made in the third world (and similar things) that show up on shock sites and obscure videos, and then set out to emulate the effects as exactly as possible. The usual problem is with movie makers doing too much, but that isn't always the case. This kind of thing is also why there is so much debate on whether snuff flicks exist or not, because it's so easy to fake. If you get into the "extreme horror" subculture and the obscure videos a lot of people in it follow, you'll notice a definate differance in how they do things from the Hollywood norm, even when they have reasonable large amounts of resources behind them (for the "genere"). To date we have yet to really see video games go there, though I am hoping they will for certain generes (like horror). As Yahtzee once pointed out in one of his "Dead Space" reviews, it's kind of immersion breaking to see limbs come off like dry twigs, or badly constructed models one would expect a degree of resistance when dismembering limbs. The human body (not considering necromorphs) is more durable than video games give it credit for, especially when facing certain kinds of trauma. I look forward to a time when a game like "Silent Hill" decides to try and "get it right".
