My son is playing Runescape and from a distance I see a pen with cattle and my son's character doing something to them. I get immediately suspicious, it didn't look all that innocent what he was doing to the, what turned out to be, yaks.
So I asked him what is this, what do you have to do to these animals? He had to throw knives at them -- virtual knives to virtual yaks, of course -- to kill them in order to gain experience points or so.

WHAT? I thought we had care and protection of animals, of any life actually, even plants, as a priority in this family? I thought I had seen him stop other children from needlessly harming insects, even. And now this? Is there such a division between the virtual and the real world that he can happily, quite cruelly, harm a yak on screen?

I know, it's an 'age-old' discussion that will not end and those who favour such games will never be convinced there might be something wrong about severe virtual aggression and abuse. ('Supernanny' has a nice experiment though, in which she rather convincingly proves that it HAS a negative influence on 'caring about others')

For me personally the shock is that I had not expected my son to also be able to get fun from such, in principle, terrible actions. I had thought he would avoid such games, but obviously I was far too optimistic.
Well in a virtual world where killing foot-passengers with cars or bloodily murdering the so called enemy is fashion, stabbing yaks is only a minor thing of course, so what do I fuss about? At least he tried to make clear on me that I should not be pathetic...

I can't help to remember though, the blog-entry here on WDC, from a long time gone former-mod. She described how her teen-daughter sat in a car with a 17-year old driver, on the way back to the village from a night in town. A deer crossed the road and the boy decided it was fun to hit the deer, so he went after it in the car. Sadly however he lost control and ended up against a tree and if I remember well, one child died and several were severely injured. The members daughter was unharmed. She was lucky.

I was so devastated on reading this, not just for the severity of the accident, but how that woman, as well as the quite a few commenters, seemed to think it was normal to want to hit a deer for fun and no one asked about the state of the deer.
I never stopped wondering if the normalcy of these aggressive games was the source of the action and the subsequent accident.

I do hope my son has enough sense, that I will not have to find out that he has, even a little bit, mirrored his virtual activities in real life, but the thought frightens me nevertheless.