I have just seen a demonstration of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. It is staggering, not just in detailed simulation of a crowded city but also in the range of highly graphic gratuitous violence it offers the player.

What is really ominous is the fact that it is a multi-player environment. Participants engage in bloody street war against other real humans with highly realistic weaponry. That fact is part of the gamer's mental experience even if it is through a simulation medium. It must be part of the attraction or else neither game producers not players would bother with it.

The original theory was that violence in video games didn't produce externalised destructive behaviour in the real world. It appears that on the strength of that video game producers are unashamedly ramping up violence in games that increasingly duplicate reality.

How can we accept that the point won't be reached where young people begin to lose sight of the line between fantasy and reality? What will be the result of that? Will it ever become necessary to begin shooting on sight lots of young people, both males and females, before they can kill other innocent members of the public because their minds have become so twisted by immersion in irresponsible fantasy that they are extremely dangerous?

That may sound far fetched but I am not so convinced. I find it hard to believe that psychologists employed or at least sponsored by game producers aren't involved in determining the likely effect of these games upon individuals in much the same fashion that doctors were employed by tobacco companies to disprove the harmful health effects of smoking.

Those professionals will no doubt find this new generation of ultra-realistic killing games benignly uninvolved in increasing poor behaviour from young people. As with the tobacco experience their arguments will cleverly disguise the fact that their thrust relies almost entirely on the assassination of proofs by virtue of the inability of any proof to be entirely exclusive, since it can hardly ever be disproven that some other factor might be involved. In other words, they will rely upon mirrors, smokescreens and logical trickery.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone, professional or otherwise, really knows where these highly noxious virtual realities are leading society. But I am sure of one thing. If the effect of them blows up in our faces governments, justice officials, criminologists and other social leaders, still sitting on their hands, will lay the blame totally on the public, insisting that it is a community issue that needs to be solved within (and therefore by) the community.