I Honestly Didn't See This Coming

I recently got turned onto this case study, which I find both interesting and disturbing. I wonder if this is the kind of thing my parents worried about when they tried to talk me out of buying Street Fighter II for Genesis when I was nine, though I'm sure the reality is that this is a far cry from what they had in mind.

To distill the post, a man developed a form of paranoid schizophrenia that made him think he was inside what appears to be a Grand Theft Auto game. This led him to steal a series of vehicles and assault several people, though he thankfully never killed anyone.

On one side of the issue, paranoid schizophrenia is a mental illness that arises from a number of combining factors, so blaming it directly on the presence of games like Grand Theft Auto in our culture is out of place. On the other side, the study mentions that the delusions experienced by paranoid schizophrenics--I'm God, Secret agents are trying to get me, I'm inside a video game--always reflect some modern cultural element, and the omnipresence of games like this in our culture means that there will inevitably be such cases.

Speculation and scapegoating tend to run wild when things like this come up, and as much as I love to comment on controversial issues, I have to say that this time it's really a "keep calm and carry on" scenario. Nobody should or ever will have to think about the possibility of influence on the severely mentally ill when designing the content of entertainment; there's just no accounting for it.