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Video Gamers From the '90s Have Turned Out Mostly OK (arstechnica.com)
A study reported on by Ars Technica indicates that video games, much ballyhooed (alleged) source of mental, physical and psycho-social ills for the kids who spent a lot of time playing them, don't seem to have had quite as big a negative effect on those kids as the moral panic of the past few decades would have you believe. Instead, There didn't seem to be an association between the number of games the children reported owning and an increase in risk for conduct disorder. When examining depression among shoot-em-up players, there was evidence for increased risk before the researchers controlled for all the confounding factors, but not afterwards. Of course, there's a lot of data to go around in the several studies referred to here, and the upshot seems to both less exciting and less simple than "Video games are good, not bad!"
I love video games and think any kind of ban is just stupid. But they aren't without harm. I have seen people put their jobs in jeopardy repeatedly playing online games late into the night. I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
I suspect that more than one life has effectively been thrown away to play video games. So while people might not be out there in droves pulling people from their cars after a few GTA sessions, I suspect that there are a number of kids who didn't go to collage, went to a crappier collage, or dropped out of collage, because of video game addictions.
I think it is telling that I have met a probably going to die alcoholic who was able to stay on the wagon primarily through his newfound addiction to video games.