Rampage ... Anders Behring Breivik in costumes. Credit:Reuters The only problem with this is, in Australia at least, it doesn't seem to ever have happened. We have had a mass murderer with a low IQ and a love for the movie Babe, and another with right-wing politics and conventional military training, but the violent-video-games generation has produced no local spree killers at all. Jim Wallace, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), which has consistently criticised violent video games, hands me a "Statement on Video Game Violence" signed by 150 "scientists, scholars and researchers" who argue that: "In addition to causing an increase in the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, violent video games have also been found to increase aggressive thinking, aggressive feelings, physiological desensitisation to violence, and to decrease pro-social behaviour." But if video games make children violent, where is all this violence? I've never met anyone who was scared of a gamer, or heard of drinkers slipping out of the pub because a bunch of gamers walked in. I've never known gamers to bond over a gang rape, or mount a physical attack on rival gamers. Japan and South Korea, where the gaming subculture is the dominant youth culture, are not violent societies (although fears are being raised even in East Asia that an apparent growth in youth crime and alienation might be triggered by the joystick and the computer screen). In the US, where the violent crime rate has been in steep decline since the mid-1990s (there were 2200 murders in New York City in 1991, and only 536 in 2010), video games and the internet have been cited as a possible reason for the decline because, according to the icily rational newspaper The Economist, they are "affordable forms of entertainment that keep people inside and away from real crime and drugs". So why, in a world of real risks and actual cruelty, of bloodshed, carnage and war, are people frightened of the animated theatrics of video games?

Good versus evil … gamers face plenty of moral choices when playing. At Bond University on the Gold Coast, associate professor Jeff Brand teaches Australia's only Bachelor of Computer Games degree to students hoping to enter the games industry. They are mostly male, articulate, ambitious and dressed in boardshorts, sitting among consoles and games posters. Brand invites me to cut into the lecture with my questions, and I ask what they think about the idea that computer games might cause violence. Crim sim ... a scene from Grand Theft Auto. The biggest problem with the critics, says student Simon Anderson, 20, is they are "outsiders to the world" of games. "They don't play the games, so they don't understand what it's all about."

The action in games is contextual, says his classmate, Simon Lydiard, 19. Rather than teaching immoral behaviour, games generally discourage it. "In games," says Lydiard, "pretty much all the time that behaviour has a con­sequence. It's almost a learning experience of what is right from wrong." Shoot 'em up … a poster for the game Doom. One game that has attracted the rage of critics is Grand Theft Auto, in which a player can take the identity of a car thief and run down pedestrians. "I definitely know that I can't go and run down a pedestrian in real life," says Lydiard. "And whenever I did it in the game, there were severe consequences: you'd be chased by the army." Games have a narrative, they tell a story. Gamers have a mission, a purpose, a quest, and they might punch, kick, strangle, shoot, stab or blow to pieces any characters who get in their way, but the action is far less believable than anything in a bad martial-arts movie, and nothing compared with, for instance, the battle scenes in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which is regularly broadcast on prime-time TV.

"I know if I play a war game, I can't go shooting people on the street," says Lydiard, "because, first of all, I'm not a soldier. If I'm playing a soldier in a game, it's not like I'm going to go down to Kmart and buy an M-16 - which I can't - put on an undetectable outfit, hide up in the bushes and then ambush a bunch of pedestrians. It's ridiculous to think a normal person would think that's something they should do after playing a game." In one class of 10 students, only three admit to having been in a fight in their adult lives. Mikhail Svrcula, 24, had a brawl at a games tournament. "If you see anyone playing a competitive sport, and someone really wants to win, they're so jacked up on adrenalin they'll do anything," he says. Dashiell Ross has fought twice: "One of them was in competitive water polo, and the other was in competitive surfing." Alex Wood has done the same: "One of them was in rugby union and the other was in the workplace," the 22-year-old says. "I was a chef, and I had my nose broken." The ocean, the pool, the footy field and the kitchen are all places parents think of as safe. This is where we feel our children should be spending their time, outside in the fresh air or inside earning money. But if anything is going to happen to them beyond the family, it's more likely to be here than at home, simply because kids alone in their bedrooms tend not to beat themselves up. So why don't Christians campaign to ban rugby union? "I think you're trying to compare apples and oranges," says Jim Wallace. "I don't believe you can run an argument that says you should illegalise rugby playing because a couple of blokes get into a biff ... We're talking about creating people who go out and do that Port Arthur massacre." Although Australia has been spared school shootings, it has had cases of young men running riot with rifles, the worst of them being Martin Bryant, the educationally subnormal murderer of 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996. Early reports about Bryant suggested he kept a library of so-called "video nasties". It turned out his favourite music was the soundtrack to The Lion King and Cliff Richard, and that he had a lot of videos, but no "nasties". He enjoyed martial-arts action films such as Under Siege, but his favourite film was Babe.

"I've spoken to people as recently as the last three months or so, who've reconfirmed for me that his house was full of pornography," says Wallace. "Violent videos, I'm not sure." According to a newspaper article based on Bryant's psychologist's report, Bryant "admitted buying erotic magazines and military-type magazines about weapons, military tactics and survival techniques". He also liked The Sound of Music. "I think somebody's really pulling the wool on that," says Wallace, "because everything I've been told is completely the opposite." Wallace seems to be conflating pornography with violent videos, and videos with computer games, but he isn't being disingenuous because movies, computer games and videos are all pretty much the same thing to him. The idea that young people in a changing society learn theft and murder from popular entertainment has a long history that is immediately and completely forgotten as soon as a new diversion comes along. In Victorian England, there was a concern that cheap "penny dreadful" novels about highwaymen encouraged kids to hold up stage coaches. When, in 1869 in the US, the Methodist Reverend J. T. Crane wrote that "the increased prevalence of gross forms of wickedness is due to a general poisoning, mental and physical, which fills the minds and the veins of its victims with a more deadly venom than we have hitherto known", he was talking about "the novel". (Ironically, his son, Stephen Crane, grew up to write the classic American novel The Red Badge of Courage.)

There has been a recurring feeling that new entertainments will produce a deformed generation, different even physically from their parents. When boys and - far worse - girls began to enjoy the new freedoms offered by the bicycle in the 1890s, newly minted experts warned of the dangers of "bicycle face", "bicycle foot", "bicycle hand" and "cyclist hump". The postwar rise of television saw a conviction that the new media led to "TV squint", "TV bottom" and "TV tummy", and there have been the more recent discoveries of dubious conditions such as Nintendonitis, PlayStation thumb and acute Wiiitis. When I watch my six-year-old son play mild shooting games on the laptop, tapping the space bar to fire, I see his eyes widen, his legs tremble and his feet tap with excitement. He seems wholly absorbed, and perhaps that's a part of what worries us. He doesn't become this excited when he plays snap with his mum. Maybe he's getting something better from the game, and he'll never want to talk to us again. But adults of the gaming generation use games to wind down rather than wind up. "I play a lot of games," says student Alex Wood, "particularly first-person shooters, and gameplay is the only way I can relax. If I watch a movie, then I'm on my laptop. If I'm watching TV, I'm on my phone. I'm so used to multitasking with these devices, the only way I can truly block out everything is to immerse myself in gameplay. At the same time, the more immersing that gameplay is, the more aware I am that it's separate from reality." Critics tend not to have played the games all the way through - many games take 40 hours to master every level - and often assume they're simply animated killing rooms. The students argue the narratives are more complicated than that. "A lot of games these days give us moral choices," says Brandon Cooper-Wilson. "Do you want to be a good guy, or do you want to be a bad guy? And, sure, most of the time players do go the bad guy, because it's something they can't do in real life and they know they shouldn't do in real life, so it gives them an option to experiment and play around. But we find that, most of the time, the good guy's path is encouraged within the game. They get better perks, they get different and better storylines, they even get packs of new content that otherwise the bad guys don't usually get. So we find it's not encouraging it; it's really saying, 'It's not all that great.' "

There have been many studies demonstrating a link between aggressive behaviour and playing computer games, and other investigations that found no such connection. The studies generally use a treatment group, which is exposed to violent games, and a control group, which is exposed to the non-violent games that make up the majority of the market, and then test how quickly and belligerently the two groups might react to certain stimuli. "But while the difference is meaningful statistically," says Brand, "it's not meaningful in the real world: a 0.01-second difference in propensity to deliver a loud noise blast using an air horn to an opponent in some sort of context, after playing a violent video game as opposed to a non-violent video game, is not in my mind real-world validity. It's not evidence of a profound effect." Every time a lawsuit has tried to put the responsibility for criminal actions on violent video games in the US - from the Heath High School shootings in Kentucky in 1997 (the shooter played games) through the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado to the 2003 case of Alabama police-killer Devin Moore (who "compulsively" played Grand Theft Auto) - it has been thrown out of court. There do not appear to have been any similar suits in Australia - nobody here seems to have blamed games for their crimes, but the ACL has done it for them. But if the legal system consistently refuses to recognise the guilt of games, the news media is always eager to assign it. There's no novelty left in the idea of a stalker, but a story about a "Facebook stalker" plays to both fears for privacy and concerns about new technology. So now we have cyber-bullies, internet paedophiles, even "Craigslist Killers". It's far less sensational to acknowledge that violent people might gravitate towards violent entertainment, rather than be formed by it, or that hateful ideology and paranoid mental illness are more likely triggers. On July 22, Anders Behring Breivik, an extreme right-wing Norwegian "cultural Christian", murdered more than 70 people, the vast majority at a Labour Party youth camp. He wrote that he saw the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as "part of his training simulation", and brows furrowed as if this was somehow key. In contrast to Jeff Brand's Bond University classroom, Jim Wallace's ACL office in Canberra is furnished with militaria: framed photos of soldiers with guns, and a hardback book about Australian commandos. Brandishing the list of 150 experts who agree there is a link between games and violence, he asks why the games industry cannot supply a list of 150 academically credible dissenters. He says the industry is not interested in children, or worried about the few "perhaps unstable in many cases" who might be damaged by games.

Wallace is a former major in the SAS. He has trained men to break down their "natural resistance" to kill. Soldiers are drilled to show mercy to innocents, he says. They know not to shoot civilians. Gamers, he believes, will shoot anybody. "People walk through airports shooting everything in sight. There's no only shooting something that's a threat to you. These games are, in the main, from what I've seen, totally indiscriminate." But in the real world, gamers do not go through airports shooting everyone. "Yeah, they do," says Wallace. "Let's look at the Columbine massacre." In 1999, Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 people on campus and injured another 21, before killing themselves. The computer game Harris and Klebold played was the science-fiction/horror first-person shooter Doom, in which a space marine on Mars uses an arsenal of weapons to progress through a variety of difficulty levels, blasting every monster - including possessed humans - in his path. Players can build their own Doom levels, and it was alleged Harris and Klebold mapped out their high school using the game, but it now appears this wasn't the case. Before the massacre, Klebold said the killing would be "like f...ing Doom" and the shotgun he used was "straight out of" the game. But how can a console-based game like Doom teach someone to use a pistol? "These Wii games don't use a console," says Wallace, "they use an actual weapon."

But the Columbine killers played Doom. (The Wii console wasn't released until seven years after the Columbine massacre.) The games industry and the ACL have also been locked in conflict around censorship categorisation. The majority of gamers are adults. According to the Games Developers' Association of Australia, the average age of a gamer is 28; 35 per cent are parents and 8 per cent are seniors. But there is no R18+ category for games in Australia, although a meeting of state attorneys-general recently agreed in principle to the adoption of an adults-only class. The highest censorship rating is currently MA15+, and Wallace credits his organisation's successful opposition to R18+ as the reason there hasn't been a school shooting in Australia. But Doom wasn't R18+. It was available here. Before Port Arthur, the worst mass killing in modern Australia was the 1987 Hoddle Street massacre in Melbourne, in which 19-year-old Julian Knight murdered seven and injured 19. Knight learnt to kill the conventional way: he was a member of army cadets at school, then the Army Reserve. He was accepted into Duntroon Military College, where he was a poor student with good weapons skills. In prison, he collected white-power literature and Nazi pictures in his cell. People are often alienated and confused by technological change. Computer games look like a waste of time and money and, as Brand puts it, "somehow subversive in a way we can't understand, pulling our children away either from us or from education".

Sport is seen as a healthy pastime, even though athletic training has long been concerned with preparing children for war. Computer games disturb us because they are generally sedentary and solitary pursuits. The gamer might seem separate from mainstream society, that most feared of all misfits: a loner. All adolescents have a hobby or pastime, even if it's just masturbation. Parents are always worried about them spending too much time in their bedrooms, except when they're worried they spend too much time outside. Most adolescents can't drive, might not be able to go out late at night, and don't have an evening job, but however they choose to spend their free time - be it playing computer games or, God forbid, going cycling - excites the concerned imagination of the older generation. Whatever it is, if we didn't do it, it can't be good. "This ongoing moral panic keeps shifting its gaze," says Brand, "so you can't win, in terms of making a rational argument about the fact this has gone on before and it will continue to go on, and the attention's just focused on the latest, most recent medium that a proportion of the population does not understand. As games mutate into whatever the next medium is going to be, the moral panic will simply move with that change." But I'm a parent, so I worry, too. I worry about my son spending too much time at the computer. But I don't worry much. Grooming by Diane Dusting and Lores Giglio. Models from Extras Agency and Voom. DualShock 3 wireless controllers courtesy of Sony and Harvey Norman.

This article first appeared with Good Weekend magazine in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.