From my own experiance of playing games (from the old days of the Commodore 64) they have got more violent as the computers to play them on have got more powerful.

I think that if your of a cirtian age (not that I know what the age should be) to know what your doing in the game is violent and not acceptable in sociaty and you take it as entertainment then theres not a problem, the problem seems to be with people that are unstable or kids who are too young to know that it is violence that manage to get their hands on the games.

In the end though the term violence and the availability of the images etc has changed over the years, for example the most violent thing you could see is whatever was on the gorest video/DVD, now a from a internet search engine you can see hostages being beheaded and ex dictators hanging, which has nothing to do with fiction and entertainment, also the scary thing is that it appears to be coming almost to being the norm when one of these things happen.