When I was a kid there were a lot of groups and even politicians that had some sort of movement to regulate video games because they claimed that gaming lead to violence. While there is no doubt in my mind that this is true, it isn't going to stop anything if we make every video game Hello Kitty like. Hell, if we only stomped on walking mushrooms in games there would end up being someone out there on Tik-Tok that would end up crushing the head of their friend as they tried to recreated Mario Bros.
However, I can kind of understand where they were coming from because twice in my youth we tried to do the things we saw in games and it resulted in real, but thankfully not terribly severe injury.
I think that this sort of idiocy is a lot more likely to happen with younger people than it is with adults and I say this as someone who has been both a kid and an adult. Now, when I am thinking about doing something dumb that I saw in a game I am responsible enough to realize that there are rather dire consequences for these actions and choose to not do them. As a kid though, you are indestructible in your own mind and at least for me and my friends, the consequences didn't even occur to us.
The first incident was in my friend's living room when 4 of us went over there for some reason one afternoon. We had been playing some WWF game on Nintendo or Sega and some of us who were not playing thought it would be a good idea to do some of the moves in real life that we had seen on the game.
I put my friend into a pile-driver position and it was at that moment that I decided that it might not be a great idea to slam my friend's head into the cement floor below.
Unfortunately for me, my friend didn't feel the same way and he proceeded to flip me over his back and I crashed into the glass protector on their fireplace and I found out the hard way that this is not made of safety glass. Blood was everywhere and I had to get 6 stiches on my left arm. Nobody died but lets just say that we were in a lot of trouble. I don't know who paid to get the blood out of their carpet but the crazy thing is that I could have died.
The other instance happened when I was a newspaper delivery boy and there was this one street that had a lot of kids on it. We would rough-house every time that I went around there and for the most part it was really good natured. That was until I decided to do one of the moves on a guy that I had seen in probably the same wrestling game.
This move was called the "Rude Awakening" and it was Ric Rude's finishing move that consisted of snapping someone's neck on your shoulder. Obviously the professionals have a way of doing this so that no one actually gets injured but that was not the case with the guy I performed the move on. Thankfully there was no spinal damage because that would have been seriously bad and I would have likely gotten in legal trouble over it because the kid I performed it on was a lot younger than me. He cried - rightfully so - and I ran away on my bike. I apologized to him profusely later but from that point on the yard shenanigans with the paper boy were no longer allowed.
So I do think that there is a real chance that injury can happen because of video games but then again, kids are going to emulate just about anything that they see and attempting to completely control what they are allowed to see or play isn't going to change that. I'm sure all of those kids grew up to be reasonable adults and perhaps we are even better off having learned those real-life lessons the hard way.
I haven't done any wrestling moves on anyone since that fateful day where I could have broken the neck of a neighborhood kid and I think that for most non-insane people that the end result would have been the same :)