Here's some snap shots from popular xbox gaming platfrom,
as you can see more than 50% of the listed games are in shooter category or related to enjoy killing others somehow,and lots of movies can be metiones as well,
I've played and enjoyed many shooter games in recent decades of life,some of them had beed full of bloodshed and brutality,
BTW, in real world I can not tolerate even seeing a drop of blood or watching other's death for a moment.
So ...how this paradox or conflict between mind's imagination and reality works?

 

Lived on a farm killing for food and slaughtering animals as early as I can remember walking with adults. Saw some horrible things that human do to humans in the service. Computer shooting games seem an extremely stupid waste of time to me but I like shooting real guns.

No idea what it means in terms of a Strange Paradox In the Mind.

 

Yes, it's a paradox that is hard enough to understand let alone explain.

My guess as a layman is the exploring of the darker side of one's psyche without the consequences and getting a thrill out of it.

I have played my share of the FPS "Descent" which is a game where you kill robots, but I have never seen the draw of games where you "kill" living things.

 

Not a paradox at all. really. The two situations are not even close to being comparable. The vast majority of humans (there are certainly exceptions) are fully capable of distinguishing between reality and make-believe.

Or, perhaps more relevant and to the point, they react very differently to what they believe is real and what they believe is make-believe.

I read a study, many years ago and I've tried to track it down without success a few times, in which functional-MRI images were taken as people viewed hyper-realistic images of violence and gore. One group of people was told that the images were from an upcoming fictional war movie, another that they were from documentary footage from taken by embedded cameramen, and a third wasn't told anything. The first two groups had, on average, very different regions of the brain that were activated. The third group was a mix, and based on correlations with follow-up questionnaires, depended primarily on whether the person assumed the images were real or not. What was most interesting, I thought, was that there were a handful of people that started off with one region active and then it switched at some point. Turns out all of those people (but there weren't many, so the sample size was small) were people that consciously recalled seeing something that made them decide that the imagery was probably real or probably fake.

The study was exploring several things, but one was the potential for determining if people were a risk to society because of not being able to distinguish between reality and make-believe (at least in specific circumstances). I don't know to what degree that was pursued. While part of me would like to see tools like that be available, a larger part of me if far more concerned with how it could, and almost certainly would, be abused.

 

The paradox does not concern understanding the difference between fantasy and reality, but the dichotomy of getting pleasure from one and not the other.

I mean if you get pleasure from killing fantasy people, why not get pleasure from killing real people?

That is the paradox.

Maybe paradox in not the correct term, but I understand the question.

 

The paradox does not concern understanding the difference between fantasy and reality, but the dichotomy of getting pleasure from one and not the other.

I mean if you get pleasure from killing fantasy people, why not get pleasure from killing real people?

That is the paradox.

Maybe paradox in not the correct term, but I understand the question.

Probably something innate.

Young boys used to love to play Cowboys and Indians, with the successful conclusion of the cowboy killing the Native American.

Not so politically correct nowadays.

 

The paradox does not concern understanding the difference between fantasy and reality, but the dichotomy of getting pleasure from one and not the other.

I mean if you get pleasure from killing fantasy people, why not get pleasure from killing real people?

That is the paradox.

Maybe paradox in not the correct term, but I understand the question.

There is only a paradox to the degree that fantasy people are indistinguishable from real people.

If someone gets pleasure from hitting a baseball with a bat, do we ask why they don't get pleasure from hitting a puppy with a bat?

Of course not. We don't see any paradox or dichotomy there. Why not? Because we intuitively grasp that the vast majority of people do not equate baseballs with puppies when it comes to hitting them with bats. So if we also don't equate fantasy people with real people when it comes to committing violence against them, then there fails to be any paradox or dichotomy -- or, at best, it false into the category of a false dichotomy, which can be worth exploring in its own right.

 

I guess it must be something stronger than risk of social consequnces or beeing pursued,
what brian feels in a game or fantasy world is totally joy and pleasure but in reality is totally disaster (not even a moral or social risk fear).
IMO this is related to a strong (maybe the stronges) instinct in human's mind that is instinct or appetence to the "Eternity" and had been discovered by Sigmund Freud at first .
In virtual world this "instinct of eternity" makes human's mind joyful of killing others,and in reality this appetence causes disaster while seeing mortality of human by even a drop of blood.