There was a time when we all played games and loved them and you never heard of any murder being caused because someone got the notion from playing games.
This is because there was a time when murders and other crimes were blamed on books, and then plays, and then radio, and then television, and then board games (Dungeons and Dragons) instead.
Popular media formats have always been blamed for crimes by criminals in their defense. In an attempt to shirk responsibility for their actions, they blame a convenient, poorly-understood facet of society (usually new technology) and write it off. "The devil made me do it!"
Video games do not cause violence. Conscious human choices cause violence, which has nothing to do with videogames. An individual unstable and suggestible enough to have been swayed to violence by a videogame would have been swayed by any number of other triggers had it not been the videogame. A ticking bomb will go off, and nothing can stop it. Trying to assign blame on whatever happened to be closest at the time doesn't solve anything.
For every kid that shoots somebody and says "Grand Theft Auto made me do it!", there are thousands, millions more people who didn't shoot anybody. The statistic these agenda-toting groups like to tout is the number of crimes commited because of video games. The statistic they should be touting is the number of crimes commited because of video games
as a percentage of number of cases of video games played, in total. That number, the one the matters, is preposterously low, and no legitimate institution would accept it as significant.
Calling for an end to all violence in video games is, to put it mildly, an over-reaction. It is the stifling of artistic expression. It cannot be permitted because people say it will keep that one-in-several-million whackjob from pulling the trigger just a little bit longer.
I'm not saying games need violence to be good, they certainly don't. And adding violence to a mediocre game (Mortal Kombat) doesn't make it any better. But games can be violent and good at the same time, and realism can enhance the experience that the artists responsible for the game are trying to give the player.
Crazies need to be locked up, not video game developers.
All that being said? These filters, while welcome in a sense because they'll keep the soccer moms that don't care enough about their children to pay attention to ratings quiet, are an ironic reflection of our current society. It's alright to shoot someone in the face with a shotgun, as long as they don't bleed. It's alright to talk about the horrors of war and tell someone, very forcefully and angrily, to die -- as long as you don't drop the f-bomb when you do it. It's a farce of the highest level, a depressing parade of hypocrisy as we remove little details and then claim things are fine.
If I yell "F--- You!", it sends a particular message. If I yell "Eff You!" or "*beep* You!", the exact same message is implied, and any non-imbecile will understand it's the exact same message. Censoring the one word doesn't change the message, it's a superficial change that makes absolutely zero difference to the content. Words are offensive because we are told they are, not because of any intrinsic offensive value.