What happened?

Last post I talked about the fact that some of the highest grossing and best rated games are those focused on violence. The concept of violent video games is a prevalent one as well. Politicians in Germany are calling for a ban on them. In Minnesota the courts couldn't prove that violent video games were affecting behavior and therefore couldn't put in new laws preventing youth to purchase them. There are other articles about how video games can increase aggression.
The articles are endless on violence in video games. I've already spoken to the fact that I don't believe video games can induce crime but find it unsettling that these games that primarily focus on killing are so popular. It wasn't always like this, the movement of video games in the last 20 years is almost unbelievable. The atari 2600 was the first real video game system and most of the games were as simple as the classic "pong " game. When this was released arcade style a lot of stores reported their machines as overflowing with quarters. I assume what drew everyone was being able to control something they were watching. Pong was considered the best game in the world, yet compared in today's world it would be laughed at. What's entertaining to me is that most people would say graphics as the reason games of the past would do so poorly today. But don't we all know that these things aren't reality, therefore proving how real the game looks as pointless.
As we moved into the 80's Nintendo as well as Sega came out in what most refer to as the golden age of video games. This was a time in which side-scrolling screens and more developed storylines in games like Mario and Sonic devleloped. Graphics were better, still not as "real" as today but drew a lot more popularity because games like Super Mario Bros. 3, the best selling cartridge of all time , came out and let the gameplay go on for hours traveling through worlds and such. The gameplay was key, this stayed on through the early nineties with the release of the Super NES. This is when it appeared that developers had mastered the 2D world.
When I think video games started taking a turn for the worse was with the release of the first set of 3D systems. At this point, it was all about what looked better, and what sounded better, instead of what “played better.” “Realism” was now actually mentioned when people talked about video games. The problem was in the 2D world all of the graphics were basically the same so for a game to be a true success it had to have a great story or great gameplay. People weren't going to play to see how real the 2D Mario looked as he ran down the screen. They were going to play because they wanted to beat Bowser and because it was fun.
The development of video games is basically solely focused on graphics and how real the game looks. And the fantasy side of games loses out a little bit because if we want to see something real a war will always look more real than Sonic or Mario. What's frustrating for someone who loved playing video games as a young child was that when I played them I loved going through the new stories. When I watch people play games now I see them playing the same storyline essentially everytime but now you can see individual hairs on their character and the rips on their uniform. As we move away from developed stories and more towards graphics I feel like violence will become the reoccuring them more drastically than it already is. My only hope is that developers and those playing will realize they are playing something that doesn't actually exist and at the end of the day I'd rather play a 2D game with good gameplay and a good story than the 12th war game that I've essentially played already really being able to feel killing that other soldier. I can only hope others feel like that, because I don't get the feel now that I did when I played Sonic as a kid, and I think that others are in the same boat.