Are we really learning values from games?

The media is constantly influencing the way we think, act, and feel about our society and people around us. A major concern behind this has always been that many people are getting the wrong messages from watching movies or TV or playing video games. And while we do seem to get many of our values from the media, I am not sure that we receive all of them from it. I especially feel that video games are not one of the more significant sources of values in today's pop culture.

While many people feel that people can easily learn violence from video games or even learn important skills through them, I do not feel that we learn our morals from them. I have always felt that morals are learned through our families, friends, and general upbringing in life. I am sitting here looking at my video game collection and, while I see plenty that are violent and all with very different stories and views of what is going on in them, I can not really find one that seems to have any realistic values that might be imposed by them. I am not ruling out the possibility of values being imposed by games because I do know that some games, such as real-life simulators, can impose some values, but I generally see people as learning the majority of their values from the aforementioned social interactions.

The easiest examples to find of games that might impose values on people are always the violent ones, such as this article that mentions 'Manhunt' as an example: http://www.impactlab.com/2008/01/13/the-moral-argument-for-video-games/
However, even with these kinds of arguments in existence, it just seems as though it's a little outrageous to say that everyone's going to all-of-a-sudden believe that it's okay to do the things to see in this game just because you can do it there. If a person's parents have taught them good morals and a decent understanding of their surroundings, then the person should already understand that what they are seeing there is not alright and would never be acceptable in any form.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that I feel as though the morals taught by real social interactions tend to override the ones shown in video games. If a person actually takes the interactions they see in a game as a good way to go about something, then they were probably never really taught otherwise. But if a person is taught the proper things as they grow up, such as the right way to treat people and interact with others, then normally they will not revert their learning just because they saw it in a video game.