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As with all things social and cognitive, people are affected different ways. I personally think that video games have increased my desire to perservere. After playing any type of game, and just HAVING TO GET PAST THAT BOSS, or needing to get all the high scores on 1080 (loved that game). For example, my brother recently got Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. He spent an innumerable amount of time (stretched over the course of weeks though) going through some incredibly tedious things. It's almost a point of pride to be able to beat a video game without resetting, or whatever you want to say.
I can't say that they have affected my real life in the manner in which I deal with problems, because really, they haven't. I don't deal with any of my problems in real life the way I do in video games, using any sort of analogies or metaphors. I think you might just be seeing a few isolated incidences and falsely generalizing them to the population. Sure, there may be some people who are affected in such a way, but then again, there are a very few people who will allow a video game to send them "over the edge" and get them to kill. And that is a horribly ungeneralizable side-effect of gaming.
That said, I'm not arguing that video games do not affect people in the material world (how can they not, through time management, emphasis on using different areas of the brain/mind and so forth), but simply that they do not affect most people in the material world in the manner in which you describe.
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"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - Albert Einstein
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato
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