A common issue that has been debated for years and will probably continue to be debated for many more is the thin line that separates our reality and what video games present to us, the issue has been brought up many times during the 90s and 2000s, to this day it is still something that hits the news every once in a while but not as frequent as those years. The controversy brought us the ESRB in the United States and other methods of rating to prevent younger audiences from experience a reality they are not ready to handle (although this is debatable, thinking back I can see Americas Army and other games as a good recruitment tool).
One of the earliest memories I have about the controversy would be Doom itself, an ultra-violent game which was corrupting a generation, it was the existence of Doom what brought the ESRB to existence in the first place yet it was not the first of its kind, Wolfenstein 3D was there before Doom and was around the same level of nasty than Doom, the difference was that in one you were fighting Nazis after being captured during World War II (or infiltrated the stronghold, at this point I can't really remember and I'm not googling that) and Hitler in the end (who melts into a gelatinous blob after you kill him) and in the other one you are fighting all kinds of demons straight from Hell in order to stop an invasion on a giant multi-corporate military base on one of the moons of Mars.
If we read in between the lines there is a triggering effect due to a religious involvement more than Americans doing the right thing and killing Nazis (thinking about this, metal was struck continuously by people who believed they were the tool of the devil and so was Dungeons and Dragons, these people really need to find something better to do with their free time than trying to use these as scapegoats of their boring life).
While one of the biggest controversies surrounding video games could be related to Doom and the Columbine High School Massacre and the incident in Brazil when a man went into a movie theater and started shooting people a la Duke Nukem (I remember both from back in the day in the news) other causes could be found as to why things were happening, even today the Columbine incident continues to be studied and new points of view brought into this matter, video games do not necessarily make people break, it can help them in their fantasies and even put some of their behavior to rest inside isolated halls of madness, but can a video game really turn someone into a murdered, a serial killer or something even worst?
I can think of the whole controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto, back in the day it was so frequent to see Jack Thompson fuming about the series and other video games that there was a rumor going around (maybe it was confirmed, I can't find the note) that Rockstar had paid Thompson to keep making an issue about the thing for even bigger promotion of the series, even bad publicity can turn out to be good publicity. Did it win anything to Jack Thompson? Not sure, maybe there was a satisfaction of making an issue about the whole thing but it surely did not affect the video games he put pressure on. Which makes me wonder, why didn't he raise an issue with the video game Hatred?
Hatred on its own became highly polemic, it was a video game that got a ton of hype (again from bad publicity) about controlling a person who was going on a genocidal rampage to destroy the world (which I think you can somehow achieve), there were mentions of national socialism, racism, that there was a hidden agenda with the developer team, in the end Valve did not flinch on saying they would not remove the game because they were all in with freedom of speech, this was a controversial move as Gabe Newell had previously removed other video games/mods on Steam for maybe similar reasons (again, this depends on perspective).
What happened in the end? Not much apparently, Hatred came out, the game was not what it had been made to be and the whole issue died considerably fast, the game still stands in the Steam store for a discount price (because after the initial craze for the game I can imagine sales would not get any higher than that).
All in all, gaming will be surrounded in controversy for many reasons like the ones mentioned above or the issue in China where gaming is being treated nowadays as an addiction and people are being sent to rehab camps so they can stop playing until they die, not sure about the numbers but world wide there have been plenty of cases which have happened for several reasons, there is a reason why there is a warning about not moving for more than a specific amount of time, to stop playing so long and to start moving, this is for the players safety and not just because it has to be added to the game/console warnings.
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