Slashdot Mirror
News Media Links Shooting To Games
Via Kotaku, an MSNBC report entitled School shooter followed video game-like 'script'. If you're going to scapegoat in the wake of a tragedy, who better than the entertainment industry? From the article: "What I mean by 'a script' is that when you look at popular culture, movies, video games, you will see this kind of "shoot 'em" pathway running through many of them. It's not an original idea of his; it's something that kids are exposed to by the millions." Given that another story on the MSNBC site states that the suspect talked about shooting people before the incident, it seems like there is more than enough finger pointing to go around.
From what I gather from this washington post article it was the white man who stole all the Indian land and forced the native americans to live shitty lives on reservations that cause the school shooting. If I lived the life that was describe in this article I might have done the same. And I'm white!
-Dipster
It never ceases to amaze me how reactionary people are to things like this. All the stakeholders get into their little defensive postures ready to strike down the pointing fingers from those that want to look proactive, and nothing ever happens.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Let us not forget a couple of decades ago, when the news media were throwing a shitfit because Dungeons and Dragons was causing children to commit suicide.
I heard that they even sometimes cause people to go crazy.
Interesting how the "authority" in the article repeated over and over that the kids who do these things do them to overcome being branded as "losers".
He does have a few buried points about the nasty effects of conformism and homogeneity on adolescents: let's face it, if you set up and enforce a single system of human worth in a society, the community will seem very "safe", but there are gonna be as many "losers" as "winners". And "big losers" aren't going to have an easy time of finding an alternative value system that empowers them. Video games may provide the script, but then again so did John Ford.
Homogenous communities are dangerous for just that reason: there's no social control at all on good old-fashioned deviants.
Anyone have the link to the animation they're talking about (I don't wanna install IE/SW7)
If you read the article, it actually dosn't blame video games for the shooting. Furthermore, video games aren't even singled out as a bad influence; violent video games are lumped together with violent movies. In the discussions of violent video games influencing violent behaviour, people often say such things as "violent movies have been around for x years, why don't they cause people to go on rampages, Mr. Smarty Pants?" Well, it looks like someone out the agrees with them. It's violent culture that's blamed, and not for causing the violence, but for giving them a role model to emulate. Dr. Newman knows that these children are disturbed to begin with. "What it tends to reinforce in the shooter's mind is not so much a violent impulse as a template for how to be notorious and alluring and cool as a shooter" She's acknowledging right there that video games don't cause the violence, the kid would have gone on the rampage anyway. He just would have had to use a little imagination to look cool while he did it. The real problem here is the title that MSNBC gave to the article. The hyper-reactionary slashdot community took the bait and, as usual, got up in arms. "Faded Columbine reality kept warning signs from being taken seriously" would have been a much more appropriate title for the article, as it spends more time on that subject that nthe subject of video games.
Columbine was the same theme as this just different circumstances. The kids in both these events felt isolated from "Society". Compounded with emotional disorders and surronding themeselves with violent games, nazi books, and malcontent jerks on the Internet was recipe for disaster. But, at the core of it all was a bunch of kids who couldn't think out side the box of their current prediciments. Yes the Indian Reservation sucks. Yes, Columbine was full of phoney jocks with a school/community structure that told the kids "if you don't fit the mold you are worthless." But, once your 18 you can fly the coupe and try to make a life for yourself somewhere else. These kids couldn't think that far.
-Dipster
Damn this is a tired maneuver. Let's look at the situation and see what could have had the most impact:
* He is part of the smallest and most disadvantaged minority.
* He lives in poverty.
* Statistically he has a high chance of a future of alcoholism.
* His father killed himself.
* His mother is in a coma in a nursing home.
* He voluntarily was going to a psychiatrist.
* Everyone commented that he was a loner, seemed troubled and in need of friends or help but never thought it would go this far (and never did much to offer that help).
* He had access to weapons and a bullet proff vest.
* He played video games and watched TV. (Assumptions I believe, not sure I read anything stating he was a gamer).
Well, come on..its easy to see. It had to be the games.
Or was it Ozzy, Judas Priest, Dungeons & Dragons, Twisted Sister...no those were the demons of choice that have been left behind for the new crops.
Pathetic. The victims deserve a better closure than this kind of sensational reporting.
I am so sick and tired of hearing this. The school environment overloads some kids, to them it is like slow torture. The fact that it is going to end doesn't make up for the fact that these kids are expected to not only live through it, but study and get good grades at the same time. School isn't for everybody, and it is about time we admitted that.
It might sound like I am saying education isn't necessary, but what I am saying is this. School isn't necessary, education is. Just like sports aren't necessary, but exercise is. Sports have a lot of unnecessary elements to exercise that make it more fun for some, but hell for people without coordination. So let those kids just run or pump iron. There is no need to make them dribble a basketball.
School also has elements that are unnecessary to education, but help make education more efficient. I think that if a kid is big enough to go to school with a gun and shoot the place up, they are probably big enough to teach themselves at home and socialize in a way that is more comfortable to them.
Hmm, parents are the problem(hint)?
While you were modded funny, this is the REAL problem. Parents are disconnected with their kids. Too many kids grow up with both parents working full time (or only have one parent since our society seems to promote that situation today) and end up being raised by daycare / teachers / the street. Parents don't want to hear bad things about their kids. Parents don't discipline their kids. Parents let their kids do whatever they want.
We also have tied the hands of public education - we can't discipline problem kids in any way. Bullying, taunting, etc. goes on everywhere and frequently gets out of control. Nothing ever happens until someone gets seriously injured or killed.
He's right, but he has his logic kinda backwards. If (hypothetically) I were to go on a school shooting, I'd follow what I know from FPSes. But does that mean that because I know how FPSes want you to shoot stuff, that I'd do so in real life? No.
Or how about this: suppose a bioweapons researcher went rampant and decided to kill a few people. I'd bet that he'd use some bacterial agent instead of using a gun (it's hard to get a significant number of kills with a gun in real life). But does that mean that these researchers are likely to poison people? No.
It doesn't even say anything about whether researchers or gamers are more likely to kill people. It just says how they would once they've decided to kill people in the first place. And that's the problem we should be worrying about.
I think we can pretty much all agree that video games don't make people go nuts and start fragging other people. The capacity and execution of that kind of violence is born in a disturbed mind, not a microprocessor.
However, I do believe that the games might give such disturbed minds new ideas (and even training) on how to make their big day more exciting for them and/or more efficient.
I must assume that teenagers that lived in pre-gunpowder times would also have gone on psychotic rampages from time-to-time. Probably the only media they had access to that could teach them about such things were books. So does anybody know? Where books on swordfighting censored so as not to corrupt the youth of the time into grabbing a sword on going on a berzerker streek, beheading all of their classmates?
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Actually, poisoning a watersupply is not more effective in this case...
Remember, the point of a rampage is not just to kill people, it's to make a big scene and get your name on TV whilst doing so. If the point were just to kill people, then this guy had easy access to the means and cause of doing so much more effectively.
Poison will kill people, but not make a scene. It may even be a while before anybody realizes it was intentional and not just Dow Chemical dumping dioxins in the water supply again.
A bomb will kill people and make a scene, but it won't be immediately connected to you, and in the end you'll just be called a terrorist of some sort. People will ask what could have been done, but in the end, it'll be a relatively limited scene.
A shooting rampage will accomplish all three goals. You'll be on TV, lots of people will point fingers all over the place, there'll be a very big scene. The whole effect will be much more gruesome, there will be wounded survivors who will also get on TV and talk about you. And inevitably, when the finger pointing starts, a lot of people will get dragged into the scene who had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Game connection or not, this shooting was clearly the work of a deranged mind. The Smoking Gun covered how he frequented Neo-Nazi websites where he frequently inquired as to how he could best make a big scene killing people. He made a series of flash animations showing him killing stick men and then committing suicide. He drew pictures of guns in his school books.
This entire article ignores one, very key question: Did the shooter even OWN any of these games?