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.
Or, maybe, if you intend to go somewhere and kill people, walking and shooting are pretty much your only options?
I always thought video games got the idea to walk and shoot from real life. Now I know better! Thanks, MSNBC!
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.
Let us also not forget that when somebody finally conducted a study to figure out if there is a connection, it showed that kids who play Dungeons and Dragons are less likely to commit suicide.
I love how every time there's a school shooting the figures of authority rush to blame Marilyn Manson, Grand Theft Auto or rap music. Does nobody in power realise that there is a problem that kids of 16 or even less can walk into stores and buy guns? Games don't kill people, bullets do.
There are 2 types of people in the world, those who find that stupid binary joke funny, and those who don't.
Considering that the quote in the summary was actually about an animation that the shooter posted, not about how he actually went about shooting people... ...c'mon, guys. I mean, what the fuck? Really, take the time to read the whole article before misrepresenting it on Slashdot. In the end, it isn't entertainment media that's blamed, but the isolation of the small towns.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Why don't they also blame gangsta rap? There's as much talk of guns in much of it.
Damien
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)
It's kinda hard for me to talk about this, but back when Mario bro's first came out, I couldn't stop playing it, but then I took it too far. I decided to see what Mario's magic mushrooms were really like, and from then on it was a downward spiral of jumping on turtles and falttening brown mushrooms, I've been clean for a few years now, and I hope that kids jsut don't get influenced in the same way I was.
Now I know why Columbine happened.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What a total load of *explitive deleted* .
First up it does not matter one bit if the shooter immitated a game , if it had not of been a game it would of beena TV show , a relative , a historic event.
These people obviously sufferd from some serious problems , and if i were to take a few hours to research i could site many many cases of imitation of historical masacres , or copycat killers etc.
People will find someone to hold on to and they will use that
All this Doctorb(The b is for bar-stard)is doing is ridding to fame on a fad , a whitch hunt of media morality.
I doubt this is the last time ill state this on slashdot , there are always more of these idiots out in the wild
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
That's why my mother-in-law saw a shooting in school as a little girl - in the 1920's. Has to be the video games that caused it.
And you call this news? Wake me up when games are not held responsible for these kind of incidents, that would be news.
Kids go to school by the millions.
Perhaps schools are the reason(hint)?
Every kid that has done this, has had parents.
Hmm, parents are the problem(hint)?
Millions of kids drink water evey day.
Wait, every criminal ever coinvicted has been exposed to drinking water. That's it! NO More Water! NO More Crime!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
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.
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.
He followed a movie-like script too!
Also a book-like script!
Clearly we should ban them all (sarcasm). Despite the fact that the article mentions movies, they clearly blame video games more. I just am at a loss to understand this.
What these experts don't ever mention is the endless hours spent playing "Cowboys and Indians" by generations past. Playing "War" isn't new, it's just that there is new technology to play war with.
When people spout off about this I always point out that Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones was banned by the BBC when it was released because it was seen as a call for violent revolution against the government. Fast forward a few decades and the same government has made Mick a Knight.
People want quick fixes and something to blame instead of looking into the mirror to see that people, even kids, are capable of horrible acts of violence. They don't want to think about how to raise their children right, they want to leave them with babysitters to attend the next Marilyn Manson record burning.
[insert sig file here]
I'm more concerned about the games that let you defecate on people.
"If you're going to scapegoat in the wake of a tragedy, who better than the entertainment industry?"
Because thinking is too hard.
We treat our student bodies like prison populations. Should be we be all that surprised when they start to act like it? If "Hell is other people," what does that say about legally mandating student attendance ("or else")?
However, public schooling is a more popular daycare/warehousing solution than television and/or video games, so it won't do to question it.
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
The article on thesmokinggun.com that MSNBC mentions is here, which includes an archived link to the flash clip Weise made about shooting people. Also, his band's message board was located at http://6sik6.proboards25.com/, but it has since been taken down. No Google Cache of it either.
Kind of scary stuff... for the most part he seemed like a fairly normal kid.
This is another example of some meathead in the press "reporting" his ideas, even if he has to ask preloaded questions to get his (or her) idea across in the story.
Dr. Newman has written a book "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings" which points out one of the principle facts in this case: advance warning signs get ignored.
She doesn't seem to blame games, but the "reportor" sure seems bent on linking blame to games.
It is the ignoring of the warnings that leads to the violence. Well that and the fact that there are people. I say eliminate all the people it is the only way to prevent such violence.
Here's an except from the review of her book:
Rampage challenges the "loner theory" of school violence, and shows why so many adults and students miss the warning signs that could prevent it.
Drawing on more than 200 interviews with town residents, distinguished sociologist Katherine Newman and her co-authors take the reader inside two of the most notorious school shootings of the 1990s, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Paducah, Kentucky. In a powerful and original analysis, she demonstrates that the organizational structure of schools "loses" information about troubled kids, and the very closeness of these small rural towns restrained neighbors and friends from communicating what they knew about their problems.
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
He made a flash animation too. Clearly, Flash is the problem!
Now I'm worried, since I spend 4 out of 8 hours a day in Flash. Thank god photoshop and BBEdit, where I spend the rest of my day, haven't yet been conclusively linked to violence.
Won't somebody please think of the web developers?
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
here I posted it above, but it goes to the same effect.
"We must protest and make a fuss before somebody thinks of blaming us"
You have no idea how right you really are.
MSNBC have to point the finger at someone. Otherwise people might look closer to home. Like MSN.
The kid had a profile on MSN as Solitude where he listed:
Interest categories:
Military, High Schools, Death & Dying
Picture:
From the Gus Van Sant movie about a highschool shooting.
Favorite Things:
moments where control becomes completely unattainable...
times when maddened psycho paths briefly open the gates to hell, and let chaos flood through...
those few individuals who care enough to reclaim their place...
Hobies and Interests:
Plannning
Waiting
Hating
And then he linked to his homepage where he had a flash animation called Target Practice, which was about a guy going on a rampage with guns, killing police officers, then blowing his own brains out - which is pretty much exactly what he subsequently did.
I'm imagining, in all the hand wringing, MSNbc isn't going to be asking, "Why don't we automatically have flags go up when an under 18 lists their only three interests as the combination of Military, High Schools and Death & Dying?"
I'm not suggesting such invasion of people's privacy should be encouraged or practice, nor should MSN be held accountable for not doing anything to stop this. But the point is there that it's deeply hypocritical for one part of MSN to point at an exceptionally vague connection to video games while another part hosted what was pretty much his premeditated confession.
Think of it this way. If you had to mow a square shaped lawn with the shortest distance walked and with the shortest number of turns, would you start from a corner or from the center? Would you zig-zag your way through or would you walk in straight lines systematically? It doesn't take military training to tell you how to achieve maximum effectiveness on something so small scale and with a short amount of time in mind.
I mean, sure there's obvious dumb ones that would never work in real life (rocket jumping, bunny hopping, etc), but the more realistic these games get, the more realistic the tactics get. Why else would the army use them as part of their squad training?
I mean, you learn some important things, such as Line of Sight, how to sneak up on people, how to shoot more accurately, basic characteristics of weapons (at least in games that strive for realism), etc. You even learn basic squad tactics from some games.
So while they might have learned these things from video games, in reality, these are real life tactics employed by our armed forces. I mean hell, the Army puts out a game thats one of the more realistic ones out there. Why don't we blame the Army for coming up with effective ways to kill people.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
...where the object is to die at the end.
So where did he learn suicide?
Uh, you do know where he got the gun in this case, right? Aparantly not. The kid used his grandpas police issue sidearm! His guardian was a cop. So any gun control points in this case are moot.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."