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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
From an economic viewpoint (that is, the view of the average economist), your response would seem accurate. But let's look a little closer. Take West by God Virgina (USA) for example: Large portions of WV are depressed economically, with few job options. Working at McDonalds isn't an option - There isn't one at which to work. So we suggest that they move away. But look at the options economically:
1. Live in a depressed community, surrounded by your friends and family.
2. Move away to some place where you don't know anyone and you have to take a job that doesn't pay very well or give satisfaction.
Neither one is very attractive, really.
It's easy to point the finger at other groups and say, "Bah! Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!"
It's even easier to say that when you yourself have successfully done that. But really, it is a problem of society, to try to improve educational opportunitues, and try to break the cycles that groups get stuck in.
[dismount soap box]
Either way, it's not so simple as it appears at first glance.
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.
Something I'd pointed out before when a case like this came up: In my state, there was a school shooting in 1980 or 81. It made Columbine look like Sesame Street On Ice. Something like 90 people were hospitalized, and it came down to a gunfight with the police. The shooters (there were six of them, all social outcasts as if I had to point that out) were more organized than any of the ones on the news here. They positioned themselves so that there was no line-of-sight from outside to them, and blockaded themselves into a hallway.
All the crimes that get blamed on video games have one thing in common: They have no special identifying characteristics. Had those six gunmen in 1980 been dressed in red and yelled, "Death to the Amerikanski!" they would have been called Communists and Russia would have been blamed. As it happened, they had long hair and thusly drugs were blamed.
This guy was sick, in more ways than one. Look at his MSN profile. That's not the result of somebody playing too many video games, it's a product of a very deeply disturbed mind.