A killer opens fire on a crowd, murdering and wounding many. Clearly, computer games must have played a role.
So far the case of Anders Breivik has followed several fearsome media patterns quite clearly. First, there's the association with some aspect of the digital world: here, gaming.
Breivik... went through a period of playing the online fantasy game "World of Warcraft" up to 16 hours a day, he testified.
Next, we need to know that said gaming helped shape a loveable innocent into a mass murderer.
[H]e "trained" for the attacks he carried out in Norway last summer using the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The 33-year-old said he practised his shot using a "holographic aiming device" on the war simulation game, which he said is used by armies around the world for training. "You develop target acquisition," he said. He used a similar device during the shooting attacks that left 69 dead at a political youth camp on the island of Utøya on 22 July.
The picture is now complete: two famous, not quite savory games + young male = tons of violence. As the Times of London apparently shrieked,
“Breivik played video games for a year to train for deadly attacks”
With that framing, we're free to theorize quite imaginatively about toilet training, order vs chaos, globalization, work problems, and more.
The case doesn't hold, unsurprisingly. Rock Paper Shotgun takes it apart very neatly. Breivik mentioned gaming very rarely, but news media skipped what he emphasized (conspiracies and material). And eventually CNN climbed down from its fear-the-gaming, Gothic world perch.
(thanks to Todd Bryant, Alexander Knorr, and Tomak; images via Call of Duty Wikia and Wikipedia)
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