Perspective on Tragedy

Firstly, let me say that the shootings at Virginia Tech, which can't rightly be called anything milder than a massacre, are so shocking as to seem unreal. To anyone who was affected by this event, I extend my most sincere condolences and prayers. It's just not fair, and I wish I could do something to fix it.

This post is speculation on what will result from the media frenzy over these killings, and how much or little it will affect public opinion about video games. If this doesn't sound like something that you want to read, or out of place given the severity of the events in Virginia, then thank you for visiting, and try another one of our older posts. For those of you who are interested, keep going.

Kotaku has the jump on me here, posting the running commentary on the "Games-are-to-blame" debate first with the Jack Thompson fear mongering and vicious lying then by linking the first mainstream article to mention games and most recently Rush Limbaugh's surprisingly sane response to blaming games.

Actually, between the time of the Kotaku post and the writing of this post, the Washington Post changed the article that the link points to, removing any reference to games. However, a search for "Counterstrike" on their site still returns:

1. Shooter Described as Eccentric Loner by Students, Teachers
Debbi Wilgoren, Sari Horwitz and Robert E. Pierre (Edition) 04/17/2007
...Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using...

This text, however, no longer appears in the article.

NOTE: Kotaku has now published a post on the WaPo edit.

The truth is, we should all be ready to hide our gaming for the next few weeks. If history teaches us anything about the modern news (any three things, that is) it is:

• Cable news networks will pump a story as long as they can if it can pull the public's attention


• Most news outlets tend to report stories in the same way they reported similar stories in the past, with similar commentators (the press equivalent of the military fighting the last war)


• Simple explanations are easier to present and invite less criticism or confusion

When you add all this up, you can probably expect a fair amount of blame to fall on games. As much as I hate to say this, as much as it goes against every fiber of my being, Limbaugh has (mostly) the right idea. We can't just assume that one issue created this event. However, I disagree with the fact that he uses this as another occasion to push his views on gun control, and his statement "You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act." I would have put it "You have here a sick individual, an individual who committed an evil act." I don't know enough about Cho yet to conclude he was evil, but I have no problem condemning his actions as evil. I think it's a subtle and important difference. the minute we decide he is "evil" is the minute we cease to try to understand him, which is a tremendous mistake. This is not an isolated event, but part of a frightening trend in our schools and colleges of children going over the edge and killing their peers. To not attempt to understand how and why this is happening is irresponsible and dangerous, and this is why I would resist calling the shooter "evil."

All this said, I still think Limbaugh is a big fat idiot who is trying to drag this country back a century or two.

The fallout on games will not likely be as bad as in past shootings. It seems like the witch hunt is (in my opinion) going to decide that the local police and campus authorities are most to blame, despite the fact that they probably don't deserve it. This sort of situation is like an earthquake, impossible to predict and hard to react to. I'm sure that over the next weeks we'll know if they prepared and responded as properly as can be expected.

Video games have been called the new rock and roll, which is an interesting comparison. Both are driving social (and economic) forces that started in youth culture and quietly maneuvered themselves into the mainstream. They have also both faced a backlash from the defenders of mainstream culture, especially in moments of human crisis. I think it's worth exploring the worst example of rock and roll being linked to horrific violence, so we can see that we have, since the Columbine killings, moved to a more secure position within the mainstream where games may be less of a scapegoat.

I can put it in two words: Helter Skelter

From wikipedia

Manson regarded as foretold, by The Beatles, on The White Album, an apocalyptic war of which he was destined to be both the uncanny cause and the ultimate beneficiary. When, by his music, he, Manson, would have drawn to him the young, white female hippies of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. After a resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would have been rhetorically exploited by the Black Muslims to trigger a war of mutual near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks, the Black Muslims would arise to finish off sneakily the few whites they would know to have survived.

In this epic sequence of events, which Manson told his followers would take place in the summer of 1969 and which he termed Helter Skelter, after the White Album track of that name, the Family had little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath California's Death Valley and that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the actual remaining whites upon the war's true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world.

Now, games have been blamed before, and will likely be blamed again, but at least no one has ever said "Doom 2 laid out the apocalypse, and I was just following the plan." No one as crazy as Manson has yet used games as an excuse for their crimes, and if rock and roll can survive this sort of scapegoating and bad press, the explicit rationale for one of the most notorious serial killers of our time, and wind up the vibrant force in American culture that it is, then games will survive.

At the moment, should any of us in our daily lives be asked to comment on whether or not games are to blame for this, I suggest that we defend games in the gentlest possible terms. Explain that they're art, free expression, and not tools of violence. Explain that they can be outlets for pure joy and exploration. And make sure to let the person, reporter or TV station know how depressing and shocking these events are to you personally. Games will make it through this one okay, so let's pay our respects to the real casualties here.