The Last Word With The Cultured Gamers

Video Games: an innocent scape goat
February 1, 2007, 10:05 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

May 5th, 1992: The day Wolfenstein 3d was first launched. A game that happened to be the first of its genre, and since then, many have reproduced the FPS(First Person Shooter) Genre, The Genre that has been attributed to several school shootings in the past 15 years. I will now raise the question, can these violent video games be attributed into training, and even possibly pushing these people over the edge.

So if we may, I will be detailing certain aspects of the characters of these shooters. Eric Harris along with Dylan Klebold were seen as outsiders, and had a tendancy to be bullied on a frequent basis, a fact that large media conglomerates tended to cover up and instead brought up that they were avid Doom fans. Not only this, but they also tend to exagerate that point, by proclaiming that they would design levels in said game to look like the halls of columbine. I also want to move onto Kimveer Gill, who was the shooter at Dawson last September. He as well felt rejected by society, and made several references to it on his profile, I will not go into that, because we’ve obviously heard about it 100 times by now. Gill also enjoyed playing violent video games, and was obviously inspired by the acts at columbine, however I think his status in society is what drove him over the edge.

Montreal seems to have a bad history with school shootings. On December 6th 1989, Marc Lapine walked into L’ecole Polytechnique, and targeted and killed 14 women, and injured another 14. He targeted only women, and told the men to get out of the way. In a written letter that was found in his coat pocket, Lapine said his reasons for the attack and of his anger is because society was accepting women, and giving them the same advantages as men.

Let’s go back, and view the date that the first FPS was released: 1992. Now I’m starting to see a pattern in these shootings, and it all seems to have a link with society in a certain shape or form. Still not convinced?

14 year old Michael Carneal walked into his school, and opened fire on a group of praying students, killing 3, and wounding another 5 on December 1st 1997. Carneal was bullied daily, and would try to sell things to people to try and make friends, he was a major outcast in his school. The bullying, and name calling got worst, when publically in the schools newspaper it was proclaimed that Carneal had a crush on another boy. Carneal had very few friends, and the shooting quickly stopped, because he realized he shot and killed one of his friends, Nicole Hadley. In 1999, several parents of the victims of this boy went in with a 130 million $ lawsuit, against several gaming companies and pornography sites, their claim was that the media corrupted this boy into doing the shooting. The case was dismissed in 2002, the ruling was that it was “simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom.”

Several highschool teenage shows have tried to address this situation, more recently Degrassi Junior High and One Tree Hill. The case they presented in the mentioned shows supports my argument of feeling alienated, and bullied, and that videogames aren’t the psychological cause of these horrible events.

With all of this said, I condemn the acts that these people have done, and that I feel for the victims, who were robbed of their lives, and also to their families.