Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (15 page)

In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the police eagerly pointed to perpetrators Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold’s video-game hobby (Harris created his own levels for
Doom
, which were widely distributed). In 2001, relatives of the thirteen people killed in the massacre sought damages from computer-game makers, claiming that their products helped bring about the killings. The lawsuit, which named twenty-five video-game publishers, including Sony, Activision, Atari, and Nintendo, and sought $5 billion in damages, argued that investigations into the tragedy revealed the influence violent computer games had on the pair who carried out the shootings. The suit read: ‘Absent the combination of extremely violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred.’

John DeCamp, the lawyer acting on behalf of the families, said the legal case was an attempt to change the marketing and distribution of violent video games that turn children into ‘monster killers.’ The judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying that computer games are not subject to product-liability laws.

Video-game supporters argue that critics have the causal link backwards, and that violent people are attracted to violent video games. Violent video games do not create violent people; they merely provide an escape for already troubled minds. The American psychologist Jerald Block argues that, following Harris and Klebold’s arrest in January 1998 for theft, both youths had computer access restricted, which caused the anger that they had previously expressed in virtual worlds to spill into reality.

But when killers such as Breivik cite specific video games as being ‘training tools’ for their killing sprees, it becomes more difficult to dismiss the headlines, or to argue that the rote blaming of video games is nothing more than a straightforward attempt to confine madness with sense.

In context, the quotations from Breivik’s diary were part of a general discussion of pastimes Breivik used to unwind, and crucially, came long after he had formed his initial plan for mass murder. This didn’t stop British newspapers such as the
Mirror
claiming that
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
allows players to ‘shoot people on an island,’ implying a causal link between the game and the style and location of the real-world killings. When Breivik testified to his fondness for
World of Warcraft
and his particular understanding of
Modern Warfare II
as a ‘police shooting simulator,’ this led to headlines such as
The Times
’s ‘
BREIVIK PLAYED VIDEO GAMES FOR A YEAR TO TRAIN FOR DEADLY ATTACKS
.’

But it’s difficult to imagine how
World of Warcraft
could ‘train’ a person for any acts of violence, other than perhaps suggesting that murdering swamp rats is an effective way to pay for some fur-lined boots. More important, for many of its ten million monthly subscribers, it’s an experience that creates community, provides the lonely with a virtual family, and promotes teamwork and competition.
Modern Warfare II
is certainly thematically analogous to real-life shooting, but it is also as mainstream as a summer blockbuster; the game sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone. In both cases, as with poker or golf, the games allow humans to play, compete, and make social connections. They may improve hand-eye coordination, and in this sense could be used to ‘train’ someone for murder, but less so than an obsession with clay-pigeon shooting might.

Video-game violence became America’s concern
du jour
once again following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when
twenty-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members. The massacre, the deadliest at a high school or grade school in U.S. history, renewed the debate about gun control in America. But video games were also an addendum to the post–Sandy Hook gun-control debate.

In December 2012, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, protested too much when he accused the games industry of being ‘a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people.’ Then, in January 2013, representatives from Electronic Arts and Activision—the publishers behind the
Call of Duty
and
Medal of Honor
series—were called into a conference with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the relationship between games and real-life violence. Subsequently, President Obama has called for more studies to investigate what links tie game violence to real violence, while U.S. senator Lamar Alexander provided the extremist perspective when he proclaimed on television that ‘video games are a bigger problem than guns.’

Overstated depictions of violence are not unique to video games and cinema. Shakespeare’s theatres dripped with blood, and directors routinely used goat’s entrails to add gore to a scene. If the realistic (or exaggerated) depiction of violence in art leads to real-world mimicry, then it’s been happening for centuries. As the British comedian Peter Cook drolly put it, when referring to the supposed copycat effect of screen violence: ‘Michael Moriarty was very good as that Nazi on the television. As soon as I switched off the third episode, I got on the number eighteen bus and got up to Golders Green and … I must’ve slaughtered about eighteen thousand before I realised, you know, what I was doing. And I thought: it’s the fucking television that’s driven me to this.’

Trying to rationalise the irrational leads to a madness of its own. But beyond the sensationalism, it’s more difficult to explain away the disproportionate focus on violent content, a point that few of video gaming’s apologists bring up. Hollywood may share an obsession with bullets and explosions, but cinema’s thematic range is more diverse, offering romance, drama, and documentary—subjects that games struggle to depict.

Is this merely a by-product of the medium’s own prolonged adolescence? As games such as
Papers, Please
and
Cart Life
demonstrate, game designers who have begun to explore away from the plainer themes of competition and domination (which are so fundamental to the commercial behemoths,
Call of Duty, FIFA
, et al.) are beginning to find more widespread success. Or do video games, as in Block’s assertion, principally allow us to vent our anger, our primal instincts of violence, in a safe space, without consequence?

Is some of the appeal of video games the way in which they allow us to explore our own darkness? Or is it something else? Do games enable us to explore the violence around us as an act of processing and understanding?

Before Jewish families were sent to the labour and extermination camps during the Second World War, they were placed in ghettos to await processing. Here, according to survivors’ accounts, parents tried to divert their children’s attention from the surrounding horror by creating makeshift playgrounds. These play spaces were intended to preserve and maintain not only a kind of routine amid the dread disruption, but also a place of innocence.

Adults also sought out avenues for play, especially the kind of games that would offer them a psychological reprieve from their circumstances. The historian George Eisen recounts one story in
his book
Children and Play in the Holocaust
of a man who traded a crust of bread for a chessboard. By playing chess, he reasoned, he could forget his hunger.

The children used to play in a different way: not to escape their reality, but to confront it. Their games were, typically, violent and warlike. They played games that, according to Eisen, simulated ‘blowing up bunkers,’ ‘slaughtering,’ and ‘seizing the clothes of the dead.’ At Vilna, Jewish children played a game they dubbed ‘Jews and Gestapomen.’ The children playing the role of Jews would overpower their tormenters and beat them with sticks, which were used to represent rifles.

Play was also found in the extermination camps, where children who had the strength to move reportedly created a game they dubbed ‘tickling the corpse.’ At Auschwitz-Birkenau, they dared one another to touch the electric fence and, most grimly of all, they played ‘gas chamber,’ in which players threw rocks into a pit while mimicking the screams of the dying.

One game, ‘klepsi-klepsi,’ replicated the physical abuse Jews often experienced during daily roll call. One player would be blindfolded while another stepped forward to strike him on the face. Then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit would guess which of the children was his attacker, judging their guilt from their behavioural clues. To survive Auschwitz, Eisen points out, one often had to bluff about stealing bread or about knowing of someone’s escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi was a rehearsal.

Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist, explains in his book
Free to Learn
why this kind of play was important to the children of the camps, and why violent-themed play continues to be valuable outside that extreme context:

In play, whether it is the idyllic play we most like to envision or the play described by Eisen, children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to confront them, to experience them, and to practice ways of dealing with them. Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence. How else can they prepare themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically for reality? It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world for the future by controlling children’s play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; children will follow suit. The children must, and will, prepare themselves for the real world to which they must adapt to survive.

Despite the fact that violent play is usually a symptom of violent society, a way to understand through fiction the bruises of reality, video games are the latest recruit to the aftermath blame tradition. And, like all new mediums, they provide the right sort of scapegoat, enjoyed as they are by a generally younger demographic, from whose ranks America’s school shooters have often stepped. They are separated from older media by virtue of their interactivity. The medium has a unique capacity to inveigle, and even implicate, its audience through its interactivity. When we watch a violent scene in a film or read a description of violence in a novel, no matter how graphic it is, we are merely spectators. In video games, whose stories are usually written in the second person singular—‘you,’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ or some foreign ‘I’—we are active, if virtual, participants. Often the game’s story remains in stasis until we press the
button to step off the sidewalk, light the cigarette, drunkenly turn the key in the ignition, or pull a yielding trigger.

If video games can prepare us to become expert accountants or city planners or drivers by mimicking these real-life activities, it’s logical to argue that they might also prepare us for crime and violence.

But as the examples of the extermination camps demonstrate, games tend to reflect and replicate the world in which they are designed. They present a safe and consequence-less space in which to enclose and examine human life, love and tragedy. No wonder they can be so elementally appealing, when they aid us in understanding the confusion and mess of existence.

If this is true, then, in games as in all fiction, anything is permissible (so long as we also uphold the rule that nothing is beyond criticism). Video games should, by that measure, be free to replicate any human tragedy—perhaps even one of the school shootings for which they have so often shared blame.

Danny Ledonne released his independent game
Super Columbine Massacre
in April 2005. The game’s cutesy, sixteen-bit
Final Fantasy
–style graphics belie its macabre and challenging content: in the game you play as Harris and Klebold, following their actions on the day of the Columbine High School attack.

Ledonne was attending another high school in Colorado at the time of the killings. Confused as to why boys of a similar age, location and situation (he, like Harris and Klebold, was bullied at school) would express themselves in such a destructive manner, Ledonne decided to make a home-brew video game using the PC program
RPG Maker
to try to make sense of the events leading up to and during that day.

The plotline follows the events of the day with meticulous detail amassed from newspaper reports and sheriff records. Such attention to minutiae (your characters have the exact same number of bombs and weapons as Harris and Klebold, for example) has seen Ledonne described as obsessional, perhaps even glorifying the attackers’ acts.

‘I felt like if I wanted to make a serious game, I ought to take my subject seriously,’ says Ledonne. ‘This wasn’t going to be something I’d sink months of time into unless I was going to tell the story the way it happened. Without the attention to detail, I think the game would run a much greater risk of trivialising the shooting and would undermine the game’s primary purpose of showing the player a story they only thought they knew before.’

While the game doesn’t show footage or stills of any of the victims, it does intersperse real photographs of the boys, quote things that they said and, finally, display a graphic image from the coroner’s office of their lifeless bodies at the scene. What drove the decision to display such an image?

‘That decision was an easy one,’ says Ledonne. ‘I wanted to connect the limited graphical reality of the “game” with the deeply serious consequences of the game’s subject matter. They killed people. They killed themselves. This isn’t
Mario Brothers
. This really happened. Here are the crime-scene photos to prove it. The player must now account for what has happened thus far in the game. I felt like a documentary approach filled with real quotations and real photos was the best way to confront the shooting in honest terms. Video games often sanitise their violence and thereby short-change the player in terms of understanding the ramifications of his/her actions. I wanted to challenge that. This is a subject that demanded as much.’