In brightness of the tragical events in Oslo and Utya, information was observed that Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for the shootings in Utya,used both Creation of Warcraft and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 as a "breeding base" of sorts. Whether this did lead to Breivik`s violent tendencies is nevertheless under review, but according to clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a specialist on videogame violence at Texas A&M University, it`s not the media that`s the cause. "I know it`s a little controversial to say, but there`s a certain character of racism in set with these killings," he said in an audience with Forbes.
"When shootings happen in an interior city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things pass in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed.I mean that theres a certain factor of racism or ignorance here."
We can`t look to recall when was the final time Grand Theft Auto was blamed for a car-robbery-gone-wrong in the poorer districts of cities. It was only just another crime in the poor neighborhood. Ferguson continued on that killings of Oslo`s scale are passing to keep occuring, and there`s nothing anyone can do to keep them. They strike randomly, they strike powerfully, but they don`t move very often. When they do happen though, the price is high. "People actually need to live what sort of boogeyman can we hang this on and video games are nevertheless the top choice when it comes to any case of tragedy," said Ferguson.
It`s all a count of reality: when do we get the argument between reality, and virtual reality? The model of your character killing somebody in a game can well be misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted?) as an interior need for dispatch and violence. However, even the U.S. Supreme Court has found that there is no scientific ground for such an argument. Surely this means the harassment will stop, right?
Wrong, says Ferguson. There`s always passing to be somebody willing to pin-the-tail-on-the-videogame. "There are groups out there who are leaving to blame video games on everything," he said. "Theyre like ambulance chasers, really. I believe its irresponsible and thoughtless to try to produce political gain off of somebody elses tragedy, but theyre leaving to do it. Thats what they do. But even those groups have been much quieter with the Oslo tragedy."
Another big shooting that has oft been affiliated with video games is the Columbine tragedy of 1999. On April 20th, two high school students killed 12 students and one faculty member in their school in Colorado state before committing suicide. Later reports declared that both students were fans of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, which were popular FPS games back in the day.
While people were ready to condemn both games at the time, Ferguson states that this was simply because people wanted something to blame. "What was so scary about Columbine was that it could happen anywhere, even in a seemingly safe suburban high school," he explained. "People wanted something to pick and video games became the target. And they wanted to just regulate games away."
It`s almost like to people`s "You can`t see me, I can`t see you" or "Out of view out of mind" mentality. Making games go away makes the origin of many of these problems go away. Therefore, they won`t happen anymore. The Virginia Tech tragedy of 2007 proved all of this wrong. On April 16th, one lone gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and wounded 25 others before turning the gun on himself.
Strangely enough, Cho was no fan of video games. Where does that allow all the thumb pointing? Ferguson said that this was a suit to shew that these shootings happen randomly and that games are not the culprit. "One thing weve learned from research is that around 95 percent of young boys have played a violent tv game," said Ferguson. "That becomes a crafty thing when these mass homicides occur and the shot is a new male. The odds are hes played violent video games.
"Linking the acting of violent video games to a mass homicide when the culprit is a new male is like blaming the kill on the fact that he was wearing sneakers. The basal value of that behavior is so green that it has no predictive value whatsoever."
The argument will yet remain. Do video games cause violence, or do they not? Do we need to secretly pull the spark on a gun, or do we only go out our fantasies in a virtual environment? One thing is certain: we all accept the power to get a choice, and we all must have for the consequences of that choice.
Read the entire interview at Forbes.
Via Destructoid.
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