The five most ridiculous cases of anti-game hysteria

Every time there is a mass shooting, there is no end of journalists who don’t really play games opining on the violent nature of modern video games.

This is a bit of a relief as if they actually did play video games, they would probably be blaming Kirby whenever a case of cannibalism came up.

However that doesn’t mean that a suggestive title won’t get a game blamed more or less at random for more or less random violence. Here are the top five examples of this.

5: Doom: Columbine

When the Columbine massacre happened, the most common game to be blamed for it was Doom. When the lawsuit happened, one of the companies that was mentioned in the suit was Nintendo. This is exactly like suing Disney because Die Hard, a 20 Century Fox movie, is violent.

Nintendo in that era was noted for its strong corporate emphasis on being family friendly, it was very much the Disney of gaming (as opposed to Sega, which was closer to Dreamworks in that it was pretty tame but pretending not to be), its entire cannon from that period would fall under “ridiculous to blame”.

4: Mass Effect: Sandy Hook

While Mass Effect 3 had a pretty terrible ending I don’t think it was quite so bad that it would inspire a murderous rampage. Evidently Ryan Lanza liked the Facebook page for the game series, which led to it being attacked by various individuals saying it caused the shootings.

Of course, aside from the fact that Mass Effect 3 is about uniting a galaxy to fight alien robots, Ryan Lanza turned out not to be the shooter. The shooter was his brother, Adam.

3: Counter Strike: Virginia Tech

Counter Strike is a legitimately violent game. It is indeed about shooting people, and thus should be at least a reasonable hypothesis that it led to violent right? Well, you see after Jack Thompson started talking about how Seung-Hui Cho was such an avid player of it and violent video games like it a major hole developed in the narrative.

No games were found in Cho’s dorm room, and there is no evidence that he actually played video games in college (he didn’t even have a console) and the Washington Post deleted its reference to Cho playing Counter Strike, because it wasn’t clear he actually played that game.

2: World of Warcraft: Oslo killings, Colorado Theatre killings

World of Warcraft is a game where you can play as a kung fu panda with an alcohol problem, and where a fair chunk of your time will be spent viciously attacking rocks so that you can get enough materials together to sell to the auction house, in order to get some decent gear in order to get killed by some giant monster while screaming “Leeroy Jenkins” into your microphone.

This hyper-realistic portrayal of hyper violence was apparently played by Anders Breivik for seven hours a day for months before he decided to protect “Cultural Christianity” by shooting children. Colorado’s James Holmes was also apparently a fan.

1: Dynasty Warriors: Sandy Hook

Dynasty Warriors is a game based on a the novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It is essentially a martial arts game where the nearest thing to a modern firearm is in fact a wooden cannon. This didn’t stop the UK tabloid The Express, from pointing out that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, played it.