That kid was playing Doom

[Guest endymion]

That kid in Virginia spent the last two hours of his life playing Doom. He did what we all do before we go on a shooting spree in Quake: he racked up whatever body armor and ammo he could and set himself up to speed reload and then he went in with both barrels blazing.

I'm a software developer. In college I had a long-time job building software for the US Navy and I stopped when I realized that I had an ethical problem with inventing ways to automate killing people. A moral problem I guess. My two college buddies and I moved to Silicon Valley together and worked for an early video game hardware startup called 3Dfx. One of my friends went on to iD Software and built most of Quake II, one of them wrote SiN and worked on most of the Half Life series. I went the entrepeneur route and grew out of games.

I spent last week picking on Diddy and Ludacris and Al Sharpton for encouraging white people to say "nappy ho". I can't stop thinking about the fact that we built simulators that taught that kid the skills that he used to kill all of those people.

[Guest pod]

Jack Thompson for Mr. Porter on line one.

[Guest mr.miami]

Uhh. Do we really need to hear this type of BS? Video games dont make people evil they are born that way.

Look at that lionel kid that when he was 10 wrestled and killed that little girl by accident. Well guess what he was in the news recently for commiting a new crime. Demon seed i tell ya it is all in the genes.

[Guest the lurker]

I can't stop thinking about the fact that we built simulators that taught that kid the skills that he used to kill all of those people.

being a "tech" junkie i would expect you to understand the difference between a mouse and a gun.

video games are not simulators until they make an auto aim feature for a gun.

[Guest pod]

207930723457234570 kids play video games every day. Only a tiny tiny percentage of them ever "snap".

I hope none of y'all are gonna suggest banning them?

[Guest endymion]

In Quake when you want to make sure that a common demon is down, you take a bead on it and hit it three times. Then you take a bead on the next thing that's moving, its head if possible, and you hit it three times.

That kid's kill rate was so high that it shocked me yesterday and I realized that the reason why his kill rate was so high is because he trained for years on a simulator before he went on his killing spree. I'm not saying that Quake made him do it. I'm saying that Quake made him better at it when he did it. I just can't stop thinking about that.

[Guest clubchicky]

Uhh. Do we really need to hear this type of BS? Video games dont make people evil they are born that way.

Look at that lionel kid that when he was 10 wrestled and killed that little girl by accident. Well guess what he was in the news recently for commiting a new crime. Demon seed i tell ya it is all in the genes.

I agree...don't ruin video games for everyone else who knows the difference between a game and actually killing people. We have enough censoring already...My cousin and I love Doom....and we are not going to go out and buy oozies and go around blowing people away...

[Guest pod]

Shooting a real weapon and clicking your mouse are totally different experiences. I could hand a .45 to the most hardcore gamer, and I'd be shocked if he'd hit his target on the first try. Being holed up in your bedroom doesn't do much for your physical health. Well, one arm might be stronger than the other...

This guy at VT had to have some basic firearms knowledge aside from Doom.

Again, we can't "ban" things based on the assumption that someone, sometime might get hurt or killed or hurt or kill someone. If that's the case, let's ban: booze, loud music, nightclubs, fatty foods, computers, TV, pretty much anything requiring electricity, hell, let's just disembody the kids at birth, plug their brains into a Mac Pro cluster and they can live their lives in virtual reality.

[Guest clubchicky]

exactly...I would NOT know what to do with a real gun...are u kidding me....shooting ducks on duck hunt with the nintendo gun is not the same thing

[Guest Buck White]

If some college student had been running around Tulane University, in 1981, pummeling people indiscriminately with an oversized gavel....you can't afford to get down on yourself because you helped design Donkey Kong. It's hardly you're fault Tech.

Let's read the conspiratorial view of why this is happening.

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/160407blackop.htm

[Guest endymion]

I don't feel directly responsible and only a little indirectly responsible but I just can't stop thinking about it.

He may have only been doing target practice with a real gun for a month? It's all still getting pieced together so I don't know if that's the final story or not. If so then Quake did play a part.

I didn't realize until I read the Wikipedia entry on Charles Whitman yesterday, but that mass murderer had a brain tumor pressing against the rage and aggression lobe of his brain. The tumor may have 'caused' the incident in his case but I would still feel really bad if I had been the guy who taught Charles Whitman to shoot a rifle.

[Guest Adam Singer]

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2007Mar/bga20070301003098.htm

Violent games don't make killer kids

posted 8:55am EST Thu Mar 01 2007 - submitted by Brian Osborne

BLURB

You don't make killer kids by just allowing them to play violent video games. That is the finding by a sociologist from the University of Southern California. Karen Sternheimer will publish her findings in the Winter issue of the American Sociological Association's Contexts magazine.

Sternheimer found that in the 10 years since the first release of Doom, juvenile homicide arrest rates have actually fallen by 77%. If violent video games are causing an increase in juvenile violence, then it doesn't seem to be showing up in these statistics. If that doesn't put parents and students at ease, then that the students have a 7 in 10 million chance of being killed at school should.

It is easy for people to point to a single cause when it comes to unexplainable acts of violence, especially when that violence is perpetrated by juveniles. Sternheimer makes a great point by saying that violent video games aren't what turn kids into killers. Other factors are at play that can't be easily explained by saying it was since the kid played first-person shooter games.

-------------------------

certain people are predisposed to conditions tech, video games in no way create this kind of behavior

do you go out and drive 100mph after playing need for speed?

[Guest endymion]

Sternheimer found that in the 10 years since the first release of Doom, juvenile homicide arrest rates have actually fallen by 77%.

That's an interesting statistic.

Homicide arrest rate is one interesting metric. Another interesting metric is the kill percentage. It was just so high. That's what shocked me. Mass-shootings never have such a high number of kills per shots fired. The kill rate was high because he had a high skill level. He had a high skill level because he trained on a simulator for years.

[Guest Adam Singer]

Sternheimer found that in the 10 years since the first release of Doom, juvenile homicide arrest rates have actually fallen by 77%.

That's an interesting statistic.

Homicide arrest rate is one interesting metric. Another interesting metric is the kill percentage. It was just so high. That's what shocked me. Mass-shootings never have such a high number of kills per shots fired. The kill rate was high because he had a high skill level. He had a high skill level because he trained on a simulator for years.

we live in a crazy world man, its incredibly sad but you cant put blame on yourself my friend...there are people with mental imbalances and its just unpredictable and uncontrollable...

[Guest endymion]

Yeah. Just wow. People can be pretty scary when they malfunction.

[Guest pod]

It's why at a society level, we have to totally overhaul the way we treat people who are imbalanced. The "solution" nowadays is to pump 'em full of drugs, rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, the drugs only work when taken. The minute the subject goes off the pills, it's all over. Or, if they're not doped up, they're shunned for not being "right", and then one day they snap.

And conversely, if a kid is "weird", it's pill time. I'm thankful for the fact I grew up before all this. As you all know, I'm not what society would call "right". I deal with it on my own. If I was 20 years younger, you bet your ass the school psychologist would be telling my parents to dope me up on the usual suspects, ritalin, etc.

[Guest saintjohn]

The kill rate was high because he had a high skill level.

Skill? Maybe.

Mind set? Definitely.

[Guest pod]

Seriously, we don't know the dynamics of the situation to make a judgment call like that. Not to sound morbid, but the scenes of the crime were indoors, and in a confined environment where the victims were taken by surprise.

[Guest web_norah]

so if video games don't play a role in this type of violent acts ...

can anyone answer this?

why do all these sort of teen murders in school/ universities happen with such frequency in the US? Amish guy, Columbine, etc?

--you never hear things like this in other developed nations ...

is it the guns? video games? lack of parental guidance?

i am with Tech on this, there has got to be some connection to video games .

[Guest slamminshaun]

There's no easy answer for that Norah. Kids in Japan play more violent video games than anywhere per capita (at least I think I read that), yet you don't see this happen there (or at least we don't hear about it).

I think some of what contributes to what happens in the U.S. with young people is a result of what many call "Generation Me". In other words, unlike past generations, young people in this country are obsessed with attracting attention to themselves, being a celebrity, etc., etc. We live in such a superficial culture, at times it makes me sick.

In the end, we have 300 million people who call the U.S. home. The odds that you'll have a nutcase or two among the flock is very high. I wouldn't over-analyze this shooting. It's not the guns, video games, Charlton Heston (click here), or Don Imus that caused this....it was a psychotic nutcase, pure and simple.

[Guest endymion]

Not to sound morbid, but the scenes of the crime were indoors, and in a confined environment where the victims were taken by surprise.

That skill comes from playing Doom. Anybody who has played Quake or anything like it knows what I'm talking about. You clear rooms by controlling the exits in a first-person shooter. You bust in and your corner the demons and you let them have it from the doorway so that they can't scurry off like cockroaches. You kill every single one of them so that one of them doesn't come after you when you turn around to go off and clear the next room.

In Castle Wolfenstein, one of the first games of the genre, the Nazi guards went down if you hit them one time. In Doom it took two or three hits to take down a demon.

This skill level thing is something new and scary that's separate from the "mind-set" issue. One question is did the games teach him the idea of a first-person-shooter killing spree. Like Ludacris teaching white people that it's cute and endearing to say "ho". There was a Columbine simulator, I wonder if Seung-Hui ever played it. A totally different question is did games make him more effective at what he did once he already had the idea and made the decision to do it.

[Guest web_norah]

There's no easy answer for that Norah. Kids in Japan play more violent video games than anywhere per capita (at least I think I read that)' date=' yet you don't see this happen there (or at least we don't hear about it).

I think some of what contributes to what happens in the U.S. with young people is a result of what many call "Generation Me". In other words, unlike past generations, young people in this country are obsessed with attracting attention to themselves, being a celebrity, etc., etc. We live in such a superficial culture, at times it makes me sick.

In the end, we have 300 million people who call the U.S. home. The odds that you'll have a nutcase or two among the flock is very high. I wouldn't over-analyze this shooting. It's not the guns, video games, Charlton Heston (click here), or Don Imus that caused this....it was a psychotic nutcase, pure and simple.

a lot of people live in Europe yet you hardly hear about things like this. random violent acts perhaps but not students shooting inside schools.

so, if guns weren't so readily accesible to this so-called nutcase -point and case: like here in the UK, you just can't go to a store with two forms of ID and buy a gun.............don't you think the odds would be different?

i do.

[Guest pod]

Well, for better or for worse, an armed citizenry is here to stay. There's nothing that can be done considering there's enough weapons to arm every man, woman, and child in the country.

[Guest endymion]

It's not the guns, video games, Charlton Heston (click here), or Don Imus that caused this....it was a psychotic nutcase, pure and simple.

so, if guns weren't so readily accesible to this so-called nutcase -point and case: like here in the UK, you just can't go to a store with two forms of ID and buy a gun.............don't you think the odds would be different?

Shaun and Norah are both right. That kid's brain malfunctioning caused this. Any other factor can only be contributory. The school not locking down properly, video games, the availability of handguns, all of those things are just contributory. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Norah, I do think that it could have been different if that store hadn't sold him those two guns so easily. Do you also think that it would have been different if he hadn't trained for years on a killing spree simulator to improve his kill rate and learn room-clearing tactics? Maybe neither of those things were the "cause" but they were enabling factors.

Did he really only start target shooting two months ago with the Walther .22 pistol? It's common to buy a .22 pistol for target practice for your first handgun because there's almost no recoil and the ammo is so cheap that you can shoot all day for $20. Then after that you graduate to a larger caliber. He came back a month after he bought his first .22 and bought a Glock 9mm. Was that only his second handgun? Somebody who only started shooting two months ago and who had no formal training should not be able to achieve such a high kill rate.

[Guest Adam Singer]

if you're going to blame video games, you have to blame the news, movies (pulp fiction anyone?), TV (24?), etc etc etc...

you can't put this on one thing like video games

there's a WORLD of difference between playing quake and using a firearm

i mean do you honestly think that people sitting at home playing GTA think to themselves 'ok, im going to run out and rob the quickie-mart now?'

if anything it is a myriad of elements, not 1 thing

i still blame it on a mental disorder though...most people easily separate real life from games...you cant scapegote 1 thing