EDITORIAL - Games, shooters, and shooting games

Following what can be considered as our country’s first school shooting --on par with what happens now and then in the U.S. with students as actual perpetrators-- many people are now looking for answers.

One of these is what influenced the two offenders, one aged 14 and the other 15, to act violently. Focus quickly shifted to an online game called GoreBox where online players kill each other’s characters. Despite the boxy look of the game meant to appeal to young people, online deaths were described as particularly gory, hence the name.

Now people are calling to ban youths from playing violent online games.

Will this actually help? It might, but then again, it might not.

GoreBox isn’t the first shooting game to come along and introduce youths to violence, nor will it be the last.

Just a generation ago, youths were first introduced to PvP (Player versus Player) games like Counter-Strike, Delta Force, and Half-Life, among others. Students playing against friends or even against total strangers in internet cafés became a common pastime.

Those games were just as violent. However, we didn’t see any student in that generation become a mass shooter.

That’s why we think that games, even the violent ones, by themselves don’t really push their players to become killers or fantasize about killing others. If this was the case then we would have already been seeing an epidemic of school shootings which, fortunately, has not been the case.

For those two students in particular it wasn’t just GoreBox that drove their need to kill. We have to be wary of what else led to their actions.

We should be careful in pointing to just one thing that set those two off. This may seem tempting because it simplifies the problem and narrows down the things we have to be careful of and look out for. It also makes it easier for many of us to blame someone else for what happened.

But if we ignore the other factors that influenced those two young killers to do what they did then we run the risk of more kids picking up guns and killing fellow schoolmates.