An Annoyed Gamers Constant Frustration

By Jack Gamache April 18, 2013

MODERN media disgusts me. Specifically in the way it chooses to handle tragedies. Its a sad state of affairs that this should keep happening, but it does. As most of the nation is aware, a couple of months ago a twenty-year-old man by the name of Adam Lanza walked into a school in Connecticut and murdered twenty children and six adults before turning the gun on himself. As is sadly usual in these kinds of tragedies, we have a great many people, most of them in the media, willing to jump at the chance to make a lot of money from politicizing and covering a tragedy in the greatest possible detail, whether or not that detail is actually true. The media is a partner in crime to school shootings, and as a result of intense coverage, turns the shooter into an infamous antihero as opposed to focusing on the victims and what could best be done to help the victims and prevent such tragedies in the future. Speaking on Charlie Bookers Newswipe, a British news review program, a forensic psychologist by the name of Dr. Park Dietz gave his opinion on the matter: Weve had twenty years of mass murders throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media if you dont want to propagate more mass murders, dont start the story with sirens blaring. Dont have photographs of the killer, dont make it twenty-four-seven coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero. Do localize the story to the effected community, and make it as boring as possible in every other market. Every time we have intense saturation of mass murder, we can expect to see one or two more within a week. Behavioral change expert and four-time New York Times bestselling author Joseph Grenny also detailed, in an article posted on Psychology Today in April 2012, that the media is continually amplifying the violence of shootings through naming the shooter, describing his characteristics, detailing the crime, numbering the victims, and ranking him against other attackers. Such aspects are truly needless in the presentation of tragic news. Specifically, both televised and printed media have targeted the video game industry again and again. The big news companies claim that video games are the reason for most violence in young people today. The Sun, the most popular newspaper in the United Kingdom, had a particularly troubling coverage of the Sandy Hook Shooting which focused on the killer, Adam Lanza. The article began with huge front page spread with the words Killers Call of Duty Obsession, followed up by a double paged spread on

the inside with the words Black Ops Bunker: Killer lived in windowless lair playing violent video games, surrounded by posters of weapons, he plotted massacre. At first glance this may seem to just be a simple jumping to conclusions on the medias part. That is until one looks at previous articles written by The Sun about Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. In months previous to the shooting, The Sun presented this specific game in a very positive light, even promoting its release, with headlines such as Call of Duty gets even more realistic- with pre-launch live event and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is set to be the shooter of the future. It is quite interesting how quickly opinions will change when they know that newspapers will be sold as a result. Another news organization, the Daily Express, is quoted as saying chillingly [Lanzas] favorite video game was said to be a shockingly violent fantasy war game called Dynasty Warriors, which is thought to have given him inspiration to act on his darkest thoughts. Dynasty Data Source: UNODC, others. Image source: (Max Fisher/Washington Post) Warriors is a long-running series of Japanese hack-and-slash games based on heroic novels of ancient Japanese origin. They are games which contain no bloody violence of any description, no form of decapitation, no removal of limbs, etc. In fact, blood is never even shown on screen and it is impossible to kill your enemies - they simply flee the battle, wounded. Furthermore the game is presented in a very cartoonish way with no indication at all of being a realistic depiction of ultra-violence. The closest thing to a shotgun in that game is a wooden cannon.

games. This is due to the fact that Lanzas brother had the audacity to like a Facebook page. The games were quickly condemned by those who knew nothing about them, and it suffered a loss of sales. For those who do not know, Mass Effect 3 was a game where the main character is constantly tormented by the needless death of a single, innocent child. This is a game that apparently encourages the massacre of school children. Perhaps one of the most important parts of this situation to remember, however, is that these people do not actually believe what they are saying. They are putting together a narrative that they believe their viewers and readers want to hear. They believe this is what will interest them; this is what will drive up the ratings and sell more advertising space or, in the case of newspapers, sell more copies. Even though there are traces of increased aggression among people who play violent games, these aggressions are often subtle; studies have consistently found that it is not possible to link between destructive violence and the consumption of violent video games. A report by the Secret Service from a couple of years ago found that the most common form of entertainment for school shooters was written violence, while video games only accounted for a very small fraction. This does not even mean that written violence causes this kind of behavior, but it shows that video games are indeed the least common form of entertainment for those who perpetrate school shootings.
Crime when compared to release years of ultraviolent games.

Whether it be rock music, comic books, violence in movies, or now video games, it has always been in the medias best interests to continually condemn and hammer its competition. We are in an age where many young people do not even watch the news, and gaming habits that leave them surfing the internet lead them to find their source of current events from non-traditional sources. Many gamers have no interest in reading the paper or watching the news, and why should they when they have access to every form of news and entertainment they could possibly ask for in an on demand form? Media giants are gradually losing control due to the rise of video games and alternative news sources, and it is, therefore, in these companies best interests to discredit and harm in every way possible video games and everything associated with them. Just within this past year, video games have clearly proven to be near the top of the competitive ladder in media with the release of the new sci-fi shooter Halo 4. Based on the sales in the United States alone, Halo 4 has officially broken all other box office records in history. Most big news corporations examine this kind of competition with bitter contempt. Make no mistake, these organizations do not have the publics best interests at heart. That is not their priority. Their priority is to make as much money as possible, and the exploitation of tragedies such as school shootings is one way to do that. These companies are making money on the backs of dead children.

They should not be doing so by lying to the public. They should not be attacking the competition in a cynical and morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest fashion. Yet that is what they have been doing for years. I grow tired of the todays violence being constantly blamed on video games, based on generalizations of gamers that are decades old. Video gamers are not some shadowy club, they are not some clique, they are not some niche anymore. Almost everybody plays video games. They are ubiquitous, they are unbelievably popular across the board, and they are a multi-billion dollar industry based on the notion of entertaining people with a piece of fantasy and nothing more than that.