COMM 344: Doom and the Columbine problem.

When the Columbine Massacre happened in 1999, pundits jumped on Doom. As this article from The Denver Post in May 1999 shows, a lot of focus was put on Eric Harris's love for the game. People speculated that Harris had created a Doom level of Columbine High School, that he and Klebold had practiced their massacre in-game. 

Commonly, Doom players rebutted this assertion. The common rebuttal is that enemies in Doom are aggressive. That, in 1999, the ability to change enemy behavior so that they flee was not possible. Regardless of these rebuttals, it is of high importance that we look into news media's portrayal of the impact of video games on violent behavior.

In the modern day, video game violence is no longer such a concern. In "Are Video Games Art?", Nick Gillespie states "...video games have become too ubiquitous to prohibit, their predicted damage to the fabric of society has stubbornly refused to materialize." Essentially, the people who called for bans on games in the Doom/Night Trap era were proved wrong by history. The news media still wants to discuss the issue, but banning video games is an absent concept.

This shift is apparent from a perusal of Gillespie's article. On Columbine, he says "The Columbine rampage was routinely attributed to the killers' playing of first-person-shooter (FPS) games such as Doom (where players were "space marines" fighting demons) and Wolfenstein 3D (World War II POWs vs. zombie Nazis), even though later analysis concluded, in the words of psychologist Peter Langman, "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games.". 

But what does the lack of calls for mass-banning of games really mean? Does it mean that child-friendly games like Super Smash Bros have gotten us to a point that banning games is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or is it games like Bioshock and Flower that reinforce the idea that games are art, as Gillespie argues? While the motivations for acceptance of video games are unclear, it is clear that games have become more socially acceptable in our society. Games are no longer our scapegoat. (Leave that to social media).