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My sons would say I have no right to speak on this topic. Not being a gamer. No knowing about games. Being just a mom who watches her kids play and often discusses the games with them.
But I come from English Montreal(a smallish community) and just last week a local man(who it happens, attended the same high school I did) played that video game about Columbine and then drove to the city and shot a bunch of kids in a CEGEP college cafeteria. (CEGEP students are the age of seniors in American high school.)It's deeplyupset my community, because most everyone is connected to this college in one way or another.
Most commentators are calling for even STRICTER gun laws (even though our Prime Minister doesn't want that at all: come to think of it he's in deep doo doo now). It's ironic we feel, that the US considered the marijuana that passes over the board southward to be much more dangerous than the guns that pass northward.
A few commentators are calling for banning violent video game (just a few people, mind you) but on this my sons and I can all agree, that's not quite the point. The killer also like Jon Stuart (a favorite in our house) and Law and Order (Grandmaman's favorite show). What do his entertainment preferences have to do with anything? Still, that fact that this deranged man played a certain game and then went out and 'acted it out' is disconcerting - and may speak to the power of these games -on a troubled mind.
(Of course,the media always focuses on the anomaly, the exception. Maybe the story is that sooo many millions of young men play these games for hours on end and remain peaceful and constructive citizens -if not readers of Victorian novels.)
But I must say that I have long understood that video game technology is connected to war - and directly. Gwyn Dyer wrote a article a while back which I read with interest, having young boys at the time(one who is 18 and downstairs playing some violent game over the Net as I write). He claimed video game technology was designed specifically to get soldiers to kill more effectively on the battlefield:that forensic anthropologists (?) who study war scenes discovered that in battles, half of soldiers (or so) shot in the air. With this new training,soldiers in the Vietnam era shot at the enemy more. (This is how I remember it.)
My point: This video game may not be the ONLY recruitment video game out there. They all may be designed to prime young men for battle.
