Many media outlets have said that Adam Laza was an
avid video gamer, several posters of video games were found in his room,
nevertheless the question remains open do video games really trigger all the
violence they are being held responsible for? Let’s review the evidence we
have, these were 3 video games that in some way shape or form have been related
to the shooter:
a) Call
Of Duty: The English paper The
Sun ran an article called “Killers Call Of Duty Obsession”, in this article
the newspaper describes how the massacre perpetrator Adam Laza was a big fan of
this video game, that he even had “military posters hanging all over the walls”,
it seems paradoxical that the newspaper itself ran several stories about the
launch of the video game, we can clearly see how in this story
the newspaper is covering the launch of the game and they even use phrases such
as: “Graphically, the game is
sublime, something the series’ reputation is built on” and “It’s pure, unadulterated warfare”
and that is not the only story they ran digging on the video game properties,
we have this
story where they are evaluating each one of the different maps in the game and
they rate it “10 out of 10”, this
other article where they are saying that one copy of the video game is sold
every second and that makes it the fastest selling entertainment release of
history selling more than 1 billion dollars in just 15 days, giving just a
superficial review of the material we have collected here you can see there are
several things wrong, number one (even we all know that the Sun is not one of the
most ethical and respected diaries), if they are convinced that video games are
a problem and one of the causes of this disgrace, why do they accept money for their
advertising, rated so highly and spoke so well about it? If it is the biggest
entertainment released in history shouldn’t we have more people going on
killing spreads? After all this is the cause and it is the best seller in
history isn’t it?
b) Dinasty
Warriors: Another English diary, the Dialy Express blames the Dynasty Warrior
video game as one of the causes of this massacre, nevertheless whoever has played the game has seen that the
enemies don’t even “die”, there are no fire weapons, just a bunch of wood
weapons and that the action revolves around the story of several kingdoms in
China, so I don’t really see how this video game can be related to the
massacre.
c) Mass
Effect 3: this has been another video game that has been tossed around as one
of the video games that have influenced the perpetrator to commit his crime,
what many people don’t know is that actually the way the media arrived to this
conclusion was when they confused his brother with the killer and the brother “Liked”
the page of this video game and it appeared in his wall as one of the things he
liked.
After the media had portrayed the video games as
evil, let’s think a little further about the video games, let’s suppose that
the murder was a real fan of these 3 video games, that he actually played them
furiously, does this mean that the video games influenced him to commit such a heinous
crime? Adam Laza was wearing clothes the day of the murder and I have not heard
anybody saying that the clothes were the cause of his rage, to me this is a
battle that has been cooking for a long time, between the old media and the new
media, if you can see the newspapers are part of big entertainment conglomerates
that are watching their power diminish for video games, internet videos and
basically any type of entertainment on demand, nowadays the younger generation
entertain with the video games they want to play, they watch the videos they
want to see and they basically decide what to see and what not to see, the old
media is angry because they are losing the attention of the new generation,
they are losing their advertisers, their ways to make money and the only way
they have found to monetize is by creating fear, distrust and misinformation.
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