Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

There was one article somewhere claiming the virginia and other
shootings were mainly influenced by video games. I smugly accepted,
considering some person might get influenced by all the killing that
you do in a game, and might’ve done it for real.

I was doing my half hour daily gaming ritual, playing GTA: San Andreas
(a great game, I wholly recommend it) Here you’re set loose in a city
and you can kill anyone or run over lots of people and become an
international criminal if you want to. Now this game has been claimed
to be responsible for a lot of things and has received a very bad
response from some people.

So here’s the mission, I’m chasing down this drug smuggler and trying
to kill him with my M4 Rifle, and I accidentally hit a civilian, and I
felt sick. Not because I took an innocent life, but because now the
cops were gonna come after me. And then it struck me!

Three golden rules every gamer knows:

1. In a game, reckless killing can get you killed or arrested or something but it won’t be too much fun for you.
2. A game is about fun and enjoyment, and very rarely about killing.
   Even if killing is the primary objective, like in Quake 3 Arena, where
   the primary objective is to go around killing everyone you see(while
   others are doing the same). Here it’s not even called a kill, it’s
   called a frag. If you’re killed you don’t respawn with a 150 bullets,
   but if you’re fragged you do. And I don’t keep up with the news much
   but I’ve never seen “Mass student fragging in this university”
3. All games have a fight for a greater good. Every kill has an
   objective, weather it’s for points, or to unlock higher levels or
   whatever, it’s all about the objectives. You don’t celebrate that you
   blew someone’s head clean off, you celebrate you finished the tough
   mission.

What pissed me off was that some articles blamed everything on
videogames. There are millions of gamers in the world today, and why
don’t all of them take a gun out and go rampaging around

The point is that you shouldn’t be trying to blame the shooting on
something. If a kid really wants to shoot the crap out of people, he
will. There’s no stopping him. No gun laws, no rules, no security
checks, nothing.

What will prevent it is that if everyone had something to do with their
time and doesn’t give them the time to go around killing people. In
other words, they need a good pastime.

Might I suggest a good game of Quake 3?