Norway has had a terrible tragedy. The person behind it was clearly insane. The predictable nonsense of sensationalist mass media attempting to attach his affiliation with video games didn't take more than a day or two.
To illustrate the ridiculous nature of associating hobbies with psychosis: why doesn't "Bible Addiction" get the same scrutiny in how many child molestation cases every year? Or on a more equivalent level, remember the east coast sniper a few years back? He openly and directly attributed that motivation to scripture. Statistically speaking in fact, we should be a hell of a lot more worried about dogmatic believers of any given religion than all gamers combined, given actual crimes committed in human history, by orders of magnitude.
Maybe video games are threatening the dinosaur businesses of TV & Print? I don't know, just a thought. Got to have one conspiracy theory in here somewhere.
Back to the point: Ted Bundy was an avid snow skier. Ted Kaczynski loved camping and swore off technology. Unfortunately, broken people do many things besides commit atrocities. Some of them are going to play games, some are going to preach religion, some are going to be astronauts. Does that mean everyone else that does any of the things that the bad person did are also bad? How about we look a little deeper into this man's past and recent history and see if we can't uncover a few more lurking issues besides whatever he used as a distraction leading up to his breakdown.
Perhaps it is just part of being human that we have to constantly search for reason and pattern and connection, that we jump to such ridiculous conclusions and associations. Sometimes, maybe it's just a plain confluence of chaos. I suspect that idea is far more unsettling to many people than being able to point at something and say "yep, that's what it was, that's the reason."
On the bright side, this is the first time in my life I've actually seen several quotes from high ranking officials involved immediately dismissing the notion of video game "addiction" having any relevant part of this man's tragic story. Perhaps we finally have some rational thought creeping into global consciousness? I'd like to remain optimistic, but I'm just waiting for someone with authority and a microphone to point at Chat Roulette or maybe Spotify or whatever else is out there that is new and scary and hard to comprehend.
(ps: addiction should really be reserved as a clinical term as it applies to physical brain chemistry changes which are literally inescapable, unlike psychological compulsions which have proven to be conditionable)
