Research has shown that video games
desensitise humans. In 2016 a study was undertaken with a
group of university students who were split into groups of
video game players. One group played violent games and
another group playing non-violent games.
The results
confirmed repeated play of hyper-realistic violent video
games desensitised gamers to having emotional responses to
acts of violence and numbed their feelings of guilt.
The
recent terrorist attack in New Zealand has confirmed the
gunman was an avid video game player. This was confirmed by
the gunman himself in his writings that he disclosed minutes
before his shootings. Family members of the 28-year old
have also confirmed he had an addiction to video games –
“Tarrant spent most of his time on computer games during
his high school days rather than chasing girls”, his grandmother said.
This was the
same situation for the Norway gunman who brutally killed school
students as they attended a school camp. He too used video games as a training platform
before he set out on a mass killing spree of school
students.
In 2015 another white supremist, Dylan Roof,
shot and killed numerous people as they intended their local
church. Investigations into Roof’s background
and childhood revealed he had a longtime exposure to violent
video games.
Therefore an emerging profile of a western
based terrorist is a European, male, aged between mid 20s to
mid 30s, a lone wolf, single with a fascination and/or
addiction to online video games.
To further push this
theory forward, that is, players of violent video games have
a higher propensity of becoming a mass killer, a
psychiatrist described a man as insane and therefore not
guilty or murder “because he believed he was living in
another world.”
Jo Pert was stabbed to death on 7
January 2016 as she was out jogging in broad daylight and
attacked with a knife. The psychiatrist responsible for
examining the mental status of the offender, Dr. Mhairi Duff
said the offender suffered from schizophrenia,
hallucinations and lived in complex system of delusions,
believing he existed in a virtual reality when he killed Ms
Pert – a total stranger.
“The rest of us are living in an
altered reality and the players within this altered reality
are controlled by controllers from the real world from which
Mr Filo has been temporarily banished,” she said of the
offender’s delusion.
Dr Duff said the offender thought
he was doing “missions” to get back to the real world, where
he thought he was a king, saying he would have viewed the
attack as killing someone in a shooter video game. “He
continued to believe the person he killed was not a live
human being but rather an … artificial being.” (source).
Moving back to the most
recent terrorist act in New Zealand, the gunman referred to
a video game, Fortnite, where he described, “…. Fortnite trained me
to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my
enemies.”
Coincidentally, Fortnite has also recently been
connected to facilitating money laundering.
How much
commitment is being made to regulate these games by way of
ratings and controlling distributions?
With the above
incidents of terrorists being connected to avid gamers, what
can society and governments do to prevent children,
teenagers and adolescents from becoming terrorists?
