Just two weeks after posting a blog on this site about the dangers of role-playing video games such as World of Warcraft, the man accused of killing 12 people in a murderous rampage at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado is said to have been obsessed with similar games.
According to the Daily Mail, a former classmate of accused Aurora shooter James Holmes, said that among other reasons why Holmes might have snapped before going on the July 20 shooting spree is that he lost touch with reality from too many hours spent in role-playing video games.
“James was obsessed with computer games and was always playing role-playing games,” the unidentified friend said. “I can’t remember which one but it was something like World of Warcraft, one of those where you compete against people on the internet. The terrain and surroundings of games make it highly difficult to aim as there is a lot of AI involved in addition to the live players competing against you. Moreover, there are realistic lighting effects induced in the game with smooth animations that can cause a real issue for you trying to aim at a moving target and make sure you hit them where it hurts. You can use escape from tarkov hacks to help you with the accuracy of your aim and each bullet you fire lands the intended target. It is one of the most useful Escape from Tarkov Hack that you can use to hit those hackers back the same way.
“He did not have much of a life apart from that and doing his work. James seemed like he wanted to be in the game and be one of the characters. It seemed that being online was more important to him than real life. He must have lost his sense of reality, how else can you shoot dozens of people you don’t know?”
Billy Kromka, a research assistant at the University of Colorado neuroscience lab where Holmes was a student was also aware of the amount of gaming Holmes was doing in the months leading up to the shooting.
“Sometimes during the lab when he was supposed to be reading a paper or something like that, I would see him playing online role-playing video games, like World of Warcraft, League of Legends,” Kromka said.
Police uncovered evidence of Holmes’ penchant for violent games when they found a poster for the Soldiers of Misfortune game in his apartment.
As we describe in this blog, experts claim the World of Warcraft video game is extremely addictive and describe it as being the “crack cocaine of the video computer gaming world.”
Sadly, Holmes will not be the first mass murderer with ties to World of Warcraft. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who went on a shooting rampage last year that left 77 people dead was also addicted to World of Warcraft. The 33 year-old was said to have spent untold hours immersed in the game’s fantasy world filled with knights performing violent “missions.”
This was my first suspicion when I heard about this shooting. ” Another young man who has spent too much time practicing killing without any real consequences”, I thought. These poor souls have been seduced by the lie that we can furnish our minds with evil and it will not spill over into our actions. Even the “booby-trapped” apartment shows not a total loss of touch with reality , but an altered reality where the fantasy has invaded one’s real world. Unfortunately , for all the victims’ families as well as his own , there are consequences to our thoughts and our actions and they are only too real. My brothers played cowboys when they were little using their fingers as their pistol . However, they didn’t do it past the age of 10 and they didn’t do it for hours a day. It also was never confused with reality when they were called into lunch in the middle of it all. Today we encourage play ,and very violent role play at that, well into the years when our parents were accepting the responsiblites of adulthood.
Let us pray for the victims, their families and for this lost young man and his family as well. Their promising graduate student has become a mass murderer. Is this what any parent hopes for his or her child? Let us speak out about the damage this role playing is doing to our culture and our next generation. The culture doesn’t like the word sin , but the Scripture is clear that the wages of sin is death. Our world is fallen and the wages and corruption of sin in our world is painful. Let us point the way to the One who has overcome both sin and death . Let us not objectify each other even in the small ways that can be tempting , but live to show the world the Image of God, the eternal being that we encounter in each of us. Let us use this horrible news story to engage our friends and neighbors in this cultural discussion.