Is Doom Responsible for Columbine?

[Achika]

I want honest opinions here. And I need everyones opinion too.

Is Doom responsible for the events that happened at Columbine in the spring of 1999?

If you think so, then say 'yes' without fear of retribution. If 'no' that's fine too. I want to know from REAL gamers, not from one sided news media. If you want to interject and say why, go ahead. This is all going in my report on videogames as 'Art & Politics'.

[cerex]

haha i think not,going to school everyday being beaten up,getting rocks thrown at you as you leave school,going to the principal and them doing nothin,getting turned down by the marines,having your girl friend dump you and doom caused someone to shoot these ppl up?

[portnoyd]

I blame lev. No wait, I blame the parents. Games and movies just draw the attention from where the true blame lies. Those kids were nuts, not Carmack's fault that they played his game.

dave

[Queen Of The Felines]

Doom is as responsible for Columbine as much as Marilyn Manson and "The Matrix" are.

In other words, not at all.

Kristine

[moycon]

Sick fucks with lack of respect for human life is what's responsible for Columbine.

[geelw]

absolutely not! that's like saying playboy is responsible for any sort of sex crime. the mental state of those kids (and anyone else who goes around shooting people for no reason) was f*#ked before they sat in front of that computer screen.

if this had happened 30 years ago, would people be blaming gunsmoke reruns? i don't think so. then again, the parents of the shooters didn't even have much of a clue as to what was going on in their own houses- a bad idea if you have kids and never look in their room or have a decent conversation every now and then, i say...=^P

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

Doom had nothing to do with Columbine. Doom has nothing to do with the DC area sniper. In both cases, and any others you care to name, you have people who clearly slipped between the fingers of the half-assed travesty that passes for our country's mental health system, and whatever other support systems they had (friends, parents, a conscience) either kicked in too late or, in the Columbine kids' case, not at all.

On the other hand, I used to play Pac-Man all the time when I was young, and now I'm just a wee bit overweight, so maybe there's something to it...'cause I know that all those quarter pounders weren't responsible.

[lionforce]

I just bought Doom for the GBA, awesome little port, Wolfenstein is next, any questions :wink:

[kainemaxwell]

Doom and video game shave nothing to do with recent happenings. The government and media, in their great wisdom need something to use as a scapegoat, so they pick video games and what happens, people belive it and rally behind people like Liberman and we get stuck with ratings systems and people condemning video games.

[YoshiM]

Yep, everyone in the US of A is innocent. It's everything else that's to blame.

"It just COULDN'T be little Johnny, my baby would NEVER do anything like that on his own. He was influenced, that must be it. I mean, I saw him moping about for months, reading through a book called the Anarchist's Cookbook (I hope he makes us a meal from one of those recipes) and never coming out of his room. He DID ask me to get him some gasoline, soap, and Bisquick so maybe he's making a special project for Home Ec. What a special boy."

Um, ahem.

The ultimate blame falls on the people who pull the trigger. It's the simple thing that we've all been taught (or at least HOPE we were taught) from day 1: Right and Wrong.

[kainemaxwell]

It's the people themselves who do this who's to blame.

[punkoffgirl]

Sure that ONE game is to blame! Didn't you know about the subliminal messages? The kids were BRAINWASHED, I tell you
I can't ever understand how people have to tie the "blame" to ONE thing. ONE thing, video game or otherwise, is NOT going to take little Johnny-go-lucky over to the "darkside" in one giant leap.

[Kroogah]

David Cross said it quite well:

"Can someone remind me....um....what violent video games did Hitler play?"

[Arcade Antics]

Psychos are responsible for the massacre, not video games.

Seanbaby also put it quite well last year...

"The main game targeted by the lawsuit is Doom, where a space marine fights his way through hell. DeCamp claims it "is purely, 100 percent taken from the military and transferred over to the private sector."

If by "transferred over to the private sector," he means "transferred over to an alternate flaming dimension on a computer," then he's purely, 100 percent right. According to my dictionary, however; this is definition is not correct. Another misconception DeCamp had was about the exactitude of the game's representation of the military. The military kills communists and oil tycoons, not doomsday cyclopses. There are several other differences he missed such as how one is make-believe, but law school must take up all the time the rest of us use to not be dumbasses." (emphasis added)

[ventrra]

I can say, for myself, that I was playing Doom before any of this happend and I haven't shot anyone. I suspect that many of the people on this message board can say the same. I f video games REALLY made people crazy and go around killing people, then I think that I should have been put away a LONG time ago.

[slapdash]

haha i think not,going to school everyday being beaten up,getting rocks thrown at you as you leave school,going to the principal and them doing nothin,getting turned down by the marines,having your girl friend dump you and doom caused someone to shoot these ppl up?

I remember reading an article written a couple months or so after Columbine that talked about what a soulless place the "strip-mall hell" of the area was, and how that leads to disenfranchisement etc... It was a pretty good article actually; wish I had the URL.

The point is that everything in your environment can affect you, but rather than blame Doom, why not ask what drove them to stay in their rooms playing Doom in the first place. Even many of us might have to admit that we are or were socially awkard and maybe that's why we were playing games instead of going to dances or hanging out at the old malt shop (heh).

But the fact that so many people can play games and not kill people indicates that even if Doom contributed to their particular madness in some way, there's no way you can actually blame it alone. That is sheer idiocy. I recognize that it is an attempt for an easy answer which many people are going to want, but there are no easy answers to something like this, so don't be fooled into taking it, or you've accepted idiocy rather than rationality.

[MankeyMan]

The only institution to blame for shootings is the government. Would there have been Columbine if these kids would've had such a hard time to get guns? I think not.
The most recent tragic shootings in Britain where in '96 when a psycho walked into a school in Dunblane and shot 6 kids, pretty soon guns were banned. Nothing like that has happened since.
Videogames weren't blamed then, they shouldn't be blamed now.

I doubt the DC sniper would have such easy access to weapons either, and you can go on about how its your constititution and me being a socialist all you want, it doesn't change a thing.

[congobongo]

Did you really need to ask that question to this board? Many things contributed to it. First and foremost ignorant kids disconnected from reality. Secondly, more guns than people. I know, I know, guns don't kill people; people do. Well by the same token, nukes don't kill people; people do so who cares how many nukes other countries have as long as everybody's happy right? uh, ya.

[Achika]

Yes I did have to ask that question. Who knows? Someone here might think it caused the incident. Like I said, I needed this for a paper, what better place to ask than here? I needed to ask REAL gamers as stated before, not the 'little-to-moderate' gamers that the 6 o clock news interviewed.

[Achika]

ugg....nm

[Captain Wrong]

Doom is not responsible, people are. To suggest otherwise begs the question "since Doom was a hugely popular game, why haven't more Columbine style shootings happened?" Reason: there is NO connection. Case closed.

[dsullo]

Being the father of two young children. I would have to say that parent's are responsiible for modeling and developing their children. The Columbine parents as well as many others today have no idea what goes on in their childs lives. Those kids planned the attacks and stored their weapons in their parents homes.

I see too many parents simply not parenting. They are too busy to spend time with their children. They would rather let a Nanny raise the child or better yet feel the school systems are responsible for raising children. If the parents took interest in their children they would of known what was going on in their house. Including what movies they watched, games (DOOM) they played, and plans they were making to kill innocent classmates.

Doom is not responsible.

Now I have to go , my 1 1/2 year old is sticking a metal object into an outlet. Just kidding , the kids are asleep!

[ManekiNeko]

"I doubt the DC sniper would have such easy access to weapons either, and you can go on about how its your constititution and me being a socialist all you want, it doesn't change a thing."

Here's something else that won't change... the huge amount of guns already in this country. You might as well ban blades of grass. Personally, I don't like guns, but revoking the second amendment isn't going to do us any good, since there are so many of them. If a criminal wants a gun, they'll get one, even if they shouldn't have one.
Even if you could make all the guns in the United States vanish with the snap of your fingers, it still doesn't change that the Columbine students were angry and desperate for revenge. They were going to get it any way they could, guns or no guns. Klebold and Harris could have taken the principal hostage with a knife, or planted bombs around the structural weak points of the school and detonated them once everyone had arrived. Removing guns from the equation would not necessarily have saved anyone. Guns certainly make killing easier, but murder is not impossible without them.

JR

[Aswald]

The entire "controversy" is really an incredible example of out-and-out hypocrisy.

I'm 36 years of age. So, I was around during the Reagan years, and fully aware of what was going on. During that time, there was a little something called "Rambo: First Blood, Part Two." This was the most violent and bloodiest movie made (at the time). Our own President Reagan praised it, mentioning that NOW he knew how to deal with the "communists" (i.e. the Soviets). It has also been recently proven that many of those anti-Arab movies were made with the "assistance" of the U.S. Government, most of them EXTREMELY violent.

Then came the ugly 1990s. After the election of Bill Clinton, various right-wing talk show hosts, Rush Limbaugh being a perfect example, launched into their endless tirades about the "evils of the govenment," often supporting the insane rhetoric of those militia groups.

Then Timothy McVeigh committed what was the worst act of domestic terrorism, until 2001.

You'll notice that the very people who condemn "Doom" are the very ones who insist that there wasn't any sort of connection. You'll notice that all of the violent, right-wing movies (Timothy McVeigh and the militias loved "Red Dawn") in no way made people violent, yet, somehow, Doom does. And of course, the worship of guns in real life also isn't a factor, but a make-believe video game world with (often) make-believe weapons and monsters is. And don't even get me started on the Dungeons and Dragons "controversy."

The people who blame Doom are a bunch of vicious, hypocritical conservatives, along with pathetic liberals who are trying to hide their own role in the social breakdown, with both sides trying to LOOK like thy're "doing something." It's come to this. Pathetic.

[kainemaxwell]

Those who blame DOOM and video games are jus tlooking for something that cannot defend itself to lay the blame on instead of taking a look at themselves...and that's sad.