TIME magazine: “Norway Killer Played World of Warcraft, Which Probably Means Nothing At All”
Was Breivik Influenced by Violent Video Games? [Time Magazine]
Bravo TIME. Seriously. Read, but if you really must have one:
TL;DR -
When horrible things happen, we look for simple answers, for easy rationalizations — ways to essentially say, Oh, this is why so-and-so did such-and-such. We want the “why” right now, when the spotlight’s on. We want the dots connected, and we want them to correspond with our suspicions about new, ultra-popular activities, like dancing to jazz music in the 1920s, or reading comics in the 1950s, or listening to rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s, or playing Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s — or playing violent video games pretty much from the 1990s on.
Reality, of course, is far more complex, and the answers we’re after require patience and careful research. Preliminary studies that attempted to link violent video games with increased aggressive behavior failed to control for critical variables like family history, mental-health issues and gender (they also failed to contextualize increased aggression levels, e.g., more than aggression upticks caused by playing football, say, or drinking a cup of coffee?).
