‘Active Shooter’ video game lets players shoot up a school. Parkland parents are horrified.
The gunman, armed with an AK-47, is in a second-story window of a school, prepared to make a final, bloody stand.
SWAT officers rush into an entrance below. Two are struck by gunfire and are instantly killed. As fleeing civilians prepare to breach a door, the gunman turns his rifle toward them and shoots one in the back.
A digital counter keeps a helpful tally: CIV KILLED: 1. COPS KILLED: 2.
If your PC meets the minimum requirements, and you have a few dollars, you, too, can be a school shooter — in pixelated form.
Game company Valve is set to release “Active Shooter” on its online platform Steam on June 6 and charge between $5 and $10. The game, touted as a police-response simulator, will allow players to move through a school as either a SWAT officer or a gunman terrorizing civilians and police.
Concerns about the link between violent video games and real acts of violence have percolated for decades. But scrutiny has been renewed in the wake of school shootings in Florida and Texas, drawing responses from President Trump and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R). They have said simulated violence inspires killers.
“Active Shooter,” then, is the game of the moment, at the nexus of a heated public debate about why and how gunmen storm public places to indiscriminately kill, although recent research has found that school shooters actually tend to lack interest in violent games.
The game, although not yet released, has touched off strong reactions from parents of students killed in a mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14.
“It’s disgusting that Valve Corp. is trying to profit from the glamorization of tragedies affecting our schools across the country,” Ryan Petty, father of slain 14-year-old Alaina, wrote on Facebook. “Keeping our kids safe is a real issue affecting our communities and is in no way a ‘game.’”
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was among the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, blasted the game.
“I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life. This game may be one of the worst,” he wrote on Twitter.
In follow-up messages, he asked his followers to call Valve chief executive Gabe Newell to demand that the game be removed from his platform.
Valve and the game’s developer, Revived, did not respond to a request for comment. The publisher, Acid, could not be reached.
Amid the intense criticism, Acid said on its Steam page Thursday that the developer considered removing the option to play as the mass shooter and had consulted Valve for advice. It also said that child characters won’t be used in the game.
The Parkland massacre and a May 18 shooting that left 10 people dead at Santa Fe High School outside Houston have reignited calls for restricted access to violent games for minors as Trump, Patrick and others decry their social role among teenagers.
Trump said in the wake of the Parkland shooting that violent games are “shaping young people’s thoughts.” After the Santa Fe shooting, Patrick cited everything from too many doors in schools to violent video games as factors that contribute to mass killings.
“We have incredible, heinous violence as a game, two hours a day in front of their eyes. And we stand here and we wonder why this happens to certain students,” Patrick said.
But recent research has overturned the popular consensus that mass killers are fueled, inspired or otherwise desensitized to violence by playing violent games.
And even more surprising to some, data points to school shooters as being less interested in violent video games than most of their adolescent male peers.
An analysis of 10 school shooters between 2005 and 2012, including the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook gunmen, showed that only two played violent video games with any regularity.
That is much lower than the 70 percent of male high school students who show interest in those types of games, said Patrick Markey, a Villanova University psychology professor and co-author of “Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.”
While there is no clear reason that there is a disparity between the groups, researchers say video games are so culturally ingrained that avoiding the often-communal ritual of playing games with friends can point to the antisocial behavior sometimes associated with killers.
“Kids who are psychologically healthy tend to do things their peers do,” Markey told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “It’s a sign of health and normal for kids to play violent video games whether parents like it or not.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-school/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.95fc6c70d97b
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