Stop the presses! Aaron Alexis played video games, including “violent” ones. Indeed, the man who killed a dozen people at the U.S. Navy Yard on Monday was in fact a male under the age of sixty. And while the UK Daily Mirror is hardly what I’d call a “source,” I’ve heard this same coverage on NPR – coverage focusing on the Alexian love of video games rather than the voices in his head, voices so bad he called the police and switched hotels to dodge them; rather than the diagnosed PTSD brought on by participating in the 9/11 cleanup; rather than the history of arrests for gun crimes; rather than the flood of reports indicating that Alexis had numerous social problems and that many “close” to him feared the man well before the attack.
So IndustryGamers and others are reporting a new controversy surrounding Infinity Ward’s upcoming Modern Warfare 2: it looks like, for at least a small portion of the game, you will play as a terrorist, with the objective of gunning down civilians in an airport terminal. It’s sparked quite the little inferno. I’m okay with this, and I’ll tell you why. But I do worry about the mainstream kneejerks… and I’ll tell you why.