Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.
b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.
c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.
It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.
The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.
So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.
The general point though is if 99.999% of people doing a thing are fine, but one wacko who likes the thing does a shooting, the evidence for causal connection between the thing and the wackos impetus is beneath the noise floor.
If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure. Welcome to monkey planet.
There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.
A subset of the population will always be murderous and delusional about something. Just a fact of biology that not everyone is physically or mentally fit.
Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that their weakest links are driven to act on their worst impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.
I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
Nitpicking:
a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.
b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.
c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.
It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.
The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.
So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.
The general point though is if 99.999% of people doing a thing are fine, but one wacko who likes the thing does a shooting, the evidence for causal connection between the thing and the wackos impetus is beneath the noise floor.
If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure. Welcome to monkey planet.
There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.
A subset of the population will always be murderous and delusional about something. Just a fact of biology that not everyone is physically or mentally fit.
Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that their weakest links are driven to act on their worst impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.
I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.
I didn't realize ideologically-driven murder was an internet phenomenon