Columbine School Massacre

Columbine School Massacre

On the 20^th April 1999, two 18 year old High School students called Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed 13 fellow teachers and students and injured 24 more teachers and students.

The purpose of my case study is to research a well-known legal case where the use of violent video games was to blame for violence and subsequently deaths. I am going to weigh up whether is was nature or nurture that led these teens to murder.  

The case against the media is argued because of the evidence to suggest that both Harris and Klebold were fans of violent video games and would play these for hours on end. These included the games Doom which is a science-fiction horror game where the player is a first-person shooter. According to my research, some people consider this game ‘one of the most significant and influential titles in the video game industry’ because it caused a huge rise in the popularity of first-person shooter games. The Hypodermic needle model theory would suggest that the boys were so passive to the game that they could not distinguish reality and hyper reality. Although the age rating of the violent games may have been 18, the age of the boys, they were probably exposed to this type of virtual violent culture for years before and therefore had become desensitized to the violence as it may have become something considered ‘normal’ to them.This suggests that people react differently when interacting with hyper-reality, if the games that they played were reality then they would probably react differently. 

Another piece of evidence that I have taken from the website www.acolumbinesite.com  suggests that the boys were influenced by the media is their will to distribute content such as videos and content online. Harris had a website and blog in which he shared content in regards to making bombs, thoughts about friends and family, death threats about an old peer and rage filled rants about life. He was said to have an active online presence. 

It is also thought to be the content that he was able to access online that drove him deeper into his rages and filled him with knowledge that would ultimately fuel his actions on 20^th April 1999.

  A screen shot of the video game Doom.

In 2001, the families of victims of the shootings filed a lawsuit against 25 different video game makers including Sony America, AOL and Timewarner for $5 Million in damages caused by the effect of the video games on Harris and Klebold to lead them to carry out their horrendous killing spree. The Lawyer acting on behalf of the families said that the aim of the lawsuit is to make the video game creators aware of the effect that their product can have on vulnerable minds and young people who become involved with their content.

This lawsuit case was unsuccessful. I think that this was because the boys were aged 18 meaning that in terms of video game ratings, they were adults. Therefore, the way that they choose to interpret the content of the video games is down to them and not the problem of the video game maker.

I think that the evidence presented is strong enough to suggest that video games and the violent culture associated with the games that these boys were playing in particular were a cause of why Harris and Klebold became so hateful and violent that they could carry out the crime that they did. However the evidence was not strong enough and so there was no proof that this was the real cause because the boys never referenced to the games in any of the evidence where they planned the attack.

Another case that is against the media in this case is that Harris was described to have an active online presence. He had a website and also a blog where he and Klebold would share content like videos, hateful thoughts, instructions on how to make a bomb and also threats towards a former friend of theirs. I think that the way that Harris had the ability to access and produce such content is also a factor fuelling him to becoming a hateful person who would kill people is another huge factor in the case of the Columbine School Massacre.

Harris and Klebold were bullied at school by fellow students, although Harris' website had few visitors, it was a place under his control where he could express his own views. This became dangerous because he is a person who becomes very obsessed with technology, as described when I spoke about his video game use. He cannot tell reality from hyper reality and this becomes an issue in everyday life.

A theory that I can link to the example of Harris’ use, or misuse, of the web is The Tragedy of the commons. This is where an individual abuses their power of the commons and creates and distributes anti-social content purely because they have the power to. Something that was done to distribute harmful content by Harris and Klebold was that they posted a home video, known as ‘The Basement Tape’ of themselves online 30 minutes before the attack took place. In the video, the boys are talking about how they acquired their weapons, killing classmates and they also reveal in the video how they had been planning the attack for 8 months.

I don't think that this case changed the way that the media acts in regards to content in violent video games because there are even cases up to today where people are said to have had their imaginations fuelled by the content in violent video games. As shown by the result in the court case, this was not taken as a relevant or serious case by the judge at the time. Also, in 2005 a game developer named Danny Ledonne created a role-playing video game named 'Super Columbine Massacre' in which the players would take up the roles of the two teenage gunmen and gain points by shooting and killing students and teachers in a virtual school with a similar layout to the Columbine High School. Although the reactions to the initial release of the game were primarily negative, the game is still easily acessable and simple to download and install onto a computer now and the page that allows you to do this is the first result shown on google results when the name is searched. 

As a result of the backlash and negative feedback that Ledonne received, in 2008 he produced a documentary film called 'Playing Columbine.' In the documentary he had explored the controversy of the video game he had created and he also explored how video games are used for artistic expression. Ledonne argues in his documentary how his video game is not intended for the naive minds of children who are more likely to misinterpret violent content. As far as my research shows, I cannot find an age rating for this game. However, in several forums it is discussed that if you put aside the background information and the story of the Columbine High School Massacre, the game would realistically only be rated a 15. 

The internet has become a lot more censored over the past five years than it ever was before. Harmful content is a lot harder for people to access unless they really want to search for it, meaning that for young and vulnerable people it is a lot harder for them to access harmful content like Harris had. Censorship on media products like this is important because some people are more sensitive and affected by content differently and their actions can be based upon what they have been able to access and how they interpret it.