The gaming messageboard postings of Jared Lee Loughner

"Gaming appears to have been an important part of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner's life." WSJ has more. In the 7th grade, he and a pal began playing the online action roleplaying games Starcraft and Diablo, then moved on to the text-based "Earth: 2025," now apparently called "Earth Empires." No surprises here: the postings he made to gaming messageboards are rapey, hatey, creepy.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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The Snowden Principle

redstarr

When stuff like this happens, that they turn up bunches of crazy internet posts from people who turn out to be actually crazy folks who end up being violent in the real world, it always makes me wonder about how much attention we’re paying to posts on the internet. People were reading those posts and never took any action or reported anything. I probably wouldn’t have either. I’d have probably guessed drugged out or just trolling and just ignored them. It makes me wonder how many folks in life we’ve all just dismissed as trolls and moved on that actually were reaching out for real helpful attention rather just trying for plain old attention.
laukarlueng

If it is wrong for Sarah Palin to have bullseyes on a map, then it’s wrong to have video games with assassinations in them. You can’t have it both ways BB.
- Anonymous
  
  @ laukarlueng
  
  this thread is probably dead but i will answer nevertheless.
  
  As far as your statement goes, yes and no. On one hand there is violent imagery in both cases and one could therefore equate them.
  
  However, the infamous map (I doubt there’s a direct connection to it, but for the sake of argument I will use it as an example) targets a specific real individual and was created/presented by a figure with real political influence.
  
  Video games may also be violent but I have yet to find any game that even hints towards violence to an actual person. This might seem like a relatively minor distinction but I think it matters in this case.
scolbath

Here we go again. Video games lead directly to violence argument in 3… 2…
- Xeni Jardin
  
  So far, that argument is not being made, by WSJ or others.
  - kmoser
    
    Okay, if video games didn’t lead to the violence, why are they being mentioned at all? Might as well obsess over what type of soda he drank for all it matters.
    - petroleum
      
      Let’s not kid ourselves: he drank copious amounts of Mountain Dew, Monster and Coke a Cola. These are the staple liquids of a PC gamer diet.
- mdh
  
  You know, your dismissal is a defense mechanism, not an actual defense.
- Captain Obviousness
  
  Video games leading to violence, and the “vitriolic rhetoric” in the media leading to violence are equally non-sequiturs. Correlation does not equal causation. This guy was a complete nut. He did not kill those people because of video games or because BS political news is vitriolic. He killed those people because he is batsh!t insane.
  - ablebody
    
    “He killed those people because he is batsh!t insane.”
    Also a correlation but not causation.
    He killed those people because he fired bullets at them with a gun.
    - Brainspore
      
      That’s more along the lines of “methodology” than “causation.”
Yamara

Violent video games lead right to violent tabletop games, and back again.

I see it at every convention.
MrJM

BREAKING: White male between the ages of 14 and 40 plays video games.
- snakedart
  
  The point being made is that games were an outlet for his violent and hate-filled thinking, not that they led to said thinking. Calm down, grow up, RTFA.
  - MrJM
    
    Who said causation was attributed in the article? RTFCAH.
Anonymous

Everyone knows he was playing the super-violent, ultra-realistic videogame/murder trainer Doom at the time of the murders.
- maddoxmisery
  
  If Doom is a murder trainer the only thing it teaches is how to murder piles of boxes resembling a creature. My mum was none too happy when helping her move that I kicked e shit out of her boxes of good china.
  
  Im sure you are being sarcastic. I hope at least.
timdog

But Sarah Palin says that only the individual is responsible for their own actions. So we should be able to get off the video game / heavy metal causes violence argument, right?!
WellAwarrior

Might work better to try thinking of influences on this young person as a cocktail of influences, incl.
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES AND POSSIBLY/PROBABLY ALSO TV
Psychiatric meds such as antidepressants and sleepers, which have effects of increasing homicidal/suicidal tendencies and amnesic sleepwalking type state for several hours while still looking like awake
Diet of basically pretend food incl. MOuntain Dew which contains bromide, which when taken in large amounts, can cause symptoms which perfectly imitate schizophrenia until cleared from system after one stops drinking it
Illegal drugs thrown into the mix, apparently
Being an outcast on nearly all levels of his life
Being basically psychopathic, which would mean its everyone else’s fault in your perception for your difficult life
Repeated rejection by others
Easy access to guns or at least his Glock
Desperate desire to be accepted by others, or at the very least noticed/”seen” through online reaching out, etc.
People very afraid of him, apparently. Wonder if even the cop who stopped him at 7 AM, 1 hr. prior to shooting rampage, for going thru red light might have been a little afraid of him.
And likely alot more.
To look at any one as causal factor to be “blamed” here probably short sighted.
Deeply dangerous and tragic combination of factors for not only him but many people naively using any combination of these ingredients. Especially if you’re so sure they’re not and haven’t done your homework on this.
Shithead

What video game did Booth play that made him uncontrollably shoot Lincoln?
- petroleum
  
  Booth played North & South on the original, original NES.
EarthtoGeoff

“Message boards appear to have been an important part of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s life.”

Fixt
- delt664
  
  “Message boards appear to have been an important part of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner’s life.”
  
  Fixt
  
  THIS
franko

i’m just here to second what MrJM said. he’s fully in the demographic of video games, and he played the most popular ones. not news at all, but you just KNOW that the media’s gonna try to link them. /SIGH
Owen

Diablo is indeed an action RPG, but Starcraft is a real-time strategy game.

The article makes little mention of the games themselves, though; almost the entire article is about his postings on various message boards. Jack Thompson would be disappointed.
MadRat

Test question:
You roll your eyes and with an exasperated sigh think, “The problem isn’t ___ making people violent, the REAL threat to America is ___ making people violent!”
A. “video games/movies/etc.”, “rhetoric”
B. “rhetoric”, “video games/movies/etc.”

Test results:
You have feelings of apprehension and/or moral outrage. You believe sooner or later someone is going to lose control, causing terrible harm and someone should do something to stop it. You validate your feelings with scientific studies proving an increase in aggression and use a tragic killing spree as an example. You consider facts and statistics that disprove your view as either wrong or distorted. You trust commentators who share your view. You consider those who choose the other answer to be idiotic.

Recommendations:
Note that the answers differ only in the word order and the test results are the same. This is because, other than the wording, both groups are feeling and doing the same things. All the things they do that annoys you, you’re doing as well. When someone uses these arguments, you know they’re wrong. You’re wrong too, in the same way and for the same reasons. So, no matter which side you’re on, when someone takes the opposite view on this issue, remember how you’re feeling, they’re feeling the same thing.

If you agree with Captain Obviousness, you’re exempt.
Anonymous

Owen beat me to it. :P
kc0bbq

And I don’t think lack of access to a gun would have changed anything in this case. He decided he was going to kill a bunch of people. If he had decided to go amok in the same location with a car there would have been a similar outcome. He might not have been able to get to the Representative, or maybe he still would have. Maybe it would have been a different list of names or even a longer one. Don’t have to reload a car. Still would have been full of names.

He’s broken. Maybe he can be fixed. Maybe he can be made to understand the impact of what he did from a more sane perspective.

It’s hard to even gauge how preventable this really was.
scolbath

Xeni: Just wait for it…

All: I was not making the claim that A causes B. I am not the claimant here! I was simply stating that people making that claim are about to come flying out of the woodwork. It’s simply the latest in a long line of “media is evil” claims – in the 80s, it was Dungeons and Dragons; in the 50s, comic books and rock and roll.
Jack

Video games have an impact. I have a bag of white chocolate chips in my apartment & can barely resist the urge to eat them all. Especially in a row. I can only stop when I eat a big grapefruit in a corner.
Anonymous

No one is saying his playing of video gaming had anything to do with anything. The title of Xeni’s post: “The gaming messageboard posts of…” The informative info here is the compilation of his comments made on the gaming message boards.

Read the WSJ article. He posted things such as “Does anyone have aggression 24/7?” and “I bet your hungry….Because i know how to cut a body open and eat you for more then a week. ;-)”

And ranted about rape, saying women in college enjoyed being raped: “There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape.”

Taken in their entirety, these things are very disturbing.
jackdavinci

OK Xeni. I know I harp on this from time to time. But I’ve never gotten a coherent response, and it still baffles me.

Why can’t you give every entry on BB a title? Seriously! As a hard core reader, I know that if I encounter an article with a mysterious red arrow instead of a real title, I can click on the comment link to achieve the same goal as clicking on the title. But…

Won’t you think of the average reader? Having seemingly arbitrary formatting difference between titled articles and red arrowed article is confusing.

And even for the hardcore reader it’s confusing. Sure we can figure it out. But upon first glance the ineffectual red arrow just doesn’t do the job right the way a bolded title does of say “hey! here’s a new entry!”. Instead it kind of says “hey maybe I might be a part of the previous entry actually, unless you are super observant”.

And even if we can adapt to the bizarre dichotomy, well, anyone with any sort of curiosity have to be driven crazy wondering what makes one entry worthy of a title and another not. There does seem to be some vague correlation to the amount of effort in describing a link. But almost all BB entries boil down to a link. The amount of original text that accompanies it – in terms of drawing a line between titles and red arrowed entires, well – it seems to be arbitrary or at least mysterious to me.

So tell me this. Is there ANY justification for not just giving every entry a title?

I’m seriously stymied. This isn’t an attempt at trolling. I hope beyond hope that you will respond with a coherent policy or standardize titles.
Donald Petersen

That article just made me unutterably sad. Dozens of lives have been either ended or irrevocably changed at the hands of this guy, and as tragic and wasteful as all that is, Loughner’s life is a tragic waste, too. I’ve known a couple of guys like that, and I sometimes wonder if they managed to keep their shit together, or if they ended up with a rifle on top of the clock tower… or at the end of a rope swinging from a basement eave.

The alienation I felt when I was young was bad enough, but I eventually managed to get laid, hold down jobs, behave reasonably respectably, and my wildest homicidal fantasies were limited to my fiction, never approaching any real-life execution.

But from junior high on, I knew guys who felt the alienation more, and who maybe had less tolerance for it. Some of those guys, hell, I don’t know to this day if they ever got laid or got real jobs. The only rewards they typically got were to be found in fantasy, science fiction, roleplaying, heavy metal… all that pariah-outcast-alienated-teenager crap that I still love, myself, though I have a robust Real Life besides.

For a couple of those guys, sometimes I felt like I was the only friend they had… and eventually I ditched them too when their bent psyches and plaintive tonedeafness-to-social-cues became too much for me to bear hanging around. I can’t really blame Society At Large or even a smaller-scale slice of Other People for letting these socially spastic misanthropes down, when I couldn’t even bring myself to stay friends with them. But goddamn, the whole thing makes me sad. The whole nation, indeed the whole world (including Fidel Castro!), grieves for the victims of this tragedy, and I do too. But to an extent, I grieve for guys like Loughlin, who didn’t have to become the utter waste of space that he has become.

I don’t blame the other gamers on the forums. I don’t blame his parents. I don’t blame his teachers, or the McDonalds managers who wouldn’t hire him, or the girls who wouldn’t date him, or the makers of his favorite videogames, or the people that sold him his first gun, and I don’t even blame Society for what he became.

The whole thing was avoidable, but Jesus, who could have avoided it? Even an army of highly-trained and well-funded counselors couldn’t reach all of these guys, and for some of them, it’s just a matter of time.
- gwailo_joe
  
  Good post. I knew some of those people (hell, I WAS those people. . .)
  
  heavy metal? check. fantasy literature? check. (A, ahem)D&D? check. black trench coats and weird haircuts? check. butterfly knives and ninja stars, switchblades and ghurka kukris. . .sigh, check.
  
  But no guns thank God.
  
  Teenage male angst is a real thing, and to be outcast and ‘other’ can lead some folks down a dark path. I believe (almost) all of my crew in those days grew out of it and obtained jobs and partners and Real Lives. But one guy. . .I don’t think so.
  
  At one point we had a ‘project’; to imagine defending the school from armed attackers. With a map of the campus. ‘let’s place the machine gun up there and don’t forget to sandbag the windows!’ ‘The soccer field will be perfect for pitfalls and mines!’ This was pre-Columbine by a few years, so no harm, no foul. But Lordy, how dumb. But it was a dumb time.
  
  Loughner is mad. I only needed to view two of his videos to know for sure. This is a seriously confused/deranged human being. But there will always be people like that. And Pandoras box has been open for some time now: you will never heal all the freaks or ban all the guns. . .
  
  It’s just a shame.
- Snig
  
  I here you brother. I worry about those guys/girls too, and hope they make there way to a good space.
  
  A British friend suggested that there the Nanny State would have reached out more.
  
  As far as access to a gun vs. a car, it partly comes down to imagery. I would guess there’s a lot more fantasies associated with killing people associated with guns than vehicular homicide. Does it matter? Since the people involved are letting fantasy dominate reality, it might matter. I personally think the more dangerous armaments should be heavily decorated with a “Hello Kitty” motif to keep them out of the hands of those who overly romanticize the machismo of shooting people.