One of our favourite sites around the office is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Like a cheese and bacon roll, we consider part of the daily breakfast ritual. It's often hilarious take on gaming is a real breath of fresh air; however, every now and then, the sites kicks up something that makes for essential reading.
Today, that's RPS' take on the Anders Brevik trial, and the roll that gaming played in his preparation. Or, more accurately, the roll that the mainstream press would have us believe it played.
Yet again I feel compelled to repeat the refrain: were gaming genuinely a dangerous factor, something that could cause someone to become a murderer, we would want to know about it, and you can damn well believe we’d be reporting on it. What more serious matter could there be for gamers than to be aware of this? This is not about defending gaming, but about defending truth, and truth in reporting. And it is woefully lacking in the so-called respectable papers over this matter. The headline in the Times bears no relation to what is actually said by Breivik. It obfuscates the year he spent playing WoW to give himself a rest with the couple of months he spent with Modern Warfare, and it ignores the huge amount of time he spent actually practising firing real weapons. While taking massive amounts of steroids.
Give it a read, guys. And if any of you have got workmates, chums, or anyone else taking in this crap, pass the article on.
