When Fantasy and Reality Collide

Video games have become common hobbies for young children, replacing reading, sports, and other activities. With the rapid rise and innovation of technology, video games today are simply incredible. Whole new worlds are created and players become lost in these virtual worlds. Time spent playing video games daily in 1999 was an average of 26 minutes, compared to 73 minutes in 2009, and the trend continues to rise. Delwiche argues that these video games "can play a role in changing attitude and behavior."

There have been certain cases in which video games have affected the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individuals in a tragic way. The first of these cases comes from the famous Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Eric Harris an Dylan Klebold killed 13 other students and injured many more in this infamous incident. It was discovered that Eric Harris was an avid player of the video game Doom. The people that played this game with Harris, claimed that he had created a level based on the floor plans of the high school and the characters would run around with guns and unlimited ammunition, while other simulated characters could not fight back. 

Cover for the game Doom.

While it is impossible to claim that this was the direct cause of the school shooting, it can be seen that this violent video game did affect the behavior and attitudes of these two teenagers. Playing this game in such a violent way seems to have caused the young men to become more violent and aggressive in real life. This is the danger in video games, the line between the virtual world and the real world can get lost for some users. Some video gamers get so caught up in these worlds that it translates over into their real lives. 

Another case of these two different worlds colliding, comes in yet another tragic form. In 2011, Anders Breivik successfully executed both a bombing of a government building a mass shooting. During these events Breivik took the lives of 8 people in the bombing, while also killing 69 people in his shooting. To prepare for this shooting, Breivik claimed to use the video game series Call of Duty to train himself with a rifle. 

Breivik like Harris and Klebold used these violent video games to carry out his own personal agenda. Again, it is hard to place liability on the video game, but the mechanisms of effectiveness as Delwich argues are prevalent in these cases. To understand how much Breivik enjoyed playing video games, upon his arrest, Breivik actually demanded that he get a Playstation 2 in his jail cell. And recently just demanded that his old system get replaced with the new Playstation 3. 

In both these cases, video games did play a role in shaping the actions and behaviors of these people. Delwich argues the four I's of immersion, intense engagement, identification and interactivity. I think that it can be seen that video games can affect and change the behaviors of some players. While the majority of video gamers would never perform such acts, there are some people that lose sight of the real world and the virtual world, and this is where the danger lies.