A man who killed two girls and wounded seven other people at a teen club in Portland, Oregon on Saturday night, was a player of two popular first-person shooter games, according to a report in The Oregonian.
24-year-old Erik Salvador Ayala, who remains in critical condition after shooting himself in the head, is described as quiet with an interest in video games and computers. Acquaintances said that had not previously exhibited violent tendencies and they were unaware that he owned a gun. From the report:
One of the things that brought him joy was playing video games such as "Resistance: Fall of Man," in which an Army Ranger fights an alien race that is trying to take over the world, or "Left 4 Dead," where the object is to slay fighting zombies.
Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer told the press:
At first blush this incident appears to be a random act of violence of the kind that makes you despair for America.
Comments
Re: Portland Shooter Described as Fan of Left 4 Dead,
In other news, since I've been a little boy I've been sneaking in on my dad's computer and playing games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for years...and then moved on to playing Counter Strike and various other FPS's and I have yet to actually kill a living thing (okay okay I confess I killed at least 1000+ Mosquitos and 30+ Fly's...but they had it coming!!!!)
Re: Portland Shooter Described as Fan of Left 4 Dead,
"*sigh* i honestly dont know why people bring up the fact that he played FPS games as some kind of significant thing!
In other news, he had brown hair, his favourite color is blue, and he liked italian food..."
Yeah. The thing is, more and more of these shooters are going to be gamers because gaming is becoming more and more the norm in today's culture. The problem is, the folks who decide what gets reported tend to be middle-aged and out-of-touch with computers and gaming - they are people who videogame culture has yet to reach, so they see gaming as a weird aberration when in fact it's they who represent the aberration.
Give it twenty or thirty years. When grandpa (that will be me in 30 years) is playing on the Xbox we'll be over this anti-videogame nonsense. Until then we just have to stick it out and roll our eyes when this sort of silliness gets rolled out.