This week China's Health Ministry recognized Internet addiction as an official disorder. 

It didn't take long for a convicted murder to take notice and attempt to exploit the new policy.

As reported by the Shanghai Daily, 22-year-old Hu Ange, on Death Row for poisoning his parents, is claiming that his online gaming addiction made him criminally insane:

The [appeals] court heard [that] Hu was addicted to the online game Legend. His parents gave him 50,000 yuan (US$7,353) to support his seafood business in March 2007, but he spent it all on the online game. Legend is an online game where players can buy virtual weapons and equipment with real money.

The report said Hu bought 20 packs of tetramine on July 14, 2007, and poisoned his father Hu Ming the next morning. His father was saved after emergency treatment. Hu Ange then bought 45 more packs of tetramine on July 20 and mixed them with beef on July 24. Both his parents were poisoned after eating the beef at lunch. Hu Ange's mother asked him to call for help but he stayed in his room to play Legend, the report said.

The Times Online explains the Chinese government's assessment of those who suffer from Internet addiction:

According to Chinese estimates, about 10 per cent of young users suffer from addiction and of those about 70 per cent are male. Dr Tao says that the condition is often merely a symptom of deeper psychological problems. Almost all child addicts have behavioural problems, which are then aggravated by their addiction. Before they came to the internet, they may have turned to crime or drugs to cope with their feelings of alienation, he said. Some were suicidal.

The Daily Mail reports that a 13-year-old French boy is under arrest in Lyon, charged with committing arson against several cars.

A Lyon police spokesman told the newspaper:

He said he played the game for a few hours, then wanted to go out and what it felt like to burn out some cars. This kind of entertainment is clearly having a negative effect on some young people.

There's an obvious accuracy problem in the story, however. See if you can spot it:

The 13-year-old schoolboy used petrol to set light to three vehicles after playing on the violent GTA 4: Liberty City game on his home PC.
 

If you said, "Wait, the PC version of GTA IV doesn't even ship until November 21st in Europe," go to the head of the class.

GP: Thanks to reader NovaBlack for tipping us to this story in Shoutbox.

British tabloid The Sun has laid the blame for a string of sexual assaults at the feet of Grand Theft Auto.

Under the headline Sex Beast copied Grand Theft Auto, the newspaper spins the tale of 19-year-old Ryan Chinnery (displaying his bling at left). In true tablod style, The Sun's prose is lurid:

A TEEN sex beast attacked four women in an imitation of violent computer game Grand Theft Auto, a court heard yesterday.  Ryan Chinnery, 19, prowled streets in his car targeting females he thought were prostitutes after becoming obsessed with the video nasty...

 

And the court was told he may have been influenced by the virtual reality game, in which a character drives around on “missions” — including approaching prostitutes who can be beaten up. A copy of Grand Theft Auto was found at his home by police...

 

Prosecutor Eleanor Laws said Chinnery’s love of Grand Theft Auto “may go some way to explaining his attitude towards women”. She said: “Prostitutes in it can be subjected to violence. “There may be some connection with the defendant admitting spending a lot of time playing that game.”

The Edmonton Journal reports that a pair of Canadian teenagers have been barred from playing violent video games after they pleaded guilty to killing a family cat by placing it in a microwave.

The boys, now 16, were placed on probation for one year, must perform 100 hours of community service, will see a therapist, can't stay out later than 9 p.m. and must pay $250 in restitution. The grisly killing of the elderly cat named Princess followed a Christmas holiday break-in and vandalism rampage at a local home.

GP: Clearly, these are troubled kids. But what did video games have to do with it? Why the game ban? That's not so clear:

According to court ordered psychological asessments, video games were not found to have directly encouraged the boys' actions. But barring their access to such games was nonetheless a recommendation put forward in the assessments. It was also suggested that the teens' cellphone access be limited to work and calls to family. But youth court Judge Shauna Miller said that condition would have served no purpose.

 

Two more suspects have declined to plead guilty and have trials pending.

CTV has more on the original crime...

THANKS TO: GP reader Georg Zoeller for the tip!

An attorney not named Jack Thompson has loaned credence to the use of the  video games made me do it defense.

Writing for the Palm Beach Post, Terry Bosky dishes on the increasingly familiar defense tactic of blaming violent behavior of video games. Illinois attorney James Waller told Boesky:

The goal of the ‘video games’ defense is to both shift blame and to explain to a judge and jury why this good kid is suddenly acting like a terrorist. Portraying your client as the victim of outside forces... humanizes the client and shifts the culpability... my job is to present ANY theory to a jury that would explain why my client did the things he did...

 

[The games made me do it defense works on] an unsophisticated, typically older, somewhat more rural jury pool or judge. To an extent, the defendant is playing on the prejudices that these members of society already have towards video games...

 

The manufacturers do everything they can to make sure that [the games] are a household name... Restricting supply to create buzz, sensationalizing their own violence to the media, doing idiotic things like leaving the “Hot Coffee” code in the game…the jury knows that a lot of kids today are playing this Grand Theft Auto game and that it’s very violent or adult before we even walk into the courtroom.

Law Prof. Ashley Lipson agreed:

A good defense lawyer will blame everyone in sight, except of course the client - When he or she runs out of people to blame - it’s time to look around for objects. What could be better than a popular videogame?

Utah's KSL-5 reports that a 27-year-old man who led state police on a 100 MPH chase before causing a fiery accident said that such risky driving had always worked for him in video games.

Daniel Savino survived the crash with just a bad case of road rash but now faces a laundry list of criminal charges:

As for motive, Savino told troopers this was his own video game adventure.

 

"I don't know whether he was trying to act out a scene in a video game or what he was trying to do, but he said it always worked for him in video games," Roden said.

Over the past week there has been much written about accused Thai killer Polwat Chinno (at left, supposedly re-enacting his crime for investigators).

Police in Bangkok claim Chinno's alleged murder of a taxi driver was sparked by his playing of Grand Theft Auto.

On that score our attention was caught by this excerpt from yesterday's edition of The Telegraph: 

After the stabbing, [Chinno] tried to steal the taxi with the dead driver in the back seat, but did not know how to drive. Neighbours in Soi Jaran Sanitwong in central Bangkok called police after Polwat constantly pressed on the horn as he reversed into a dead end. When police arrived Polwat had locked himself in the car.

...all of which begs the question:

If Grand Theft Auto supposedly trained this 19-year-old man to kill so effectively, how could it be that it didn't train him to drive very effectively? After all, we'd estimate (conservatively) that GTA players spend at least 25% of their game time cruising around the series' open environments in a wide array of vehicles.

GamePolitics has been tracking the case of six teens arrested in Nassau County, New York last week following a bat and crowbar-wielding crime spree.

While the Nassau County P.D. said early on in their investigation that they had made a connection between the six defendants and Grand Theft Auto IV, the specifics of that linkage was never made clear.

GamePolitics has learned today that the information came from statements made to investigators by one of the suspects who told police that the group had been drinking beer and decided to act out as if they were playing GTA IV.

Although he would not name the particular defendant who made the statement, Detective Lieutenant Raymond Cote told GamePolitics:

It was rather shocking that these kids would mimic what they see in a fictional video game.

We inquired as to whether the GTA IV allegations would appear in any publicly-accessible court documents. Lt. Cote, however, said they would not. The Lieutenant did reveal that two of the defendants had prior arrests. One had been busted for a drug offense while another had a record for burglary and grand larceny (a crime known in some states, ironically enough, as... grand theft). 

Forever pushing the envelope, Rockstar's P.R. department has apparently shipped out a Grand Theft Auto IV bat to selected media types. The bat features a GTA IV logo smeared with faux blood.

It's apparently by way of kicking off their holiday season sales push. Glenn Derene of Popular Mechanics writes:

Because they couldn’t legally send us an Uzi thorough the mail, [Rockstar] sent us the 14th most deadly weapon in the blockbuster game’s new arsenal: a metal bat... It just arrived with a press release informing us “‘Tis the Season To Swing Big and Go GRAND,” promoting GTA IV as a perfect stocking-stuffer for the Christmas season.

 

But who needs the game when you’ve got the bat? In the spirit of giving, we can now give a GTA-style beat-down to random strangers on the street, just like our favorite Eastern European criminal thug, Niko Bellic. And when the cops catch us, we can say that we never would have done it were it not for the influence of violent video games. And for the first time, we’d be right!

It's kind of ironic when one considers the Nassau Six, a dirty half-dozen juvenile delinquents busted last week for going on what police claim is a GTA IV-inspired crime spree armed with a crowbar and a baseball bat. While the cops haven't said exactly why they're pointing the long arm of the law at Rockstar's controversial game, wouldn't the mainstream media go bonkers if it turned out that the bat used by the Nassau Six was this bat? 

Yesterday it was Connecticut State Senator Gayle Slossberg (D) fretting about a non-existent rape scene in GTA IV.

Today, police in Nassau County, New York allege that six teenagers charged with robbing a man at a supermarket were emulating Grand Theft Auto:

Nassau County police cops have arrested six teens for robbing a man at a supermarket... The police add the teens arrested were emualting [sic] the characters from the video game Grand Theft Auto.

 

Police say later that night they were armed with bats and a crowbar and were walking down Stewrt Ave. when they robbed a woman of cigarettes and struck a passing van with a bat.

GP: The kid has a Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt on. Maybe he was imitating them...

Thanks to GamePolitics correspondent Colin "Jabrwock" McInnes for the heads-up.

UPDATE: Newsday has more on the GTA angle, including a quote from Nassau County P.D. Det. Sgt. Anthony Repalone:

It was determined that they were emulating the character in that Grand Theft Auto game, going on a crime spree...  We got certain admissions.

UPDATE: According to the NY Post, the kids were specifically imitating GTA IV protagonist Nico Bellic. The paper quotes Nassau County Police Detective Lt. Raymond Cote:

They decided they were going to go out to commit robberies and emulate the [lead] character Nico Belic [sic] in the particularly violent video game Grand Theft Auto... These teens have difficulty separating fact from fiction, fantasy from reality . . . It was quite alarming... They were bored and they decided this was a good idea.

The Post adds:

Police would not say specifically how they knew that the teens crimes were motivated by Grand Theft Auto, and not by some other motive. They said they discovered it during their investigation.

The lawyer for a 25-year-old New Zealand man who pleaded guilty to beating a police officer and stealing a patrol car has blamed his client's crime in part on playing Grand Theft Auto - and the judge apparently agreed.

As reported by the Dominion Post, attorney Cris Nicholls argued at the sentencing hearing for Tim Reid that his client's behavior was influenced by the game.

From the news account:

[Reid] committed violent offences and compulsively played Grand Theft Auto. Mr Nicholls said a video game that showed violence toward police was a public safety concern, with the game promoting the behaviour...

 

Wellington District Court judge Denys Barry jailed Reid for five years... He said Reid was hardwired for violence and anti-social behaviour and programmed by his recreational pursuits.

GP: Reid, according to the report, began smoking pot at age five. He had been physically and sexually abused while growing up, and continues to abuse drugs and alcohol. He has priors for assault and robbery. Moreover, he is a 25-year-old man, not an impressionable adolescent.

Yet a video game is to blame?

The attorney for a 22-year-old man convicted this week of a vicious double murder says that anti-game activist Jack Thompson is off base in his claim that a "video game defense" spared James Stitt from the death penalty.

As GamePolitics reported on Wednesday, Dr. Moira Artigues, a defense psychiatrist, told the jury that Stitt claimed to have played Grand Theft Auto from midnight to 4 a.m. before killing two housemates in their bed. However, Artigues did not suggest a connection between the game and the killings. She also indicated she was not sure that Stitt was even being truthful, since his GTA claim conflicted with earlier statements.

Following the publication of the GamePolitics story, Thompson, who is involved in a pair of wrongful death suits against GTA publisher Take Two Interactive, issued a press release which read, in part:

Part of Stitt’s defense was his obsessive play of the Grand Theft Auto video games... It was put before the jury in a very clever fashion, and it worked... Thompson was right [in previous claims that GTA caused violence] and the sentence in North Carolina proves it.  Increasingly, the criminal defense bar will be using the “video game defense” because of the video game industry’s aggressive and illicit marketing of adult games to minors.

This morning's Fayetteville Observer, however, reports that Stitt's defense attorney has disavowed any such video game defense strategy. Indeed, it was never even raised in closing argument to the jury:

“There was no ‘video game defense,’” defense lawyer Jim Parish said in an interview after Thompson issued the news release. Their effort to save Stitt from the death sentence focused on the upheaval and trauma that shaped Stitt’s life from childhood, he said. He wouldn’t comment further about Thompson.

GP: We've requested a comment from Thompson, but have not received one so far...

A 22-year-old convicted killer claims that he played Grand Theft Auto just before murdering two housemates in 2005.

As reported by the Fayetteville Observer, James Christopher Stitt is waiting to learn whether he will be executed or face life in prison for the gruesome double slaying. Stitt told a psychiatrist that he played GTA until 4 a.m. and then committed the killings. The psychiatrist, Dr. Moira Artigues, testified:

He went in and killed George and Jenna in a state where he was like an automaton, not in control of his actions at the time.

The newspaper report notes:

[Dr.] Artigues... did not suggest that there was a connection between the video game and the murders.... Artigues said Stitt seems at times to live in a fantasy world and she wasn’t even sure that the version of the murders he described to her was the truth. He told a different story — in which Grand Theft Auto wasn’t mentioned — to his girlfriend, according to earlier testimony.

Courtroom testimony also revealed that the convicted murderer had an extremely troubled childhood.

An 18-year-old Michigan man is on trial for murder, charged with beheading a 26-year-old-victim last November.

Now, it appears that his attorneys will claim that Jean Pierre Orlewicz (left) was under the influence of Eidos' Hitman when he stabbed and decapitated 26-year-old Daniel Sorensen.

CNN's Jean Casarez is covering the trial and mentions the Hitman defense in a video report filed yesterday. From the video:
 

We've heard some testimony today that's very interesting... Before the killing took place... J.P. Orlewicz, the defendant, used to say, " I want to commit a crime... and not get caught and be able to get away with it... So now we see the mindset of a young man that is fixated on doing harm, according to the prosecution witnesses. Fixated on committing a crime... Because you wonder how something like this can happen...

How did the defense deal with that? They dealt with it with a video game called Hitman that he used to watch, and it was a video game where you got impressions that you would kill somebody, hit them from their back side where they were not aware that they were being killed. And, so the defense is probably going to focus on that there was not a true intent to commit a crime, just a fixation with this video game.

Thanks to: GP reader Jesus Uriarte for the heads-up...

An unnamed British newspaper is soliciting tales of those who turned to a life of crime, thanks to playing video games.

A message posted on Star Now, a U.K. website for aspiring entertainers, reads:
 

A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.

Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it's something we like, we'll call you straight back...

Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK

Via: Next Generation

The lawyer for a man being tried for murder is trying to convince an Alabama jury that the defendant believed he was acting out a video game when he murdered an 80-year-old man on Halloween, 2005.

As reported by the Decatur Daily, Andrew Reid Lackey, 24, does not dispute that he stabbed, shot and gouged out the eye of his victim, Charlie Newman. However, Lackey's attorney, Randy Gladden, is pointing the finger at video games. From the newspaper report:
 

Actions that led to a deadly confrontation between a defendant and an 80-year-old widower resembled a video game to the accused...

[Attorney] Gladden described Lackey (seen at left) as a computer geek who had immersed himself in video games and lived in "a different world than you and I."

Tapes of a 911 call made by the victim during the fatal confrontation, however, indicate that old-school greed may have been the motive. Lackey is heard to demand of the victim, "Where's the vault?" seven different times. Charlie Newman's grandson had previously told Lackey that the victim kept a large sum of money in a vault under the stairs. However, no such vault existed.

No video games were specified in the news report. However, items recovered by the police from Lackey's car (ski mask, a knife, a police scanner, night vision goggles, stun gun) suggest that the defendant put a lot of real-world thought into planning the crime.

Lackey's trial resumes today.

The New Mexico attorney who defended teenage killer Cody Posey during his murder trial doesn't think much of Jack Thompson's latest video game lawsuit.

Gary Mitchell's skillful defense efforts kept Posey out of the adult prison system for killing his abusive father and stepmother as well as his stepsister in 2004. The lawyer told the Albuquerque Journal that anti-game activist Thompson had contacted him "numerous times" before the criminal trial, urging Mitchell to employ a Grand Theft Auto defense.

"I just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever," Mitchell said. The attorney is seen in the photo at left, conferring with Cody Posey.

According to the newspaper report, Thompson was encouraged to pursue a lawsuit against the video game industry by prosecutor Sandra Grisham.

That seems a bit odd on a couple of scores. First, during the trial, Grisham downplayed any mitigation of the crime based on the horrible physical and sexual abuse that Cody Posey suffered at the hands of his father and stepmother. In fact, Grisham's tough-as-nails approach sparked a fair amount of outrage in certain quarters. If she wouldn't agree that such egregious child abuse might be a causal factor, why would she think that video games might be?

Check out this video from KRQE-13 in Albuquerque.

It's from today's Jack Thompson press coverage announcing the new lawsuit against Sony, Take-Two and Rockstar.

It makes everything perfectly clear - except for what role video games may have played. That's not so clear, other than Thompson's contention that they are "murder simulators".

We're all going to have to learn to spell "Albuquerque."

That's because we're going to be hearing a lot about the New Mexico city, since Jack Thompson's promised video game violence lawsuit is going to land there today. As reported by the Albuquerque Journal Thompson and a local attorney, Steven Sanders, will file a wrongful death suit based on the July, 2004 murders committed by Cody Posey on a ranch owned by ABC newsman Sam Donaldson.

Posey, 15 at the time of the killings, was found guilty early this year of murdering his father, stepmother and stepsister. Sentenced as a juvenile, he will be held until he turns 21. The defense maintained that Posey was severely abused by his father.

The video game connection is not yet clear. However, according to Cody Posey's Wikipedia entry, "prior to the murder, Cody was burnt with a welding rod and instructed by his father to have sex with (his stepmother)." His father had previously beaten the boy with a board, and had been reported to child protection authorities by Cody's biological mother.