Just What the CEO Shooting Needs: A Video Game Moral Panic!
On Monday, police arrested Luigi Mangione, suspected of being the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week. Right away, the internet scoured Mangione’s online presence, deducing numerous details about his life (a privileged Ivy League graduate in the tech world) and his potential motive (a painful and debilitating injury). But NBC News offered an odd theory of its own.
“Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins,” the article begins. “In the game, called ‘Among Us,’ some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.”
If that feels like a particularly weak parallel to draw, it should.
Among Us is an online multiplayer game rated for players aged 10 and up, based on its “fantasy violence” and “mild blood.” It’s also very popular, and not just among violent vigilantes: The game has over 150 million registered users and averages more than 10 million active users each day. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) even played Among Us on an October 2020 livestream. Clearly, one’s interest in a very popular party game is not an indicator of future criminal violence.
The NBC News article nearly admits as much, noting that the “child-friendly” game “has been wildly popular, especially during the pandemic, and particularly among young children because of its simple mechanics, colorful cartoonish nature, and unpredictability.”
To be clear, NBC does not say that Among Us is to blame for Mangione murdering a health insurance executive; it merely quotes a college acquaintance who found it “ironic” that someone he primarily interacted with in the context of a game featuring killers would, himself, end up a killer.
And sure, there’s some dramatic irony in that sequence of events. But it certainly doesn’t rise to the level where it should lead a major national news network’s write-up of the suspect’s arrest.
In fact, multiplayer video games in which players kill each other have long been a popular pastime: Earlier generations would gather around TVs to play Halo or GoldenEye 64 against each other. The coffee table bo
Article from Reason.com
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