Here’s some fuel for the debate over the potential harm of allowing children (and presumably unstable adults) to play extremely realistic first-person shooter games, via the Guardian:
Anders Behring Breivik has described how he “trained” for the attacks he carried out in Norway last summer using the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
The 33-year-old said he practised his shot using a “holographic aiming device” he had bought to use with the war simulation game, which he said is used by armies around the world for training.
“You develop target acquisition,” he said. He used a similar device during the shooting attacks that left 69 dead at a political youth camp on the island of Utøya on 22 July.
Describing the game, he said: “It consists of many hundreds of different tasks and some of these tasks can be compared with an attack, for real. That’s why it’s used by many armies throughout the world.
Move over Osama bin Laden—I know you already have had in the physical sense —because you now have an emulator who borrows your tactics and inverts your ideology.