Airport Massacre Revisited: How “No Russian” Might Have Influenced a Killer

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009)

When I first read John Sutter’s CNN article detailing how Anders Behring Breivik used Modern Warfare 2 to train himself to kill 77 people in Norway last year I thought “here we go again.” We could now lump this with countless other reports and studies linking video games to violence.  As a game scholar, I know that the results of previous studies on game violence and its effects on players have been very mixed.  As a former soldier, I know that shooting a weapon in a game in no way prepares you for firing the real thing.   By the time I finished the article and read some of the comments, I had already filed it into the nonsense folder.

But then I realized the article missed something.

This is not about how to fire a weapon.  That involves aiming, breathing, and trigger squeeze.  Neither a mouse nor a controller can teach you to do any of those.  Nor can a game in any way provide the feel of actually killing another person.  But what it can do in a superficial way is simulate a sense of control when killing many people.  In this case, only Modern Warfare 2 could do that. Had the news report mentioned any other game, I would not have given it a second thought. But MW2 is unique among modern shooters for one reason: “No Russian.”

Modern Warfare 2 is one of the games I used in my dissertation.  Specifically I used the now infamous “No Russian” scene where your character is deep undercover and forced to participate in the massacre at a Russian airport and I used it because it caused so much controversy.  I spent a lot of time analyzing that scene and what I found is that if nothing else, those few minutes allow the player to listen to the panic of “people” fleeing for their lives.  In “No Russian” you can gun down dozens of people in a few short minutes.  You can even watch the wounded crawl away.  Some cower in fear in various corners while others lie dead in pools of blood. MW2 is the only game I know of where your character enters a closed environment with scores of people and systematically guns them down as they try to run, help wounded bystanders, and try to hide behind shelves and columns.

So I ask you: if you planned to commit a massacre, what better game and scene to use? Not Grand Theft Auto.  The NPCs in that game can get away as they have open streets to run through.  However the airport is a closed space.  The people can only run so far.  And they never, ever get away. Worse still, another CNN article states that Breivik planned to film the killings on his iPhone.  Had he done that, it would have been from a first person perspective, just like MW2.

Anders Behring Breivik. Photo via DailyCaller.com

Of course I don’t know the motivation behind his thinking, but I can imagine him playing that one scene time and again and listening to the screams of people trying to live. Now most of the people in my study dismissed the terror of the “massacre” as simply graphic fiction, something that had no bearing at all on their feelings about violence or their sense of identity.  However there were some gamers who would not play that scene because it felt real. And this is the catch: if games are not real and the people we “kill” are not real, then why are some of us bothered by what we do in the game world?

Perhaps to Breivik the idea of cornering helpless people in an enclosed space and killing all of them was the ideal preparation for the real thing as he methodically killed 77 people.  I can’t say, but it troubles me to think about him comparing the deaths of game characters to real people.  What I do know is that it is a mistake to dismiss violent games because they are games.  Obviously most gamers can play shooters and function perfectly in the real world. Other realize that games do affect them and stay away from the violent ones.  However there is the third group, small in number, who we should pay attention to when they demonstrate that violent games influence them.

Not that any of this is the fault of Infinity Ward or Activision, the makers of MW2.  Ultimately how we use and react to our media is up to us. There is a reason Infinity Ward gave players the option to skip “No Russian.” However I doubt MW2 was the only reason Anders Behring Breivik committed mass murder. I do think, however, that the airport scene allowed him visualize how his real-life victims might react.

This is certainly not the end of the video game violence debate.  Our medium has the unique distinction of allowing consumers to interact with the virtual environment and because of that many think the influence is greater than the passive media of television and film.  What the research has revealed is that still more research is needed.  Yet this case and this particular game show us that we should pay closer attention to the most graphic examples of violence that while extreme, should not define our medium to those who do not play video games.

Mass Effect 3, Marketing, and a Magic Bullet: Emily Wong Reporting

On October 30, 1938, Mercury Theatre of the Air performed H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was broadcasted over the Columbia Broadcast System radio network.  Orson Welles directed and narrated this now-infamous production.  Because many listeners missed the first few minutes, which included the disclaimer that the performance was only fiction, many believed that an actual invasion was taking place.  This event is often cited as an example of the Magic Bullet (or Hypodermic Needle) theory that states that media have swift and powerful effects on consumers because they believe the entire message.  You don’t hear too much about Magic Bullet nowadays but then a strange thing happened on the way to the release of Mass Effect 3. The 21st century version of War of the Worlds appeared via Twitter.

Emily Wong from Mass Effect.

It all started out with a simple retweet from an Alliance News Network message.  I didn’t pay much attention, but it said something about a mysterious object in the sky.  Another retweet revealed that reporter Emily Wong, from Mass Effect 1, was reporting that Earth communications were down just as this object descended from the clouds.  My interest piqued, I began to follow the Alliance News Network (ANN) so I could get all the tweets as they posted.  What followed was a brilliant re-enactment of War of the Worlds with the Reapers now taking the place of Martians.  Of course I did not realize this at first, but as I read tweet after tweet, I remembered listening to recordings of War of the Worlds and reading about the ensuing panic.

Soon I started following the hashtag connected to the tweets and found that many others were commenting on the messages.  Some even took to role-playing as they pretended to “panic” and in doing so began to “re-enact” the real panic of 1938. I began to see some slight similarities between the mayhem used to support an antiquated theory and the reach of social media.  Of course the reach of ANN is nowhere near the panic of 1938.  Some estimates run as high as 1.7 million people who thought the production was real.  I don’t believe anyone thinks the Reapers are really coming of course and only 8,000 people were on the receiving end of those Tweets, but my guess is that the “magic bullet” BioWare is looking for is an uptick in sales.  Is it a stretch to think that those consumers who are still undecided about buying Mass Effect 3 would do so because of this modern-day War of the Worlds? Or do these message simply reinforce the idea that this is a must-have game for those who have already decided to purchase Mass Effect 3?

As I sit here and read the messages from Emily Wong, I wonder if I will see her in the actual game. Or does her story end before the game begins?  Her frantic messages serve to heighten anticipation of the invasion of course, but they also reveal how quickly messages spread through social media thanks to retweeting and hashtags.  One of the aspects of the classic magic bullet theory is that mass media quickly effect those who consume them. A marketing magic bullet, in this case, might be powered by social media.

A Response to “Why I Can’t Get Behind ‘Dead Island'”

In case you missed it, an enormous buzz practically set the gaming community on fire recently.  Deep Silver released a trailer for the game Dead Island and gamers across the planet sang praises and wrote about how they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the game.  If you’ve seen this trailer, then you might agree the production value is high and the story engaging.  However National Public Radio contributor Omar Gallaga wrote about his issues with the trailer on CNN.com last week. Gallaga writes, in part: “But, increasingly, I’m getting uncomfortable with how comfortable game developers have become with putting children in peril and, often, allowing them to be gruesomely killed.” I have no problem with that statement. After all we should be uncomfortable when children are killed, even if they are virtual children.  More on that later. Let’s wrap up Gallaga’s line of reasoning first.

He concludes that point when he writes: “I wonder if our tolerance for virtual gore and bloodshed in games has numbed us to the mutilation and torture of children because they’re virtual characters…or, more disturbingly, maybe we’ve become so used to hearing about violence directed at kids that its depiction in video games is just another reflection of our culture.” Here he misses the point.  I believe the premise of this conversation should not be that the game narrative reflects culture.  It doesn’t. Games never have.  The point should be that in order for game content to mirror society then game characters must respond to and be held accountable for their actions.  In our society, there are consequences for abusing and killing children.  If real people killed hundreds of zombie children on this island, you can bet they will not emerged unscathed from the event.  Why is it that we accept that game protagonists have no emotions and can wade through untold numbers of zombies/terrorists/alien bad guys and not feel anything? The only game recent game character I can remember having any recriminations is Alan Wake, and then only briefly.

However the scariest part of the article is not Gallaga’s concerns about children, but rather the comments readers posted about his article.  I read through most of them and the reactions of gamers must also be taken into account because they change the nature of the conversation.  There were numerous deriding his views because Dead Island is “just a game” and that means the virtual characters are not real.  Well of course they are not “real” but our reactions to them are very real.  I like to test the “not real” theory by asking if those same players would enjoy a rape game.  I wonder if they would feel the same way if asked to play a Nazi guard in a concentration camp or perhaps the captain on ship full of slaves crossing the middle passage.  After all, you can’t really rape, burn, or enslave anyone, can you?  It’s just a game so the argument goes.

I suspect most of them would answer that they would never play something so distasteful and offensive.  But they are “just games” right?  If that is the case, then why do we draw a line between is acceptable and what is too much? If these characters are not real then why should we make a distinction between “killing” them and “raping” them? Neither scenario is real.  Yet we do and in doing so find justification for tossing zombie children out a window but not raping young virtual women.  How convenient.

We will have to wait and see what Dead Island has to offer.  It may turn out that Mr. Gallaga’s concerns about children find a larger platform with this release.  I find it more likely that the same attitude we find in the comments will mute the conversation or at least relegate it to “it’s just a game.”  That would be sad, though not unexpected.