Video Game Psychosis
As I sat at my desk writing this chapter and reflecting on the impact that violent imagery can have on a psychiatrically vulnerable teen, I thought of “Tom,” a 15-year-old client whom I worked with almost ten years ago. While Tom did not have a video game problem—indeed, I worked with him before I had even become aware of tech addiction—his case can be helpful in illuminating the interplay between mental illness and violent imagery.
When Tom first walked into my office, there was nothing memorable or noteworthy about his appearance: he had that awkward facial hair that many 15-year-old boys have—not quite a shave-worthy beard, just scattered clusters of hair on his cheeks and chin with a loose array of upper-lip hair masquerading as a mustache. To complete his work-in-progress look, he wore a yellowed white T-shirt and had a small, unimposing stature.
He’d been diagnosed and was struggling with a nasty case of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD can have many variations and expressions. In some cases it can look more like a “thought disorder” consisting of mental obsessions (as in not being able to get certain thoughts out of one’s head); in other cases, troubling thoughts or underlying anxieties and/or fears lead to problematic and oftentimes ritualistic and compulsive behaviors. Tom had the obsessive, intrusive thought variety of OCD. More specifically, his mind was constantly bombarded by violent, horrific images of dismemberments and bloody mutilations. It would be fair to say that the landscape of Tom’s mind was not a pretty place.
Belying his intrapsychic demons, the scruffy boy in the yellowing T-shirt presented as a fairly nice kid—polite, soft-spoken, with stable and supportive parents. Yet he was obviously a young man with a turbulent mind. I recognized the look of a person with intrusive thoughts: the tendency to stare down or off into space during a conversation as the uninvited thoughts marched disruptively through his head; delays in his responses, as he had to shake himself out of his fantasy-thought world and get back into the reality of the moment.
Tom had been away at a special school for children with psychiatric disorders and had just returned to a mainstream school setting. As I got to know him better, I discovered that, while he had suffered from persistent and obsessive thoughts since he was a child, his thoughts had become graphically violent only after he’d been exposed to such imagery in the sadistic Saw movies, the progenitors of what critics have come to call “torture porn” films.
Unfortunately for Tom, because of his OCD, once those images became seared into his mind’s eye, they became a permanent part of his mental furniture. Worse still, Tom didn’t just constantly remember those scenes—they fed his fantasies as he used them as fodder for his own torture imagery.
Tom had also been working with Dr. Fred Penzel, the man who literally wrote the book on OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (2000). Dr. Penzel had encouraged our obsessed client to journal his fantasies as a means of expelling some of the power of those thoughts, or what I liked to call “loosening the valve of the pressure cooker and dispelling the steam—before the cooker blows.” While this horror-journaling presented a challenge to his frightened English teachers, who chanced upon some of his entries, it did seem to keep him in check.
But I’ll admit that I was concerned. As he’d go into detail about his torture fantasies (again, a recommended treatment approach—bottling up or pushing away the troubling thoughts can give them more intrapsychic power), I would find myself wondering if the young man had the potential to act on those fantasies.
Indeed, I found myself putting away the pictures of my wife that I kept on my desk before I’d meet with Tom. I started doing this after one unnerving session, during which I found Tom staring intensely—as if in a trance—at my wife’s picture for several long moments. He had just been sharing with me the difficulties he was having in controlling his violent fantasies of torturing and dismembering women when he just happened to look over at her picture and went silent, staring at it. You could see on his face that his mind was in the land of his obsessions; unnerved, I had to repeat his name two or three times to shake him out of his trance.
Yet Dr. Penzel would assure me that “these types of clients never act out violently.” When I incredulously responded, “Dr. Penzel . . . never? That’s a rather absolute statement,” he countered, “Well, almost never.”
It was that “almost never” that worried me, since it implied that there were cases—admittedly outliers—in which the mental tipping point would be reached and thought would spill over into action. After all, the whole basis of cognitive behavioral therapy—the most popular and evidence-based form of psychotherapy—is that thoughts (cognitions) shape our behaviors. But what if a person suffers from underlying mental disorders—like OCD—that make it extremely difficult for a person to effectively control, reframe or manage the content of thoughts?
About a year later, a shocking and gruesome murder on Long Island in nearby Glen Cove confirmed that Dr. Penzel should never say never regarding the possibility that those consumed by deviant obsessive thoughts might act out violently. In a crime that sickened our local area, 31-year-old Evan Marshall dismembered and decapitated his neighbor, 57-year-old special education teacher Denice Fox, who had lived across the street from him. Police found sexual fetish drawings of dismembered women—similar to the drawings that my client Tom had—along with a collection of torture porn which is said to have fueled his violent fantasies.
My client Tom did not go on to hurt anyone; he was helped immensely by psychotropic medications and psychotherapy, and his life went on to follow a somewhat more normalized trajectory. Not having directed specific threats toward any one person, he didn’t reach that critical point at which he needed to be reported to law enforcement authorities. Indeed, psychotherapists often work with clients who have troubling thoughts; we can’t—and don’t—report every client who has a violent fantasy, but we are compelled by law to report those clients who we believe are in imminent danger of hurting themselves or hurting someone else.
But the mental health field is not an exact science; there are no crystal balls when it comes to human behavior; assessing when violent thoughts cross over into the “acute” and “imminent risk” realm can be a tricky and subjective business.
Unfortunately, there are several high-profile cases of mentally ill young men who had been on the psychiatric radar yet who were still able to commit violent crimes: Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford and killed six others; “Batman” shooter James Holmes, who killed 12 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater; Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui-Cho, who killed 32. All of these young men had either been psychiatrically evaluated, received psychiatric care or been referred for psychiatric evaluation.
Years later, as I began to work more in the area of video gaming effects, I would think: how would my severely OCD client Tom have behaved if he were constantly bombarded by graphic video game violence? He saw violent imagery only every couple of months in a movie theater, and that was enough to entirely preoccupy his mind. What if he had played Grand Theft Auto for 18 hours a day, as some kids do; might he have become one of those outliers whose thoughts spill over into violent behavior?
My professional opinion is: very possibly. The research—which we’ve already examined—is showing us that violent video games do increase aggressive behavior in children without underlying disorders. That then begs the question: how can it not be more impactful to the psychiatrically vulnerable? And, unfortunately, that’s what we’re seeing: violent outlier behavior in kids with underlying mental health issues.
In order to crystalize this point, I would like to examine the case that I think most powerfully—and disturbingly—illustrates that point.
shooting in newtown, connecticut school leaves 28 dead
lanza’s descent to madness and murder: sandy hook shooter notched up 83,000 online kills including 22,000 “head shots” using violent games to train himself for his massacre1
Newtown, Connecticut. Sandy Hook Elementary. Adam Lanza.
This is perhaps the most powerful—and controversial—example of what we are discussing, representing the worst, most horrific possible outcome of the intersection of mental illness and developmental issues with violent and graphic video game imagery. It’s difficult to even write about the Newtown massacre without a feeling of overwhelming grief . . . of sadness . . . of anger . . . but mostly of the senselessness of the loss of innocent life that morning on December 14, 2012.
There are tragic events that occur in a society that scar the collective consciousness: 9/11 . . . the Challenger space shuttle explosion . . . and the Newtown massacre. We are not used to the slaughter of children, and hopefully we will never become accustomed to that. So when we read about a child who is murdered, we, as a civilized society, grieve.
But when we read—and see—the methodical slaughter by semiautomatic weapons of 20 children who were innocently attending elementary school that fateful, sunny morning, something deeper happens: it undermines our sense of an orderly world—innocent kids are not supposed to be butchered in their classrooms. That’s not the way things are supposed to be.
Those with faith are forced to question it, and those without faith are also left unraveled. When kids die in car accidents or in natural disasters, our collective soul is left scarred, because children represent our purity and innocence; but as horrible as those so-called “acts of God” may be, we, on some level, understand that accidents, earthquakes and tsunamis happen.
But how do we reconcile a sentient being, strapped with semiautomatic weaponry, walking into a crowded elementary school and shooting small children with high-powered ammo like so many fish in a barrel? Didn’t the 20-year-old shooter—barely an adult himself—feel any compassion, any empathy, for the little ones as his bullets pierced their skin and mortally wounded them? Didn’t he have any remorse or inclination to stop when he heard the blood-curdling screams as the children ran for their lives? Apparently not. Because Adam Lanza kept shooting and shooting until he took his own life.
And now, postmortem, we, as a grieving society, are left with a horror puzzle: what went wrong with Adam Lanza that he was able to do such a thing? Yes, we know; there have been crazy murderers and serial killers since time immemorial; but this young man—this deranged murderer—had some shaping influences different from those of the usual Ted Bundys or John Wayne Gacys . . . this young man had a profile that we should—that we must—look at. The gun debate justifiably rages, but what shapes the mind of a killer, allowing that person to use such a weapon? What went into creating a monster who could shoot bullets into the backs of kindergarteners?
Strangely, when you look at Adam Lanza’s bug-eyed picture, you don’t see evil. You see an awkward, lost kid. Gacy was evil. Bundy was evil. They were cunning and intelligent men who relished torture and human suffering. Adam Lanza, meanwhile, looks like so many video game–playing geeks, lost in a first-person-shooter fantasy world. I’ve never met Adam Lanza. But looking at his face, I see the expression I’ve seen many times before. Not necessarily evil; just lost in a violent dream of virtual bullets and the crackle of video gunfire.
While we can never really know what was going on inside the mind of Adam Lanza, we now have several very important clues from Matthew Lysiak’s shocking and recently published investigative book Newtown: An American Tragedy2 and two recently released reports from the state of Connecticut that chronicle his all-consuming violent video gaming habits and his macabre obsession with mass killers. (He assigned them points for kills.) This information points to the conclusion that he just may have been psychotically playing out a first-person-shooter video game fantasy.
The facts:
We know that long before the shooting, Adam had shown signs of being a troubled kid; an exhaustive 114-page investigative report released in November of 2014 by the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate3 indicates that several medical professionals at the Yale Child Study Center had, several years before the shootings, recommended that Adam be treated for psychological issues. Unfortunately, those recommendations went largely unheeded by Adam’s mother, Nancy.
The Connecticut report was painstakingly put together by state officials as well as psychiatric experts in order to help shed light on what led to the shooting. It remains the most detailed publicly available document chronicling Adam’s life, giving us a window into his childhood and psychological development.
According to the report, his problems in his early teens were belied by a relatively normal early childhood. Adam’s father told the investigators that Adam seemed to enjoy being a kid when he was eight or nine years old; that he took part in school activities, including a school play, and attended Boy Scout meetings. His father also said that Adam played baseball for two seasons.
Yet also included in the Connecticut report was Adam’s preoccupation with violence, which went back to at least the fifth grade, when he co-authored “The Big Book of Granny,” a class project that was filled with narrative and images of child murder, cannibalization and taxidermy. In it, there is also a prophetic depiction of a boy shooting his mother in the head—just as Adam would shoot his own mother in the head ten years later.
According to the experts who authored the Connecticut report, a major red flag was missed with Adam’s horrific fifth-grade writing project: “Mental health professionals contributing to this report determined that the content of ‘The Big Book of Granny’ can only be described as extremely abhorrent and, if it had been carefully reviewed by school staff, it would have suggested the need for a referral to a child psychiatrist or other mental health professional for evaluation.”
Also in the report: concerned about his son’s mental state, Adam’s father took him to the Yale Child Study Center in 2006, when the boy was a ninth-grader, via his company’s Employee Assistance Program; Adam had also been seeing a community psychiatrist at the same time. He was diagnosed with severe anxiety and Asperger’s syndrome. Adam told one of the center’s psychiatrists that he didn’t want to have more friends and that he didn’t even really understand what a friend was.
Kathleen A. Koenig, a nurse at the Yale Child Studies Center, indicated that Adam also presented with symptoms of OCD, because he frequently washed his hands and changed his socks up to 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three daily loads of laundry. In addition, he would sometimes go through a box of tissues in a day because he couldn’t touch a doorknob with his bare hand.
The authors of the Connecticut report did stress that those with autism spectrum disorder and the other psychiatric problems that Adam had rarely engage in outward violence and are far more likely to internalize their issues: “Individuals with those mental health or developmental disorders are more likely to internalize (that is, to feel distressed emotionally or to be confused, socially inappropriate or inept, and sometimes to harm themselves inadvertently or intentionally) than to externalize (that is, to act out aggressively).”
Nonetheless, the psychiatrist who evaluated Adam indicated that Adam’s constructed social and educational world was a matter of concern and prescribed him anti-anxiety medication, which Adam refused. The psychiatrist went on to note that creating a “prosthetic environment” for Adam posed significant risk and that those around Adam should work to help him overcome social difficulties instead of forming a “bubble.” He also noted that the family needed “tons of parental guidance . . .”
According to the report, an advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) also told Adam that he had psychological disorders that could be helped with medication, indicating that Adam was living in a box that was only going to get smaller over time if he didn’t get treatment. Adam did briefly go on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications in 2007, but his mother took him off them, saying that he was experiencing adverse side effects.
In 2008, when he was 16, Adam’s “box” did indeed become smaller when his mother pulled him out of Newtown High School in order to homeschool him, indicating that she’d been unhappy with the public school system’s plans for her son. Between receiving home instruction and taking some classes at Western Connecticut State University, he acquired enough credits to graduate a year early.
After graduation Adam would sometimes play the arcade music video game Dance Dance Revolution with his brother and his one friend; that one friend indicated that he had a somewhat normal friendship with Adam, telling investigators that he and Adam would talk about a number of topics, including “computers, chimp society, human nature, morality, prejudice and occasionally . . . family members.” That sole friend said that Adam was capable of showing emotion and would laugh, smile and make jokes, though he did also say that Adam wasn’t very expressive.
But not having a structured social setting like school was an increasing problem for Adam. While a public school setting—where he had been an honor student, joined the tech club and been described as “intelligent, but nervous and fidgety” by those who knew him—may not have been the perfect place for Adam, he at least had a semblance of normalcy and social interaction.
But now that the social tether of school had been cut, Adam withdrew further into his virtual fantasy world. He had first shown signs of an abnormal video obsession the prior year when, at age 15, he discovered World of Warcraft, a game in which, as previously discussed, players live in an alternate universe of mythical monsters and must heroically vanquish competitors in order to move ahead.
As time wore on and Adam continued to play alone for hours on end in his mother’s bunkerlike basement, his obsession with World of Warcraft quickly morphed into an obsession with Combat Arms, a multiplayer first-person-shooter game. The object of the game, as with most first-person-shooter games, is to kill the most enemy combatants.
By September 2009 Adam had become a fixture in the online community for Combat Arms and was accepted into a “cluster,” a group of other online Combat Arms players, among whom gaming strategy discussions were mixed with small talk and banter. By all accounts, Adam fit in this virtual world much more comfortably than he did among the face-to-face interactions of the nonvirtual realm.
But according to the mental health experts who authored the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate report, replacing real-world social interactions with a virtual group of peers was a problem for a boy with Adam’s issues: “Unlike normalizing influences and positive community peer groups, his cyber group would have had little willingness or ability to stop his dangerous trajectory or to offer cautioning feedback to him about his impulses.”
Since he was unable to fit into the real world, the virtual realm—with its myriad of avatar games—allowed this meek, socially awkward boy to reinvent himself; in Combat Arms, Adam was able to create a powerful anti-Adam avatar. As author and investigative journalist Matthew Lysiak describes it in Newtown: An American Tragedy (2013): “Alone and in the darkness, with the illuminated screen his only light, Adam had found a level of comfort in his world of computers and video games that he could rarely attain in the outside world. . . . Adam was able to show a bravado and confidence that was unfamiliar to classmates and family who only knew him as an awkward and meek teenager. . . . In his alternative online universe, the skinny and frail teenager chose to create an imposing bulky muscle-bound soldier dressed in desert camouflage and also a light vest, goggles, and a black beret. He chose equally imposing weapons for his missions: the M16A3, a military variant of the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, and the G23 pistol, which strongly resembles a Glock 10-millimeter handgun.”
By the time Adam had turned 17, in 2009, he had logged over 500 hours in the darkness of his sequestered fantasy world. According to his online profile, Adam-as-lethal-warrior had tallied 83,496 kills, including 22,725 “head shots.”
At an age when most kids were planning for college, Adam was deep in the virtual bunker; using an online persona, “Kaynbred,” he demonstrated an ever-growing fixation with violence as he began frequenting Internet chat rooms that focused on violent video games, weapons and mass killers.
His obsession with mass killers was very troubling. As his real world continued to shrink—he stopped communicating with his father in 2010, had stopped speaking with his only friend over the summer of 2012 after a dispute involving a movie, and, while living in the same house with her, would communicate with his mother only via email—his obsessions with violence deepened.
Between August 2009 and February 2010, using his Kaynbred alias, Adam spent countless hours going over entries about mass killers on Wikipedia, obsessively correcting small details of the killers’ lives or the types of firearms that they used. According to the Connecticut report: “AL [Adam Lanza] increasingly lived in an alternate universe in which ruminations about mass shootings were his central preoccupation.”
But Adam’s mass killer obsession went beyond just correcting the minutiae of Wikipedia pages or collecting mass-murder fun facts. Indeed, after a forensic review of his computer usage, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit indicated that Adam’s obsession and attention to detail with mass killings was “unprecedented.”
In a detailed investigative report4 released by Stephen J. Sendensky, Connecticut’s state attorney, on November 13, 2013—roughly one year after the murders—investigators indicated that they had also found among Adam’s possessions a news clipping from the New York Times regarding the February 18, 2008, shooting at Northern Illinois University; photocopies of newspaper articles from 1891 regarding the shooting of schoolchildren; a book on the 2006 mass shooting of children at an Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; a spreadsheet listing mass killings over the years; and other “electronic evidence or digital media that appeared to belong to the shooter [that] revealed that the shooter had a preoccupation with mass shootings, in particular the Columbine shootings.”
According to a March 17, 2013, New York Daily News story by Mike Lupica, the mass killing “spreadsheet” that was mentioned in the Connecticut attorney’s report was not just a spreadsheet meant to compile murder data; instead, the macabre seven-foot-by-four-foot sheet of paper was a murder score sheet that had been obsessively filled in in nine-point font with the names of hundreds of murderers, along with their death tallies and the names of weapons they used.5
Lupica had interviewed veteran cops who had gathered at the annual conference for the International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels in New Orleans three months after the Newtown massacre; at that conference, Connecticut State Police colonel Danny Stebbins, one of the speakers, told his fellow officers what had been found at Adam Lanza’s house.
As one veteran cop told Lupica, the Connecticut State Police believe with regard to the score sheet that it was Adam’s “intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills.”
The veteran cop told Lupica that the spreadsheet was so comprehensive that “it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research,” and he speculated that it had to have taken Adam years to put together.
Based on Adam’s dual obsessions with real-life murderers and virtual-world violence, is it possible that the two became blurred in his mind and that he believed the flesh-and-blood murders he was committing on that horrible day in 2012 were all part of some game? It appears that this slow-yet-steady blurring of reality for Adam—a blurring in which the real mass killers on his spreadsheet were just so many first-person shooters on his glowing computer screen—continued as he fell deeper and deeper into the darkness of his gaming bunker.
But do gamers shoot civilians—and children, no less? We may have some more clues from Adam’s actual online profile, which tells us the games that he immersed himself in: by 2011, 19-year-old Adam had stopped playing Combat Arms and moved on to Call of Duty and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, both violent, first-person-shooter games in which, as with Combat Arms, players compete to rack up the most number of kills.
But in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in a foreshadowing of the murders at Newtown, the shooting victims are civilians, including women and children. In this shocking game, Adam became an undercover CIA agent who joined a group of Russian terrorists at an airport to massacre unarmed civilians; in order to keep his cover and fulfill the mission’s objective, he had to shoot and kill women and children. Unbelievably, just as in Newtown, the shot and injured civilians in the game would crawl away, leaving a trail of smeared blood, while those who had initially survived would make attempts to help others—only to be shot dead. Just as in Newtown.
According to the Connecticut attorney’s report, Adam is said to have also had an obscure game called School Shooter* on his hard drive; in that first-person-shooter game, the player goes from classroom to classroom targeting children and teachers before taking his own life—just as Adam did in Newtown.
But didn’t anybody see the red flags of his deepening problems? Indeed, Adam was such a sick and addicted video gamer that, like that of drug addicts, his physical health also deteriorated as he pursued his obsession. The Connecticut report indicated that Adam had “profound anorexia” at the time of his death, weighing just 112 pounds despite being six feet tall.
Unfortunately, during Adam’s downward spiral into madness, his mother, Nancy, became an eager enabler. It was Nancy who thought it would be a good idea to expose her troubled, video game–obsessed son to the world of real guns, misguidedly believing that she was engendering some healthy mother-son bonding at shooting ranges; it was Nancy who pulled her autistic and socially awkward son out of school, thus practically ensuring the lonely and isolated existence that led to his virtually enabled psychotic solitude; and it was she who, in oblivious denial, told a friend who had expressed concerns about Adam’s increasing isolation, “He’s fine. Just so long as he has his computer and video games, he can keep himself occupied.”
Adam certainly was occupied—and obsessed. The basement, which Adam’s mother had originally remodeled into a game room for him, had taken on the look of a military bunker, with nearly every inch of the walls covered by posters of weapons and military equipment. In a former exercise room, Adam created a quasi–indoor shooting range; there, he would dress in head-to-toe military gear and shoot his pellet gun at cardboard targets he’d set up on a clothesline. In his bedroom, every inch of window was covered in plastic, so as not to let in one ray of outside light.
At some point, even Adam’s clueless mother began to become somewhat concerned, telling a friend that she had begun to notice that her son rarely ventured outside and was “like a zombie in front of the screen.” Adam, she revealed, sat and played his games well into the night and slept most of the day.
She finally became concerned enough that she secretly went into his room one day to look around. She found several drawings, hidden underneath his nightstand, that depicted mutilated corpses; another drawing she found was of a bloodied woman clutching a rosary as bullets ripped through her spine; yet another depicted a grassy field lined with the corpses of young children.
In that gruesome sketch, the faces of the children were severely mutilated and couldn’t be recognized. Still another sketch appeared to be a self-portrait of a younger Adam with blood gushing from a large hole in his forehead and his arms stretched toward the sky in a posture of triumph.
It’s important to remember that these games and violent images were Adam’s entire world. For a young man who had shown signs of OCD, they were just so much kerosene to throw onto his already burning, obsessive and turbulent mind. As the veteran cop told Mike Lupica at the law enforcement conference: “In the end, it was just a perfect storm: These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a violent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist. They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I’m actually going to be a hunter.”
The cop went on to say that according to the theory of the Connecticut State Police, Adam thought that going to the school “was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.”
There are two things that investigators theorize may have pushed Adam from virtual violence into real-world violence: according to Lysiak, just a few days before the shootings, Adam’s mother told Dennis Durant, a bartender friend, that she had recently told her son that his “medical” conditions precluded him from ever becoming a real soldier. Nancy told Durant, “I told Adam, in as gentle terms as possible, that he will never be a marine, that he’s just not cut out for it and that life has something different planned for him.”
According to Nancy, he did not take her news well.
The other blow that Adam received: Adam’s mother had hinted that she might be planning to move, either to Washington State or North Carolina. She had told a friend that if she moved to Washington she would enroll Adam in a “special school.” According to the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate report, the idea of moving from Newtown had made Adam increasingly despondent and anxious in the months preceding the shootings. The report went on to say: “The looming prospect of moving from Newtown may have increased AL’s anxiety, as he may have worried about where he would go or live, and the loss of the sanctuary he had developed in his home. This was quite possibly an important factor leading to the shootings.”
However, the report does also clearly state that Adam didn’t just “snap”—that the shootings were planned out. The report cites the facts that he had visited the school’s Web site on numerous occasions, viewed the student handbook and familiarized himself with the school’s security procedures.
The notion that Adam didn’t just snap was also echoed by the veteran cop whom Mike Lupica had interviewed: “He didn’t snap that day, he wasn’t one of those guys who was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. . . . He had been planning this thing forever. They have pictures from two years before, with the guy all strapped with weapons, posing with a pistol to his head. That’s the thing you have to understand: He had this laid out for years before.”
Extreme social isolation. OCD. Increasing exposure to violent games. A tenuous grasp on reality mixed with total immersion in virtual violence. Access to guns. Was Adam a psychologically vulnerable youth who crossed over into a form of gaming-induced psychosis that was triggered by his fear of moving—and the fear of having to leave the safety of his virtual bunker?
The question that I asked at the beginning of this chapter remains: what role did video games play in Adam’s “perfect storm” of violent insanity? We can never truly know, but we can draw psychological postmortem inferences based on the evidence that we have.
As the veteran cop had told Lupica, the violent games were like porn to a rapist. He went on to say: “It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games. That’s what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in [police] school, about how if you’re moving from room to room—the way he was in that school—you have to reload before you get to the next room. Maybe he has a 30-round magazine clip, and he’s only used half of it. But he’s willing to dump 15 rounds and have a new clip before he arrives in the next room.”
According to Lupica, the veteran cop’s voice started to shake as he continued: “They believe he learned the principles of this—the tactical reload—from his game. Reload before you’re completely out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon [the AR-15], he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing kill games.”
Was Adam Lanza’s act the by-product of what Lt. Col. David Grossman had earlier called a “murder simulator?” Was he psychotically playing out a shooter game? We had read earlier about the research into Game Transfer Phenomenon—through which compulsive gamers can blur the game with reality. Or was Adam just an angry teen who had reached a violent breaking point because he feared that life as he knew it in Newtown was about to end?
In the end, we can never really know for sure. But what seems certain is that violent video games played a key role in his insane perfect storm—either as the reality-blurring mechanism of a psychotic break or as the virtual training ground wherein an angry kid became desensitized to violence and honed his skills to shoot defenseless children.
Either way, I think it’s fair to say that first-person-shooter games were an instrumental part of the Newtown massacre equation.
* * *
As I’ve already stated, the previously mentioned cases from the last two chapters are the extreme outliers. I don’t mean to suggest that every kid who plays a video game will shoot up a school, just as not every person who drinks a beer will become an alcoholic.
But all kids exposed to the hyperarousing and hyperstimulating glowing screens will be impacted on some level; kids whose brains are exposed to the hypnotic flashing lights of electronic media during key developmental windows will have their ability to focus and concentrate adversely impacted, leaving them open to the possibility of virtual addiction. And according to all of the aggression research that was cited, kids exposed to violent games will be more aggressive.
At this point we have to ask ourselves: how did this happen? How did our entire society shift so quickly that children have gone from being normal kids to being screen-obsessed Glow Kids?
Note
* School Shooter isn’t the first game to exploit tragedy; in Super Columbine Massacre RPG, released in 2005, players assume the roles of the Columbine murderers. In 2013 Boston Marathon 2013: Terror in the Streets featured players dodging pressure-cooker bombs. In 2004 JFK: Reloaded allowed players to see President Kennedy’s limousine through the crosshairs of a rifle scope as the player attempted to recreate the lethal headshot.