A 26-year-old named Luigi Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Monday and charged withthe murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompsonalongside a handful of other charges. Immediately, a media firestorm erupted around him. He’s a fit, good-looking young man who was valedictorian at a prestigious prep school and earned Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees from an Ivy League school. He also has a social media presence.
Immediately, people began picking apart the books he’d marked as read on Goodreads. His LinkedIn was analysed. Those who went to school with him shared their memories of him. It turned out that he was also a gamer – he’d helped create two games, led a game development club at the University of Pennsylvania, and interned at Firaxis on Civilization 6.
The Link Between Mangione And Gaming Is Tenuous
This in itself is unremarkable. Lots of people play games and never kill anybody. Yet, bizarrely,NBC recently published a reportwith the headline “‘Extremely ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls”. The report details how Mangione “once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins”. The game?Among Us.
To the writer’s credit, they go on to detail that the game is “wildly popular, especially during the pandemic, and particularly among young children”. Nowhere in the text is it implied that Among Us turned Mangione into a killer, nor does it say that it taught him any of the necessary skills. It’s really just capitalising on the name brand of the game and the irony around it revolving around sneakily killing other players.
Video Games Don’t Make People Violent
And yet, by existing at all, the article implies there is some kind of link between Mangione’s gaming habits and his actions. Again, it is not at all remarkable that he plays video games.
Among Us has been played by nearly half a billion people,including members of the US government. Even people who don’t typically play video games have played or heard of Among Us. It’s a social deduction game, not a murder game. It would make more sense to link the killing with PUBG, which Mangione allegedly also played and actually has shooting within it, yet even that would be a stupid link to make.
Other games ona Steam profile said to be Mangione’sinclude Rocket League, Terraria, Don’t Starve, Stardew Valley, and Civilization 6.
Violent games have long been linked, unfairly, with violent crimes. There has historically been a whole lot of fear mongering about games like Call of Duty increasing violent urges in players because there’s so much killing in them, but there’s never been a proven link between those things. They might have other effects, like concretising the ways we see good versus bad, but that is very far from turning regular people into murderers.
Every time a crime becomes a media sensation and it somehow has a link to video games, we see articles like this appear, playing on that famous fear mongering. We saw this with the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, becausethe shooters were big fans of Doom– as if Doom made them commit one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States.Jack Thompson, an infamous anti-video game activist, has led a long crusade against rap music and, in particular, the Grand Theft Auto games, though he also blamed the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting on Counter-Strike, despite the shooter not even being a gamer.
Over and over, we’ve seen video games blamed for the violent behaviour of individuals, and over and over again, the industry has had to refute it. Yes, video games can shape the way we look at the world, but that’s true of all media. Video games are not inherently more damaging to people than television or movies. Among Us, of all the games in the world, definitely did not make a young man murder the CEO of a health insurance company.
All this is less indicative of any actual link and more of a reminder that many people simply don’t understand the industry or the culture around gaming. It is, for most people, a casual hobby, a way to connect with friends, and a way to wind down at the end of the day. Most people are very normal about video games. Mainstream media needs to learn to be normal about them too.
