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A Modest Kickstarter Proposal
In multiple domains, there is a reasonably strong consensus within the zeitgeist that negative mood affiliated media does not correlate to negative behavior. In fact, the opposite is often claimed, that proliferation of such media provides a substitute for the negative behavior, actually reducing it. Casual Ducking pulls up hundreds of articles, many in academic works, arguing that pornography (even aggressive/violent pornography) substitutes for real-world sexual assault, that generally violent video games substitute for real-world violent behavior, that fake child porn (or just sufficiently cheap, legal, and easy to access child porn) substitutes for real-world sexual abuse of children. Many people make these arguments and attach their real names and institutional affiliations to them.
On the other hand, casual Ducking for games where one is a school shooter doesn't elicit any similar list of names/affiliations calling for such a substitute. Instead, it appears to have been kinda-sorta tried and mostly just shut down. What accounts for the difference? Is there a theoretical argument for why it should have a different effect? Is there some sort of data which could be marshaled against the thesis? I don't have solid numbers for the actual cost of school shootings, but I have to imagine that if someone could set up a kickstarter (or whatever platform you'd need to use to not have the effort immediately banned by the platform) to create a school shooter video game, and if said game could provide even a weak substitute, it would be an incredibly efficient use of EA contributions.
This thought arose from watching the bodycam video of the heroic police officers that was posted below. It reminded me of actual first person shooters that I played back when I was young. In addition, the discussion of whether the shooter had a poor strategy for a loadout was interesting. Some blamed (or, um, I guess praised) FPSs for having a typical mechanic where you can carry multiple weapons essentially "for free". Would it make a difference if the video game was tailored to give players the wrong idea about what would be effective in such a situation? Or should it (and FPSs in general) move to being a more realistic simulation?
Finally, what was actually my first thought on the matter was a response to people praising the officers (especially in comparison to Uvalde). Pointing out that their behavior is something that society has strong and important reasons to encourage. I actually thought first, "What if you made a game that let you take on that persona, rushing into danger to save children at great risk to yourself?" But then, I ran into a conundrum. Would this version of the game actually encourage such behavior? Or would it substitute away from such behavior? "Yeah, I get the rush of going headlong into danger to save innocents plenty at home; no need to actually go out and do that in the real world"?
I can't find it, but I remember seeing a news video somewhere some years ago about an actual simulator for training police. From my recollection:
The simulator consisted of a room with panoramic projection screens around. Two officers would go in at a time, armed with handguns built as/modified into what I assume were basically light guns.
The trainees were also outfitted with vests with electrodes in them that would shock the trainees if they got "shot" by the virtual school shooter. I remember in the video I saw that an officer would take a virtual bullet, and he reactively clutched at where he got shocked.
The screens had the simulated environment and actors projected onto them, made of live-action footage.
I suppose you could do something like this in VR.
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This reminds me when the christchurch shooting happened. I saw the go-pro footage on 4chan. I was absolutely chilled to the bone about how similar it looked to any FPS game I had played all throughout middle and high school. I had always scoffed at the idea that video games had any real psychological similarity to real violence, but actually watching a mass shooting through the eyes of the shooter felt equal parts horrific and familiar.
Ever since I've had this nagging feeling that maybe we had been a little to hasty in overlooking the effects of video game violence on developing minds. Regardless of the multiple studies that have found the opposite conclusions, every time i play an FPS I get these weird flashbacks to watching the Christchurch and later, buffalo shootings. They are remarkably similar. Is it merely a coincidence that school shootings saw a rise with the proliferation of FPS games? It's a meme to talk about Doom in connection with the columbine shootings, but I can't get over this suspicion that maybe we were a little too hasty to dismiss these concerns in hindsight.
Many people have the thought while driving
This is not a dangerous or concerning thought to have. It's just idle daydreaming, it doesn't mean that driving to work is a gateway to incels attacking people with a van.
If somebody has the motive to kill others for pleasure, everything else about them may still be relatable, but that doesn't matter. If you don't share in the motive, the relatability is superficial. If you do share in the motive... unfamiliarity with guns and cars is a very flimsy obstacle to obtaining the destruction you want. If you're willing to die for it, killing a lot of people is an option all us have.
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I think any question of video game realism merits a mention of America's Army: a game published by the US government for primarily recruitment purposes. It's somewhat contemporary with Counter Strike, but I remember it for its emphasis on realism -- memorably: reloading only swapped magazines, and didn't reload them. It also forced players to sit through military-style training to get the ability to use some of the weapons and abilities.
One departure from realism was that they removed the ability for guns to jam. Happened all the time at first (realistic amounts) but pretty quickly they decided that letting a prospective recruit simulate being in mortal peril when his weapon inexplicably stops working wasn't great for numbers.
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America's Army also had a neat feature that I haven't seen elsewhere.
The player's team was always America. Enemy players saw themselves as America in their UIs.
Pokemon MOBA game, Unite, does a variant of this, in that you will always be blue team and always be playing left-to-right.
Wait...holy crap, I never thought about that but of course it does! That's kind of crazy!
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The most recent Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2), had a budget of $250-300 million. Let's assume that School Shooter Simulator 2023 would have to have a comparable budget in order to provide an effective substitute for would-be school shooters. You might counter that, of the $275 million-ish consumed by the most recent Call of Duty, not all of it went to development - presumably a large share went to marketing. But School Shooter Simulator 2023 needs a big development budget and a big marketing budget: it has to be both "good enough" from a technical perspective (satisfying gunplay, realistic art assets etc.) to provide an effective substitute for the real thing, and it needs to be sufficiently well-marketed that would-be school shooters are aware of it and want to play it. A well-designed game distributed for free is useless if no one plays it.
How many school shootings are there each year? Let's use last year as a benchmark and look at Wikipedia's list of mass shootings in the US. Let's assume we're only looking at Columbine-style "active shooter" events i.e. one or more people, probably mentally unstable, craving infamy (and optionally sending a political message), enter a school and fire more-or-less indiscriminately at students and teachers, with their apparent goal being to maximize their body count, and with no intention of effecting an escape thereafter. (We're therefore excluding gang shootings which took place in the vicinity of a school, drug deals gone wrong, teenage arguments which got out of hand etc.)
I count three meeting that description: District of Columbia on April 22nd (1 dead [the perpetrator turned his gun on himself], 4 injured), Uvalde on May 24th (22 dead, 18 injured) and St. Louis on October 24th (3 dead, 4 injured).
Assuming that these three perpetrators, had they had access to School Shooter Simulator 2023, would not have gone through with their respective shootings, School Shooter Simulator 2023 would have saved 26 lives and prevented 26 injuries at the cost of $275 million. This is about half the annual healthcare spend of North Dakota (pop. 800k).
To me, this all points to Columbine-style school shootings being vastly overpublicized relative to the actual amount of harm they cause. Last year there were 21,570 murders in the US, ~1/850 of which were the result of Columbine-style school shootings. Even assuming that that $275 million would be best allocated to preventing murders in the US, in my view Crip Drive-by Simulator 2023 would be a more sensible investment than School Shooter Simulator 2023.
From a pure body-count standpoint, yes, this is something we already knew. You could make arguments that pure body count isn't exactly the right metric (the victims are usually innocent children, while the median murder victim outside of mass events is probably an adult criminal) but there's no way any reasonable calculation covers the factor of 100 or 1,000 in sheer number.
One factor of course, is the pure emotion attached to children; the difference in emotional reaction to harming them and harming an adult is vastly in excess of any sort of QALY analysis or whatever. There might be evolutionary reasons for this, so I hesitate to call it wrong necessarily. Another factor is the uncertainty, probably alongside "it could happen to me": Most violent crime is relatively predictable. Murder is largely limited to very specific neighborhoods, towns, and groups of people. But a school shooting could happen anywhere, any day, to almost any school. To paraphrase Freakonomics on lynchings, few things are as powerful as the fear of random violence.
Between these 2 factors, it's certainly not surprising that school shootings provoke a much stronger response than you might expect given how many more murders take place in other contexts. The idea that your child might not come back from an ordinary day at school is terrifying, even if the probability is extremely low.
It also feels out of your individual control as a parent. For example, it's probably more likely that your child dies on the way to and from school (assuming they're being driven) than in one of these shootings (this source claims about 1,200 deaths for children aged 0-14 in car crashes in 2018). But people feel safer driving than e.g. flying, in part because they feel in control. Drowning is another major cause of death for young children, but also probably feels more in control, and isn't so violent.
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Perhaps the game could be f2p but with paid DLC for customization to reduce the effective costs? With AI tech getting better, it might be feasible in the near future to have players to pay to get their classmates and teachers into the game as NPCs, mimicking their looks, their voices, even their personalities and gaits, by having the players just submit video of the people in question. Even modeling maps after their own real schools might be possible (are public school blueprints available anywhere?). Or maybe a sort of gacha system - which is notoriously profitable for targeting people with poor impulse control, which teenagers tend to be compared to adults - for getting famous people and famous schools in. Imagine pulling on a banner so you can virtually shoot the cast of whatever high/middle school sitcom is popular among the kids these days in a virtual representation of the actual school depicted on the show.
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I don’t think school shootings occur because the perpetrator wants to experience the shooting for some pleasure gained, but because they want to make a statement about their own deep inner emotional turmoil. They hate themselves deeply and want to do the worst, most evil thing possible. So their “reward” from the shooting is not like the thrill a child gets from stealing a car, which may be sublimated from GTA4. Instead the “reward” is a kind of narcissistic ultra-suicide. They put their death wish on society, they lack empathy but most of all they hate themselves.
I think the trans shooter and Adam Lanza fit this mold: both autistic and deeply troubled and believe they were not loved enough as kids. The trans shooter made art on “to be a kid forever and ever”; Lanza called into radio stations talking about antinatalism. Interestingly, cultures like in the Philippines do not have randommass shootings (though they have other kinds) because children are raised to identify and feel belonging with their family, extended family, and “tribe”. They are raised to feel shame and its flip side, pride. I see school shootings as a distinctly American byproduct of individualism and decayed positive social emotion.
I think a huge problem is that we’re creating a lot of failed adults. Most of the shooters I’m aware of had trouble meeting the milestones of adulthood. Most had trouble getting into relationships, most of those who had graduated from school were barely employed, and generally in a low-wage, low skill position. They were also generally too-online, though I suspect this is more a consequence of isolation than a problem with the usual suspects of gaming and social media. I can’t really speak to their family history, because in general the only thing we have to verify that is the shooters words, and that’s probably distorted.
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It's probably worth noting that the more general term for mass violence, "running amok", was thought to be relatively unique to Malay culture at the time they coined the phrase.
If it's true that there was a rise in atomization/increase in negative social emotion in that culture, at that time period, relative to its neighboring cultures, this is a good point in this concept's favor, but Asia in the 16th-ish century wasn't exactly a bastion of individualism in general.
(Also, as a point of "pride": it's interesting that the rise of mass shooters generally tracks the elimination of pride as American social driving force. Guess the Reds really were good for something.)
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It might be easier and cheaper to write a few unofficial GURPS adventures. See also GURPS SWAT and GURPS Cops.
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Well I'm surprised, I thought for sure the old Police Quest/SWAT series would have included a mission to stop a school shooter but reading through the plots it doesn't appear to ever have done so. Lots of hostage rescues but never even a hostage rescue in a school.
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It may or may not reduce it, but it certainly doesn't eliminate entirely. There are so few real mass shooters that it would be hard to tell if anyone was actually dissuaded from committing a shooting due to the game, though the game would certainly be banned if even one shooter referenced it in his or her manifesto.
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School shooters are so rare that it would be impossible to determine if any intervention had any kind of effect, unless it was very dramatic (like the number of school shooting went up by 10x or ceased completely).
According to Wikipedia there were 52 school shootings in the US in 2022 alone, and that's not even an outlier. Seems like if you could cut if down by 50% that would be pretty noticeable, though it would be tricky to prove a causal relationship.
How many of those were just gang violence being carried out on a school campus? There is a big difference between an inner city gang member killing a rival on campus vs a loner white kid going on a rampage.
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Hold on, that list is bullshit. Do you think any intervention aimed at reducing school shootings would prevent: "A sheriff's deputy teaching a vocational law enforcement class accidentally discharged his weapon, grazing a student"? I count 10 legitimate school shootings in that list, and I'm being generous. If it went from 10 to 5 in a year would it be noticed? I don't know, I would have to look at what the variance is, but probably not. Maybe if the effect was that large and all happened in the same year, you'd be able to tell.
10/year to 5/year is ... very noticeable. Just over a year, with shitty math, that'd be a one-tailed p value ("how probable is an outcome equal or more extreme") of .056. Over ten years, 100 -> 50 would be a p-value of 2.8665157187919333e-07.
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A more comprehensive cataloguing of these shootings by category (lone wolf terrorism vs gang related vs romance related vs accidental discharge etc), as well as by national news coverage, would contribute a lot to this discussion but I don't have time to trawl through 50+ incidents. From a cursory look at the 2020s list by no. of deaths I hadn't heard of any of the top ten besides Uvalde and Nashville, which I find odd.
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Unironically: that incident absolutely sounds like it could be resolved by better (any?) firearm safety training. Someone broke at least one of the fundamental rules, probably all of them, if a negligent discharge happened in a school and (almost) hit someone.
But you're absolutely right it's not the sort of thing people mean when they talk about stopping school shootings.
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