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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"?
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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