I was very surprised when in The Alchemist I read that a young Thai man of 18 years old** stabbed to death** a taxi driver while recreating a scene from the well-known Game Gran Theft Auto. According to the news, the boy confessed that he was trying to see what it felt like to steal a taxi and if it was as simple as in the game, when the taxi driver resisted he stabbed him several times, causing his death. Now the teenager faces a death sentence by lethal injection and the video game has been removed in Thailand. There have also been other similar cases, as mentioned in 2005, another teenager killed two police officers and an emergency service employee, after playing GTA for months.
There is no doubt that they are very serious misfortunes, but I wonder, how many young people have played GTA since it came out? Surely millions, of which a couple of psychopaths have gone to the extreme of committing atrocities like those mentioned. Some time ago at a conference on video games one of the speakers expressed his perplexity upon seeing in the newspapers: “Pepito kills 5 people after playing GTA for months” and asked why there are no headlines like “Pepito kills 5 people after leaving the church”. There was also talk at the same conference that the press highlighted: ”[…]in a game in which you can kill a prostitute with a bat in an alley[…]”, of course, in the game there are whores, bats and alleys, but the idea of putting it all together comes only from the player’s mind, and let’s be honest, it is preferable that they can do it in a game than in real life…
In my opinion, things should not get out of hand, there have been and will be psychopaths in all times, it is the human condition to do horrible things, but are video games always to blame? I personally would prefer to see my son (if I had one) playing GTA on Play3 than “passing coke in the park”…