Norwegian Mass Murderer Spent a Year ‘Training’ With World of Warcraft
OSLO Reuters – Norwegian anti-Islamic fanatic Anders Behring Breivik told a court on Thursday that he used computer games to prepare for his attacks, once spending an entire year isolated from society playing a game for hours on end.Breivik, on trial for massacring 77 people last July, said he spent “lots of time” playing Modern Warfare, a first-person shooting game, and also took an entire year off to play World of Warcraft, a multi-player role-playing game with more than 10 million subscribers.
This information may come as a jolt upon first learning it, but really, is anyone surprised?
A few weeks ago I reviewed Douglas Rushkoff’s new graphic novel A.D.D. Adolescent Demo Division, a sci-fi vision of the future in which the hyperlink-minded, video game-trained children of tomorrow have learned to use media and technology to take control of their lives.
No one should be surprised that just as virtual worlds can provide the tools for reprogramming ourselves and our communities, evil people can also use them to transform from incompetent video game nerds into neo-fascist terrorists who murder 77 and injure 319.
I speak often with my Gen-X colleagues and friends and the dynamic is usually the same: they’re wide-eyed about the depravity of human evil and very pessimistic about the future, and expect America to collapse from the poison cocktail of cultural rot and the ever-growing welfare state. They don’t buy (yet) my Ray Kurzweil-style talk of the unpredictable effects of technology’s exponential growth combined with the Howe/Strauss-analysis of what’s coming as the Millennial generation ages into young adulthood and middle age.
They almost delight in sending me items like this to confirm that their pessimism is justified. Technology won’t save us and there will be just as many Millennial devils as angels. Only now they’ll have all that technology to help them kill more effectively and an internet to spread their hatreds. In Breivik we have our worst nightmare come to life.
And the conversation with my friends always ends the same: yes, we agree about the facts and the severity of the threat. I’m just convinced that in the end we’re going to win because our ideas are better. Our ideas actually work — theirs don’t.
Oh, grow up.
You have my permission to be optimistic. Life’s going to get better.
We get it — you don’t like video games.
So you take the word of a murderer to crap on them. Guess what? The guy will say anything, EVERYTHING, to try to get out from what he’s done.
So, grow up. Things you dislike are not automatically evil.
I do like video games. Sorry you’ve misinterpreted my arguments.
I have to admit, that was my take-away from the first half of the article (Is this guy really going to tell me that video games made him do it?)
Then, the last half of the article took a sudden turn, and I really wasn’t sure why I spent any time at all reading it. I’m completely lost. Your statement to Rob just confused me more.
Could you attempt to clear up your “arguments”, please?
Indeed, the information about his affinity for WoW was available last year when he went on his sanguinary killing spree. I actually read through the entire Breivik manifesto after the incident, and could see it saturated with the sense of vicarious participation in an exciting clash of arms and civilizations. Breivik had a whole section in his manifesto on the design of the Knights Templar uniform, and how to procure it (literally, which vendors to purchase things from and how much it would cost). He designed a commemorative tombstone for the Knights who would fall in battle, and priced it out to boot. He had meritorious medals designed as well, with visual depictions appended to the text.
The impression the reader gets is that the guy has reached some state beyond insanity. Here’s my write-up from July 2011, for those who may be interested:
http://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/anders-breivik-post-modern-crusader/
He seems like a loser so I’m not surprised he played a lot of Warcraft. As for the connection – don’t see it.
There are 10.2 million subscribers to World of Warcraft, how many others are mass murders?
Wow. Sixty years later people are still doing the same BS that Fred Wertham did and confusing correlation with causation.
Do you know what every single mass-murderer in history has in common? They all breathed a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen every day of their lives. Should we then conclude that breathing causes mass murder?
Or, to look at it a simpler way, WoW has 10 million current subscribers, and I’m certain another 2 million at least have played the game at some point in its history. Add in all the other MMORPGs and you probably have 20 million subscribers. Add in violent games with an option to play online and you have, EASILY, 100 million people worldwide playing these games.
Which means that if there was any kind of causation between video games and murder we would expect to see at least a million murders each year committed by video game players. We’d also expect Japan, epicenter of videogaming, to have a very high crime rate when in fact the exact opposite is true.
So let’s stop trying to blame videogames, tv, movies, comic books and rock & roll for crime. It’s utter BS.
I’m trying to understand how playing WoW for a year prepares you for gunning down a bunch of unarmed people trapped on an island. Not much “craft” involved.
Dave, I think you missed the point here. Despite its stupid name, WoW isn’t really related to the sort of violence seen in this tragedy.
You skipped right over the bit that actually provided this psycho with the “training” he credits with having made him a more efficient killer: his months of play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare:
“I don’t really like those games but it is good if you want to simulate for training purposes,” Breivik said as he discussed [Call of Duty:]Modern Warfare, smiling when asked about the aiming system.”
CoD:MW2 in particular has one of the most unnecessarily offensive “levels” of any First Person Shooter I’ve ever encountered – a scene where your avatar/character accompanies a group of terrorists as they march through and shoot hundreds of civilians in an airport (I forget where). I uninstalled the game and tossed it in the garbage after seeing this. I’m guessing this psycho was rather inspired by it.
What factor in Breivik’s development as a mass murderer do you regard as most critical in enabling him to be so successful? I’m arguing here that perhaps his engagement with the internet, video games, and digital culture enabled him to develop himself so that he could plan out how to kill 77 people. But maybe I’m wrong. Which variable is the key one in the creation of a monster?
A sword and sorcery fantasy game may contribute to isolation etc. as can any game (or reading fantasy) but it seems a stretch to consider it some sort of training course on how to shoot people down with guns.
David, you’d be on slightly more solid ground if Anders Breivik stated that after playing the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2 he decided to go kill people. Almost. Trying to link anti-social behavior from playing hours of WoW to gunning down people just doesn’t fly.
By the way, several years ago, around when WoW was gaining in popularity, a man and a woman met through the game and got married in real life. Are you now going to say that WoW should be used as a tool to promote marriage? Probably not, because the idea that WoW will help increase marriages is ludicrous, even though it resulted in two people getting married. It is just as ludicrous to say that WoW is going to lead to increased pessimistic views of society to the point that someone is going to gun down citizens.
Maybe we should be more outraged that Anders Breivik will only serve 21 years in prison for the deaths of 77 people. That works out to less than 4 months per victim. Maybe the Norwegian courts should play a little more WoW to get an idea of what true justice means.
I attribute his success to a little bit of intelligence, reconnaissance, critical thinking and luck. He found an island full of future liberal leaders having their brains scrubbed. He disguised himself as a cop, cut off their avenue of retreat and began killing them. Because they had been so effectively cured of logic, the young progressives kept approaching Breivik for help.
“What factor in Breivik’s development as a mass murderer do you regard as most critical in enabling him to be so successful?”
His decision to kill actual, real people.
Video games might have improved his hand-eye coordination, but wouldn’t real exercise (with martial arts classes and a shooting range) have accomplished that much better?
As for what turned him into a monster, I think it’s obvious that Breivik is insane. I don’t know if he heard demonic voices compelling him to commit mass murder, but he’s obviously insane in that his moral compass is broken, and he believes that the survival of Norway depended on him committing atrocities. He seems to genuinely believe the murders he committed were good, not evil, and that history will regard him as the “hero who saved Norway” from being destroyed by multiculturalism. In that sense, he’s clearly living in a fantasy world.
It also seems obvious that he patterned his actions after Islamist terrorists, because he viewed their terrorism as being effective, precisely because it’s so violent and bloody (Breivik even said in court that he planned to “behead” the former Norwegian Prime Minister). Although he supposedly hated Muslims, and supposedly loved Norwegians, yet he murdered Norwegian citizens, not Muslims. Why?
Terrorism is a tactic to inject extremist viewpoints into the mainstream discourse, by traumatizing a target population to be sensitized to the demands of the terrorists.
After 9/11/2001, and the 2004 Madrid train bombings (resulting in an immediate about-face change of government to one more sympathetic to Islamists), and the 2005 London Underground bombings, a large segment of Europeans blamed the victims for causing Islamist grievances. Some high-profile European critics of multiculturalism like Theo Van Gogh were murdered, while others were silenced by their own governments and forced into hiding like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, and the Mohammed cartoonist, to name a few.
Unfortunately, apparently the lesson Breivik learned is that terrorism is an effective means to change European policy. I believe that’s why it’s important for him to create the myth of being part of a terrorist organization called the “Knights Templar”, because to be as effective in Europe as Islamist terrorism, the population would need to fear follow-up attacks unless the terrorists’ demands are met.
Breivik is insane, not just because he’s deluded in the belief that the ends (saving Norway from the policies of its own elected democracy) justified the immoral means of committing mass murder (including targeting children), but also because he apparently believed that he could influence Norway’s policies more than the combination of Islamist terrorism and leftist indoctrination to embrace multiculturalism.
Dave – I’m not a fan of it, but what I understand of WoW tells me that it has little or nothing to do with planning out mass murder. *I* could be wrong.
However, I do know that games like Call of Duty (which I enjoy frequently and see nothing wrong with) provide a fairly realistic setting within which to hone aiming with a holo sight and reactions to target movement… with a mouse and keyboard. To develop that same skill with an actual, firing weapon requires a completely different sort of activity.
And I understand the difference, as I was trained for combat using an M16 in the 70s and, much later, played games like CoD, managed servers for multiplayer, programmed mods for things like “freeze tag” variations, etc., for years.
I’ve never killed anyone. Neither has anyone I’ve ever played with online, to my knowledge.
So my one data point – and, I guess, those which include all the folks I’ve played with online… which probably numbers in the 100s – tells me that playing video games (especially WoW) is probably not the key you’re looking for. Rather, I suspect it’s more classical and bound up in Breivik’s broken psyche.
Having lived for decades during both, I don’t believe video games or online activities are really much different from the ‘couch potato’ activity so prevalent before the personal computer / gaming console revolution. Games are more interactive, but that’s about it.
Psychosis, however, is still psychosis, and that’s the only rational place to look for a key, IMHO.
Okay, now it does appear you’re drawing a correlation between playing a game and being a mass murderer.
You should look into a movie called Mazes and Monsters. Read up on the real-life basis for the movie. You remind me of the media’s twist on the investigator who originally looked into the situation.
How many millions of gamers play WoW and Modern Warfare? I’d bet there’s a huge cross over. Millions of mass murderers? Hmmm…not so much.
Seems like a pretty straight-forward observation could have avoided a lot wasted time and digital space.
He didn’t do anything special. He wasn’t uniquely “successful.” His victims were unarmed and trapped on an island. The only thing he had that other people don’t was the will to murder for his cause.
I’ve never played WoW; Hoyle Chess is about my limit.
That said, my first PC (back in 1995) came with the original shareware “Doom” and “Descent” on it. Having been through a shoot house or two in my misspent youth (even us test-tube jockeys had to qualify now and then), I recognized both as being basically clearing exercises.
After playing each through about twice, finding the goodies, etc., I didn’t bother with them again. They were sort of nasty fun the first time, but after that, they just weren’t that interesting to me.
I have more computer-oriented friends who can play games like “Dungeon Siege” for hours on end. They seem otherwise reasonably well-balanced.
From my limited experience, I’d say this individual’s problems weren’t caused by playing WoW. His fantasies are his own creation.
cheers
eon
Get back to me when a game is birthplace of an ideology that has killed millions and fostered a belief that man has no dominion over himself and is nothing but property to meet the needs of the state (Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto).
Actually it would seem that someone who was going to murder people with modern weapons in reality wouldn’t get much practice on Warcraft. It’s all done in a fantasy world with monsters and creatures. Now some of the first person shooter games maybe.
I find that if I play on WOW I’m less inclined to kick the dog (as it were). I do in some bad guys, do some quests, make some gold and decompress. Then I’m better able to deal with “real” people and “real” situations. Some people watch TV (dreck, dreck and more immoral dreck) some run, some woodwork, quilt, shop and on and on. Sounds like a straw man argument by people who don’t like the game or any video game to me.
Indeed, when he testified he said that his entire plan had gone awry becuase he was looking to blow stuff up. He was nowhere near accomplishing such a feat.
Delusions of grandeur that has nothing to do with World of Warcraft, and I don’t care much for the game.
Technology is a tool; nothing more, a means to an end.
If they’re pessimistic, perhaps they’re not exploiting those tools in the right manner.
Well, he “practiced” with Call of Duty, claiming it helped him practice “target acquisition;” World of Warcraft, he insisted, was just for fun.
I realize that your point is more-so a commentary on the effects of gaming-culture, but I just don’t see it. I’ve seen parents who have shielded their kids their entire lives, then freak out when they see their kids pretend their fingers are guns. If they don’t watch violent television or movies and don’t play video games, where does this come from? Firing a weapon and taking a life is very different than what any video game can portray. Movies are more violent and gory than ever before but they don’t seem to get the same attention, so what’s the deal?
Like some of the other posters have noted, there were some serious indications that this guys was missing some screws other than his game playing habits. The thing with his games only tells me that he had had self-control issues and too much time on his hands – and that is true for a lot of people the world over.
Swindle apparently has a hard time differentiating between what he sees on a TV screen and what he sees walking around, and assumes everyone else does, too.
Tipper Gore used to make the same points about certain types of music. The argument didn’t make sense then, and still seems just as weak.
Which is why I’m not making Tipper Gore’s argument. But the baby boomers are making the misinterpretation that it makes sense they’d make — reliving the culture wars of the 90s.
Based on the daily reports of thousands of cases of video-inspired shootings and deaths, it is amazing these evil enterprises have yet to be abolished.
“Thousands?” Really? No, I don’t think so. Almost all violent crime is drug and gang related.
Yes, and he was on junk food diet while hearing Twisted Sister music and watching Chunky
Since they have( or had) the Heimskringla as their main book , it does not surprise me from a norwegian.
Call of duty is effective for combat training like Madden is good training for the super bowl.
Am I surprised that he used ‘World of Warcraft’ as a training tool? Of course not. One of the experts in this field, Lt Col David Grossman, has been discussing this for some time.
We’ve had gunpowder for 500 years. Children have access to firearms for 200 years. Until the mid 1960′s a child could order any gun he wanted out of the Sears & Roebuck catalog and the post office would deliver it to his house. Yet it wasn’t until the 1970s and the advent of video games did we start to see this level of violence.
If you had ever played World of Warcraft you would realize how patently absurd that statement is.
Furthermore people going nuts and going on rampages is hardly a modern development. There is however a dramatic difference in the media coverage that these events receive. That in and of itself is a modern change.
BTW You can play to level 20 for free now. Why don’t you go look at the game you are vilifying before passing judgment on it? A position of ignorance is no state to make a decision in. Anyway, I have dailies to do. See you all tomorrow.
Really, how many people played video games in the 1970′s?
So Reuters considers World of Warcraft a terrorist training tool now. That means one of the following:
1) There are 10 million people training for terrorist activity
or
2) Reuters is staffed by clueless noobs.
Guess which one is most likely (Hint for Reuters employees. It’s not the first one)
Breivik was also a fan of the trendy cable TV show “Dexter,” which adopts a nonchalant attitude toward a serial murderer. But of course the liberal media will never say TV might be a bad influence. No, it must be these video games that have these clear-cut winners and losers.
E.M. Forester saw the handwriting on the wall a hundred years ago with “The Machine Stops.” That was long before overweight people sat in front of giant TVs eating mashed potatoes out of a great bowl watching wealthy women scheme, pull each other’s hair and drink a lot while doing essentially nothing.
Said folks stuffing their mouths with Cheetos while viewing other people actually living on crab boats and ice roads is a step up from that. Doctors do our health for us, rescuing us from not riding bicycles, running, skipping rope, etc. However no one can save us from never hiking the Inca Trail, climbing volcanoes for a lark, or motorcycling around Bali because it seems a good idea and a nice, sunny day to do it.
World of frickin’ Warcraft? I have something far more interesting – a door.
Millions will dig the ditch they are told to dig then piss their pants when the machine gun bolts slam home and die stupidly wondering “How did this happen to me?” The tiny minority will have to do what will be required.
It’s time to stop arguing over the culture war. It’s time to stop hunkering down for the apocalypse. It’s time to stop waiting to get beamed up. It’s time to start thinking Normandy.
If you sit home waiting your turn you deserve to have your gun taken from your cold dead hands.
The Founders didn’t wait for the Brits to knock down their doors. They gathered at the green and stood up like men and they killed government employees all the way back to Boston.
What will you do when it’s time to hunt NWO hacks, republicrats and commies(“Liberals” and ‘progressives’)?
Don’t understand? Start here: http://willowtown.com/promo/quotes.htm
Then read my column ‘Prepping for Slavery’: http://www.willowtown.com/promo/blogfpprepslvry.htm
I’m a 55 year old grandma that has played WoW for years. There is nothing in that game that could prepare you for mass murder. That being said, it isn’t to say there aren’t some real wierdos who play those games and begin to believe it’s real life. But you can’t blame the game for that. It’s sort of like guns. Guns don’t kill people, bad people with guns kill people. If WoW didn’t exist this nut would have found something else to obcess over. You can’t ban everything just because some nut decides to use it to be an even bigger nut.