It's a pretty distressing day for gaming. First, Tyrone Spellman beat a 17 month old child to death when she knocked over his console. And now, news reports indicate that Kimveer Gill — the gunman responsible for yesterday's Montreal shooting spree — was influenced by the home-brew game Super Columbine Massacre.

"Life is like a video game," Gill wrote. "You gotta die sometime."

The question this and other tragedies raise, of course, is if gaming is a factor in what these people have done. And — whether we like it or no — it's a valid question, well-deserving an answer objective of our own passions.

But the question isn't whether or not video games make people killers. The question is whether art — the product of human creativity and sensitivity and emotion — makes someone willing to take a human life. Because the distinction between one medium of art and another is, at the end of the day, almost entirely semantic.

But did Catcher in the Rye make Mark David Chapman murder John Lennon? John Hinckley Jr. — the would-be assassin of Reagan — was also obsessed with the book. Did Catcher in the Rye make them killers? Or were they already killers drawn to the themes and misanthropy of the book, who would have committed their crimes regardless?

To me, it seems clear that any claims that games influence real-world violence have massively oppressive repercussions on art as a whole. A book like Catcher in the Rye would not be read — let alone taught in school — if society caved into the belief that what a man enjoys is solely responsible for the man that they are. Condemnation of games is a condemnation of art. But it's troubling that so many people can't see past the latest societal bugbear to the larger issue of freedom. Florian Eckhardt

Killer Loved Columbine Game [Toronto Sun]