Almost ten years ago, I was on the grass at Clement Park adjacent Columbine High School covering what would become the world's most iconic school shooting.

Last week, I was on the Internet reading about the Winnenden, Germany school shootings, and nothing had changed. The breaking news in the search for answers was a familiar brew of gun control, parenting, and violent video games. A tough Spiegel Online piece Monday brought them all together when a commentator wrote, "But we have debated about weapons laws and video games for long enough. Our biggest problem are parents who aren't doing their jobs."

I can't fully point the finger at the Winnenden parents, nor the Columbine parents. We still don't have enough information on either of them. (Although sadly, you might note, it's ten years after the April 20, 1999 Columbine shootings, and only about ten days after Winnenden.)

But I was surprised to see video games become the bogeyman again. Call me naive.

Tragedies can bring about positive change, and Columbine is no exception. Police have adopted "active shooter" policies to charge in rather than hang back and form a perimeter when facing school shooters. And there has been new scholarship into what makes school shooters tick.

I began a ten-year odyssey of book research because I felt there had to be some common denominators causing school shootings. Traditional theories of juvenile delinquency would not do; school shooters did not tend to be warped by drug abuse, physical abuse, or poverty.

It's wrong to say the video games played by Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had no effect on them. As I write in the book, previously excerpted here on Kotaku:

Video games may have given Eric and Dylan paths for their anger: Postal had details that previewed Columbine, and Doom's philosophy of the lone Marine against the rest of hell helped inform Eric and Dylan's us against them mentality. The game's tough as nails descriptions also seeped into their brains and influenced Eric's writings. Staring at the computer screen would keep Eric and Dylan from developing the social skills to merge with the rest of the world they so desperately wanted to connect with.

But Eric and Dylan were not the only ones exposed to the joysticks: In one week in 1997, sales of Postal hit 15,000 copies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The video games did not cause their anger. That came from elsewhere.

That elsewhere, I have found, is in America's seemingly picture-perfect backyard: Suburbs and small towns in the South and West. Virtually every Columbine-style shooting has occurred on those grid points. My forthcoming book Columbine: A True Crime Story, a victim, the killers and the nation's search for answers notes:

There is not just a psychological profile of school shooters, but an environmental one - one which fits both Eric and Dylan. School shootings overwhelmingly occur in suburbs and small towns, which may be rich in sports, shopping malls, and BMW's, but poor in diversity and tolerance. Deviation from the whitebread norm is punished, and the high school campus is often the sole arbiter of adolescent status. A loser at school feels like a loser through and through. School shooters have no escape hatch, and nowhere else to turn for self-esteem. Options outside of school off ered by a big city are not found in small towns and suburbs: There is no Hollywood Boulevard for the punk rockers.

The template for suburban school shootings may be the inner-city, youth violence epidemic from 1985 to 1995 that "seeped into pop culture" as one study put it. Columbine, along with Littleton and the other school shooting locales, are the exact opposite of crime-infested, poverty-ridden high schools in Detroit and Watts. But thousands of Columbines across the country are tough, in their own suburban and small town way. Status and cliques are as virulent as gang warfare, and the outcasts face stiff odds. After too many marginalizations, dating rejections, or bottles thrown at them white, middle-class, disaffected youth may have hijacked the violent, inner-city solution.

The homes to school shootings have different names but the same genetic makeup: Springfield, Oregon. West Paducah, Kentucky. Pearl, Mississippi. Santee, California. They form a violent crescent through the South and West. Here, the spiritual forefathers of school shooters are Western gunslingers and Southern duels. Simply put, the psychologist Richard Nisbett notes, "The U.S. South, and Western regions of the United States initially settled by Southerners, are more violent than the rest of the country."

Jeff Kass, a former reporter with the Los Angeles Times and more recently the Rocky Mountain News, is the author of Columbine: A True Crime Story - A Victim, the Killers and the Nation's Search for Answers

Excerpts from his upcoming book.

Teenage boys (of all ages and genders) need not worry that mindless games will become obsolete. We will always love action movies, and Hollywood blockbusters will always be more popular than quiet, character-driven films. But gamers have a right to expect more than what the medium now has to offer.

Video games are still emerging from their infancy. The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade was when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step isn't Halo 3.

I think Radosh makes some good points, and there's little doubt in my mind that narrative design in games needs some serious tweaking. But the point about gaming really being in its infancy - especially compared to film, the medium most frequently held up in compare-and-contrast discussions - is one that bears repeating. Discussions from the '20s and '30s in regards to the art of film making frequently resemble the same things we yammer on about in regards to gaming - and there's hope yet. Just maybe not in the form of Halo.

The Play's The Thing [NYT via GrandTextAuto, photo credit NYT/Ulises Farinas]

For a generation of marketers raised on TV and print, the internet is a gray nebulous. What works in traditional media? Getting as many eyes on a new product as possible — that creates buzz. But since the internet doesn't have "Prime Time" per se and is powered by a series of sites (not channels or publishers), focusing those eyes all at one time and one place poses a challenge online.

Hence countdowns.

We've touched on this before. Yesterday, even. We hate countdowns. Lemme reiterate that, we HATE countdowns. They're lazy, unimaginative marketing. The hope is with these countdowns that everyone will be looking at something at the same time — like with TV and print to a lesser extent. It's a way for people in business suits to measure publicity. Thing is, with the internet, more eyes doesn't always mean good publicity. This of course is not unique to the internet, but the key different is that we interact with the internet more so than traditional media. Of late, we've seen the following:

• Super Smash Bros.
• Island of Rhodes? ISLAND OF CRAP
• Bethesda Counts Down To "Please Stand By"

There are of course more. Are the game developers to blame? To extent yes and to an extent no. Developers develop games. That's what they do. The success of these online campaigns should not reflect on the actual game because they don't. Yet, the front office people hire marketers and approve plans. In that regard, they are at fault. What about us? Why do we cover them? That's what we do, we cover gaming trends, news and other stuff. Are we to blame? Yes and no. If we report on them, gazillions of people find out about them. If we don't and actual information is released, then we are not doing our job. But, just for second if companies had a month or a week countdown for a press release. That would annoy every press outlet to no end! But companies have no problem doing this via a game's site, and we have a big problem covering this lackluster marketing.

What works online? From what I can see, snowballing. Take a look at internet memes. They start small and get bigger and bigger. Sometimes they are unintentional, sometimes intentional. But they all start with something being posted. And because that original post is interesting, it gains ground. Companies tried this with viral marketing, but that style is often insulting. So now, these countdowns build up to that original posting. Why don't companies just release that info without announcing that they plan to do so X number of days later? Because it's scary, risky. What if nobody looks at their site? What if nobody notices? How horrible! Having faith in whatever information they are releasing means not hyping up that information. If it's really important, people will find out about it. Put it up on your site, don't lie to us and if it's good, we'll click away and crash your site with traffic. That's how the internet works, and that's how it works beautifully. Wise up, companies. The rules have changed. Brian Ashcraft

About 24 hours after Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and then himself, I received an email from an editor at a New York newspaper asking me to write a piece about violent videogames.

Was there any link between Cho Seung-Hui and videogames? I asked.

There wasn't, as we know now, and even the editor admitted the next day that it was a request that had come from his editor who'd been scrolling through TV that night.

My editor's editor must have stumbled on Fox News where Jack Thompson hypothesized confidently that authorities would soon find videogames on Cho's computer (they haven't as of this writing), or read the online Washington Post story saying that former high school mates said he was a Counter Strike player (a claim later cut from the story when it ran in print form), or Dr. Phil on Larry King Live lamenting the presence of violent videogames in young people's lives.

I've been writing about videogames for six years now and have answered countless questions about videogames and violence on radio, TV, and podcast. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. But there was something about the knee-jerk immediacy of the assumption that videogames must have been involved that took me aback. I wasn't being asked for my opinion, but rather to serve up one more version of an apparently accepted truth: violent videogames lead to violent behavior. Sometimes I wonder if these people don't realize that most Americans under a certain age play video games - that it's really not that extraordinary when it turns out that the sick among us do too.

The deep, deep irony in this case is, of course, that Cho's passion was not Doom - but play writing. I certainly haven't seen any op-eds about the dangers of creative writing.

(Though it may be worth mentioning that the debut of fiction as a popular form of entertainment was met with as much distaste and suspicion in its day as the videogame. Were this several hundred years ago, we may very well have been deluged by anti-creative-writing rants.)

It's natural for people to want to make sense of the disorder of the universe. When tragedy strikes at home or in one's community, one feels a keen need to understand. Why me? Why us? If only we could answer that eternal why, we could put to rest the pain of knowing the universe can deliver up something so horrific. How much easier is to say, it was the videogames! then to come to terms with the kaleidoscope of factors that leads to events such as high school shootings.

Just as I refuse to play blame-the-videogame, however, so too do I refuse to pretend that our mass entertainment isn't part of the equation. Frankly, if you're so defensive about videogames that you refuse to acknowledge that they effect us, then I'm going to have to say you're being as knee jerk as Monsieur Thompson.

I found the snap shot Cho took of himself with two guns raised in the air that he sent to NBC News the most disturbing reminder of this reality. It's an eerily generic reference to any number of pop culture images - from underground rap videos, to game stills, to action movie posters. (John Woo flashed into my mind. Who came into yours?) It was as if Cho were mimicking some vague idea of empowered cool soaked up through years of culture osmosis. His pathetic mimicry gave us a glimpse into who he felt he had become midway through his killing spree. It doesn't give us license to lay the blame for Cho's actions at the feet of pop culture, but it does remind us that yes, duh, our culture influences us.

And let's be honest. As a culture, we fetishize violence - and I don't just mean the faux-violence of games like Postal, Gears of War, or Counter strike, or of TV shows like the seemingly endless spin offs on Law & Order and CSI. The fact is, whether we want to admit it or not, we're seeped in violence both virtual and real. We don't just play violent; we are, deep down at our core, violent.

Look at our history. We've been waging war every day since manifest destiny first became popular more than a hundred years ago - some above ground like the current war in Iraq, others clandestine like our campaigns in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Central America. You don't become the world's super power by sitting on your heels picking daisies Just a few years ago, we gave the go ahead to our government for a policy of pre-emptive strike. What is that if not an emphatic endorsement of violence as the prime solution to a given problem? Members of the Roman Empire would have been proud.

And as the Virginia Tech shootings reminds us once again, anyone who wants a gun can get one as long as they can pay for it.

Most of us learn how to abstract away the faux-violence of pop culture and to stay numb to the real violence in the world around us. But when one of us does become sick - really sick the way Cho was - perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that the sickness manifests itself as a bloody reflection of all the culture showed him.

To blame violent videogames for this, let alone videogames as a medium, is short sighted, hypocritical, absurd, and, frankly, a little desperate. It's an argument made by people who fear a medium they don't understand and want a bogeyman more than they want real answers.

Heather Chaplin is the co-author with Aaron Ruby of
Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment & Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She writes regularly about games and game culture for publications like the New York Times, the L.A. Times and NPR's All Things Considered