The 11-year-old boy who shot Friday at his school in Torreón, Mexico - killed a teacher and injured classmates and another teacher before committing suicide - was "influenced" by a video game to perform the act of violence, according to the authorities.
This is Natural Selection , a game in which you shoot in the first person and also plan the strategy for a group of soldiers (called Frontiersmen in the game universe) to fight aliens called "Kharaa". It emerged from the Half-Life saga of 1998. And there are two versions, one from 2002 and a sequel from 2012.
The PC video game, as described by the official site, is about eliminating everyone on the opposite side, whether one chooses to play as an alien or as a soldier.
"He tried to recreate the video game," Miguel Angel Riquelme, the governor of Coahuila, said in a press conference, where the shooting happened. "Most likely he spent all day playing," added Riquelme, who said "even the boy had a shirt with the name of the video game."
https://twitter.com/NS2/status/1193998802056863744?s=20
A video game scene shared by the company that does it, Unknown Worlds.
It is not the first authority to suggest that there are links between video games with elements of violence and mass attacks; President Trump said last year, after shootings in Ohio and Texas, that "it is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence."
However, there is little data to support the idea that a person who enjoys video games will perpetrate violent acts accordingly. The American Psychological Association says that studies in this regard remain limited and that more research is needed.
An analysis done by the University of Oxford in 2019 found no direct links between video games and a significant increase in someone's tendency to violence; the same concluded studies of 2018 and past years.
"There is absolutely no causal evidence that violent video games lead to aggressiveness in the real world," researcher Andrew Przybylski told NBC News last year.
Although there are episodes of light aggression related to video games, that is not enough to consider that there is a causal relationship, according to other academics. "Many players get angry when they lose or feel that the game was 'cheating', but this does not lead to violence," Benjamin Burroughs of the University of Nevada told the Associated Press.
Coahuila authorities said they are also investigating what the family environment of the boy who opened fire at Cervantes College was like, to analyze the factors that led to the shooting.
Edited by Marina Franco.