If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.
b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.
c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.
It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.
The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.
So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.
If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure. Welcome to monkey planet.
I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqx4wlynjw5o
How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.
> everything you read online is false
In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?
Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.
I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.
I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.
The real problem is when the internet leaks and boomers assume everything they read online is true.
Worst part of it all? My parents always told me not to trust what's on the internet, and now I have to tell them 99% of what they see on FB or whatever is AI trash and lies.
4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.
But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.
I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The same behavior can be found of every breed of human and they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or taboo enough.
As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing out they are just LARPing.
The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.