I didn’t want to write about this. I thought the initial finger pointing would die down far more quickly. But every geek and game blog I’ve looked at the last few weeks has covered it in some way or another. Jim Wallace from the ACL made has appearance on news programs with a rant so ridiculous it borders on self parody on the subject. The subject of Anders Behring Breivik.

Anders Behring Breivik; a name that will no doubt, much to its owners delight, live in infamy. For that reason alone I was resisting the temptation to comment on how gaming relates to this terrible tragedy. It seemed... trivial I suppose, in the wake of such a horrible tragedy. But under the weight of all this commentary I have broken; we’re in for a terrible hurricane of stupid in the weeks to come and I just wanted to say from my soapbox to my fellow gamers, keep calm and game on.

Anders Breivik is the man responsible for setting of a bomb in Oslo near Labour led government offices, killing eight people. He then went on a shooting rampage at a youth retreat and killed sixty nine more people in cold blood, most of them teenagers. His reasons for doing this? Well they're pretty convoluted, he claims to be part of a modern day crusade agains muslim invaders, although most of the people he killed were christian Scandinavians. He claims to be working within an organisation despite there being no evidence of the fact. He's is currently waiting in prison for a what will likely be a ridiculous media circus of trial where he will continue to make wild claims and demands. At his arrest he was a vision of a man pleased with himself, delighted at his new celebrity and fully intending to milk the international interest in his lunacy right until the end. My guess, he's little more than an unhinged egomaniac, and rather than letting his legacy end with a quiet prison sentence I'm willing to bet he'll kill himself for a last hurrah following his trial. Possibly before hand if it's not televised.

Like millions, upon millions of people all over the world, including myself and very likely if you’re reading this yourself, Anders played Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. It’s pretty clear that he did this only to pass the time between completing his national military service and finalize preparations for this terrible crime, while he wrote his small minded and narcissistic ‘manifesto’. It’s in this document he makes a very small passing reference to the skills he learned from Call of Duty, barely two sentences. And the media have jumped all over this like crazy. Never mind that what he says about Call of Duty is baseless garbage easily refuted by anyone of active military experience, never mind that the rest of his 1500 page jack off manifesto rambles about conservative Christian values and garden variety paranoia about Muslims, never mind the fact it’s almost certainly the case that the reason he knows how to use a fire arm was through his mandatory national service, never mind that he mentions his admiration for John Howard and approval of Australia’s border protection policies, never mind that all of these subjects are far more news worthy than a few words about a video game, the media has latched onto those few words like a tick. It was announced that Warcraft and Call of Duty have both been banned from sale in Oslo, no word on whether the Bible or other books extensively quoted by Anders are facing similar banning.

Once again, it’s going to become distinctly uncomfortable to be an enthusiastic gamer. For some reason conservative Christians, gun enthusiasts, racists and xenophobes in general got a pass, but we’ve somehow come under fire. No, it’s not fair; in fact it’s monumentally backwards that we get singled out on National TV by member of the ACL Jim Wallace, a man whose homophobia and anti muslim diatribes in the past make him spectacularly unsuitable to talk about social justice and gaming. My anger towards people consumed by moral panic following terrible tragedy is tempered by a great deal of pity.

Things play out the same way every time, with a first year psychology ‘stages of grief’ predictability. Something incomprehensibly awful occurs, people are upset, people are shocked, people wonder how it could have been avoided, then the reasoning starts. People dig into the guilty individuals history and find something to latch onto, something that seems like both an alarm bell and an easy issue to act on. Maybe it’s video games, maybe its Marilyn Manson music; maybe it’s a club the offending party belonged to at uni that raises conservative eye brows. Honestly it doesn’t matter, the entire thing is a social coping strategy, most people don’t want to believe that Anders was simply crazy, or that the world is full of Anders brand of crazy and sometime in the future the same thing will happen again. People like to be in control and the terrible truth is life in general is largely out of our control. Right now the fearful are clutching their security blankets and demanding that something be done to prevent the next Ander’s, or Martin Bryant, or Ted Kaczynski, and stubbornly refusing to believe the simple fact that there is nothing they could or can do.

My only advice to my game loving brothers and sisters is keep calm and game on. The moral panic will eventually move on at some point; to underage sexting, or extreme owling, or whatever annoys the ACL and the Sunrise editor most when the media attention moves away from Anders and back to milk prices and Kardashian’s. Maybe this will impact the R18+ debate in Australia, but I imagine not. To quote the late Kurt Vonnegut (who recently had a book banned from a US school for similar ridiculous moral panic reasons), ‘so it goes’.

And spare a thought or a prayer for the people in Oslo, still awaiting the delivery of their loved ones possessions, still trying to process the tragedy. I imagine their thoughts are very far from the motivations or ramblings of the lunatic who visited such devastation on their lives.