"Gaming Community" Connected to Pipe Bomb Attack

[Mikodite]

Why do I feel like these people would be less than 3 degrees from Jack Thompson? How does a pipe bomb attack point fingers to gaming?! That's like blaming someone for killing someone's pet because they live near a slaughterhouse.

I'd like to know what the basis of the accusation is, the mental state of the bombers, and what they say their motivations were.

Glad to see the Black Scottish Cyclops there.

And this story? Just "The gaming community"? The whole thing? Is that even a thing? Because that's a damn massive and diverse community.

I blame the god-awful traffic here on the people who read books.

Had it not occured to them that their older son might be quite a bit of a dick? There have been plenty of examples of trolling gone too far, it was only a matter of time before a troll pissed off someone who then went on to physically retaliate.

Whole WoW guilds fall apart because of petty politics or even because someone didn't get the item they wanted. Then there are the thieves. If indeed it turns out that he is the "cause" of the alleged attack then it's reasonable to assume that he's probably done at least one of these things or similar and done it to the wrong person.

Hmmm, well I think people are being too reactionary without enough information. People don't generally place blame like this after an attack like this one, without reason.

People decrying the blame being placed on video games aren't putting much effort into thinking about how a gaming community could be involved in this, which is pretty easy to see.

To be honest at times like this people tend to forget that there is a lot of real money involved in games right now, virtual items with real cash values are being bought and traded, and people have ebayed things for games like "Diablo" for huge piles of money. Then there are EVE Plex stockpiles, Second Life property developments, and other things. Not to mention the big business of selling game currency for real money. Organized crime, including syndicates on an international level, have gotten involved in things like gold farming, and using video game currencies and exchanges to pass real money around.

[...]

There are some other reports out there that seem to indicate that the Son of the victim was a bit of a neighborhood problem, and tended to run with entirely the wrong crowd. I'm guessing this is not a World of Warcraft guild. More likely it is a crew of Meth dealers that had a falling out.

I'm in the camp of "Lets wait and see where this goes." After all, just what kind of involvement the "gaming community" has will play out in court: after all, the judge is going to want to know what the motive was for sentencing.

Yes, the very vagueness of the article does disturb me, but is it vague because the journalist doesn't have all the information yet or is it because they are trying to use fear tactics and blame an abstract boogyman to boost pageviews/ratings and push an agenda (Maybe I need to remind some of you that that thing with Anita Sarkeesian is still fresh in our minds and therefore making 'the gaming community' out as such a boogeyman wouldn't be that hard to do at the moment)?

So it could be a guild-fallout gone wrong. It could be a gold-farmer that wanted out, but is stuck with a crime syndicate. It could be a troll getting his comeuppance. Or it could have absolutely nothing at all to do with gaming and could be that CBS is making a boogeyman out of something that many people are not familiar with (thus why we need to include more people into gaming: familiarization) and have been getting a bad rap as of late. We shall wait and see.

 

[Aeonknight]

I'm kind of surprised people made the "what was he being a demoman irl!?" reference. TF2 doesn't even fit here.... I'm personally curious if the assailants screamed "TANK!".

 

[Captain Anon]

oh god not this shit again seriously we haven't got anything to do with this neither does WOW or COD just some seriously fucked up pieces of shit thought they would just set someone's house on fire WITH THEM IN!

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

I'm actually kind of intrigued as to how they got to that conclusion.