Virginia Tech killer had brief brush with Counterstrike

WE GOT AN EMAIL from the anti-violent video game activist Jack Thompson telling us we were completely wrong about there being no link between Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung Hui and violent video games.

Thompson showed us a link from a Washington Post article which quoted the following phrase "Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft*, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns."

Thompson claimed that Hui "trained for his killing spree on the counterstrike game" and told us that we had "got the story wrong" and should print a retraction. We checked the story and it appears that the quote that Thompson had cited has been scrubbed from later editions.

That is not to say that Thompson was wrong. It appears that Joystiq managed to get hold of the writer of the original story Washington Post staff writer David Cho.

Cho said the information was based on talks with some high school acquaintances of Hui's who occasionally saw him playing at an cyber cafe during his high school days three and a half years earlier. So far there was no indication that Hui continued to play during three-and-a-half years at college.

In fact, there was a lot of evidence that, while Hui was on the computer constantly, he was usually writing, not playing games. The local Virginia Tech Counter-Strike players had never heard of him and he hadn't attended a recent Counter-Strike tournament held on campus. µ

Note
* Microsoft did not publish Counterstrike. That honour belongs to Valve.