Wow. What's interesting to me is how we easily see this guy as a a scumbag opportunist, exploiting the pain of others for his own gain, but we don't see the "news" outlets in the same light. Apparently all you have to do is moan about what a tragedy it is and say "we hate to have to show you this" when playing cell phone video for the twentieth time in a half hour and you can make all the money you want.

All this guy lacks is the veneer of respectability. They're all pondscum, IMO.

Wow - that certainly made me think.

Is he any worse than the other people who profited from this tragedy?

What is the standard? It seems to me that, too often, the standard is "whatever is unusual is wrong." We're used to the news reporting an incessant flow of images and emotions from the shooting. However, when a game developer puts you in a simulation of the event, that's unfamiliar and therefore worse.

What if someone wrote a book about it?

What if someone wrote a "choose your own path" type-book?

What if someone created a UT level before the shootings, and was selling it via his website, and the sales jumped up after the shooting? Even before the shooting took place, wouldn't anyone using the level be simulating a gun battle in a real-world place? Is that really that much less offensive just because an actual shooting had not taken place in that location (yet).

In my mind, one dividing line is "opportunism" -- which also tars the opportunistic media. Another line is "the feelings of the families" which seems shaky to me. What if he set his game at the local mall; perhaps there are people who work in that mall who
have experienced gun violence. Who is to say their feelings wouldn't be hurt by such a game?

Would we be as upset if this guy were just selling a 3D map of the crime with no first person shooting?

I think this guy crossed a line. But I think that he had a lot of help from the rest of us obscuring the exact location of that line.

BTW - this bullshit about the ransom is either a fresh brand of asshattery, or brilliant (yet contemptible) self-promotion. Probably both. That part is well beyond the creation of the game. No news media I know of asked for money to stop reporting.

It blows God of War's sacrificial goat out of the water.

(my previous comment only applies to having created the game, not the part about rubbing it in. Someone needs to explain to the dope that you can't buy an apology.)

I've been reading a lot about morality lately, as you know, and it's interesting that there are situations that are intellectually similar but we feel/act in morally different ways*. Clearly what this guy is doing feels much worse than the news outlets, and of course the ransom thing pushes it over the top, but why -- why is it worse? I don't think it's because it's an unfamiliar thing that he's doing.

His game puts the player in a morally despicable role. There aren't too many people who would admit to wanting to be like the VTech shooter. Whereas with the news, we're voyeurs. So that, I think, is the difference from the perspective of a person watching the news. But the perspective from the news outlets, their advertisers, and this guy, is at least in part that they're profitting from other peoples' tragedy. I do personally believe the news coverage was inappropriate and irresponsible. And this guy is a blight on society, but less so than Rupert Murdoch? No. He just doesn't know how to f*ck people over with style. Actually, he's a lot more open about it.

*At the beginning of Moral Minds, Hauser discusses the following two scenarios: you're driving in your new car and you see a girl hurt and bleeding by the side of the road. She'll die if you don't take her to the hospital, but it'll be a $200 bill to clean your upholstery if you do. Do you take her? Of course you do, it would be wrong not to. Then you pay the cleaning bill. #2: You receive a mailing from a very reputable charity, one well known for putting most of its donations toward the needy. For $50, you can provide 25 children with vaccine or drinking water or something that will save their lives. Most people toss these in the trash. Why are we morally obligated to help the girl by the side of the road, but not the 25 children in another country? He suggests (and I think he's right) that it's because we evolved to help people near us. We didn't evolve to even be aware of people far away, or to help people from photographs. People evoke an emotional response. Whether this is because people near us are more likely to be family and therefore share the same genes, or because there is a possibility of reciprocation, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure what's going on with this situation, whether it's the voyeur vs. antagonist, or something else, but it's very interesting.

Okay, I think I've figured out why they feel different.

The news, which burbles endlessly about society's ills, is an extension of our gossip network. People gossip about socially inappropriate behavior in order to learn the rules. (That would be the social benefit of gossip, and probably why we tolerate or enjoy it.)

Play, on the other hand, is used to mimic and learn socially appropriate behavior.

So in the one case, the news is filling the role of the gossip for us, and although we may have a little bit of disgust toward the person who tells tales about others, we're still interested.

Watching our children roll-play negative rolls, however, feels wrong. We would especially despise the person who encouraged them to do this.

Looking at it through the lens of making money off a tragedy, though, I see them both as despicable.

I'm not so sure I buy the evolutionary perspective as the sole (or even major) explanation here.
Of course, it's definitely valid. But, I think there's something to be said for the fact that we get bombarded daily with chances to help these people thousands of miles away that we've never met. Now, I'm not a guy with a family or any great amount of financial responsibility, but I imagine that if I gave $50 to every charity that blew my way, I'd go broke kind of quickly. We still have to look out for #1.
With the girl on the other hand, I'm not about to sit and watch someone in front of my eyes die when I can prevent it. The aforementioned people are a world away and might as well be a different species*, while this girl is next to me, and we at LEAST share a geographical location in common, and most likely several other things.
I guess that kinda does relate back to helping those near us, but it's alot easier for me to justify helping the one person in front of me who may die than randomly picking a charity to throw money at to save X number of people, and it's a given that I can't afford to help them all.
If I was rich, it'd be a different story, but unfortunately, that's not the case. =P

* This comment shouldn't be taken to refer to the race of most of the world's impoverished, but rather the fact that we share nothing other than a genus/class/species/etc in common.

You'd go broke? Are you living at the poverty level yourself? If you buy a cup of coffee every day, then you're spending nearly $500 a year (or more) on something very frivolous that you could spend five minutes doing for yourself. (I'm not saying you do, but I'll bet you could come up with a similar frivolous activity. Video game? Sunday drive? Fuel-inefficent car? Air conditioning when it's not dangerously hot? Buying food when you need it, instead of on sale? Not packing your lunch for work?) How can you (or I, or anybody) justify spending *that* money, but then say that if we contributed to "every charity," we'd "go broke"? That's 1000 charities at the $50 level. You get requests for money from 1000 charities? I don't think I get 100. Beware exaggeration. Be honest with yourself. You wouldn't go broke, you'd make a relatively huge contribution to somebody's life at relatively low cost to yourself. I'm not saying you should change your life, I'm just asking for a little honesty.

We would all be so generous if we were rich. How rich is rich? Aren't you rich, relatively speaking? We're talking, in many cases, about people who have to walk a mile to get their water. How far do you walk?

Why don't you buy the evolutionary perspective? What don't you buy about it, and what's your explanation? What you said is exactly what Hauser's talking about -- we evolved to help people close at hand. We didn't evolve in a society with global communication. We evolved to help people we can see with our own eyes, touch with our hands. It makes us feel good to help them. It doesn't give us the same satisfaction to help theoretical people.

I've only started the book, but I imagine it will build on ideas that aren't especially new, such as the idea that emotion is an integral part of our thought processes, and emotions evolved over time in ways that help us survive. This book in particular is about the evolution of morality. I'm interested in an argument that refutes it, but so far you haven't provided anything. (Not that I've done his arguments justice, I haven't read the book yet. But the basic idea from that section is that we have situations that are intellectually similar, but that we have very different feelings about. If it's morally right to save a life at a small cost to ourselves (and in fact despicable not to), why don't we save more lives at less cost?)

I guess for me, although the news has an element of voyeurism to it, I also consider it important information. Stuff I should know about.

Whereas a game is simply for recreation, for personal enjoyment.

I have a hard time with the idea that someone makes a game out of a real-world tragedy--encouraging people to get recreational pleasure out of a real world tragedy in which real people died. Although it's not the first time such a thing has happened--we have plenty of war games based on WWI and WWII and other famous battles. But a real-life killing spree by a psychotic maniac a mere month after the event? Just doesn't seem right to take pleasure from emulating or simulating that.

I realize my position isn't very well thought out, but that's how I feel right now about it.

It's really hard to figure out why we have emotional responses to things, because emotions are immediate. The "why" has its basis in biology, and we don't have access to that information the way we have access to our thought processes that exist above their emotional basis.

I don't think people watch the news because it's important information. I think that's what they tell themselves, because that's what the news is telling them. I think in the past it was actually a little better than it is now, because it wasn't on all day, so they had to pack actual information into a short format. But important information sounds a lot different from the news. The news is sensationalist, the news exists to sell advertisements. What sells is what hits us emotionally, not intellectually. Now I'm not referring to public broadcasting, I'm referring to the 24/7 "news" outlets that couldn't get enough of showing that cell phone video.

So why does this feel different from WWII? We think WWII was justified. We glorify war. We don't glorify socially aberrant behavior. Are there Vietnam games where the soldiers walk into a village and kill women and children? I don't know -- I'm guessing there aren't.

If you put the violence lens on it, then yes, they're both instances of putting yourself in the position of a protagonist killing other human beings. I do think we need to ask ourselves why it's different. It shouldn't be.

Some people will do anything for attention. Why give it to them if you don't have to?