Video games and social networks may have given form to the mass murder in Vračar, but they are not the essence or the cause of the crime, journalist and blogger Mihailo Tešić, an expert on gaming culture, told Deutsche Welle (DW).
DW: Barely a few hours after the massacre at the "Vladislav Ribnikar" school, the Minister of Education mentioned video games as one of the triggers, which was later accepted by the President. Why such quick conclusions?
Mihailo Tesic: This is mostly mentioned by people who do not know what the gaming world is, and it is a special phenomenon that really has its own pathologies. I understand why many people think there is something there.
But when you blame one aspect of pop culture, it ignores everything else. Pop-culture is bulky and diverse, from books to comics to movies, and in all of it there is violence, and sometimes even the glorification of violence. Usually people apostrophize video games in particular, because they think that there you are part of the scene, there you are actively doing something.
However, when we look at how much the generation already has the opportunity to play violent video games, it does not seem to affect those who burst out and do something like this in Vračar. There is no higher incidence among gamers.
At one time, the film "Hell's Orange" was targeted by the establishment in the West.
Among others, yes. When Minister Ružić directs us to America, let's look at it as the country that, unfortunately, has the most experience with something like this. Ever since mass shootings have been occurring more and more since the XNUMXs, everything has been blamed: movies, satanic sects, board games... In the XNUMXs, many people wanted to score political points by blaming video games. Today it has reached social networks, especially TikTok.
You said that the gaming world really has its pathologies. What do you mean?
Unlike other forms of entertainment, video games may draw people in more easily. Everyone who plays has had the chance to play, and spend twelve hours in front of the computer. Who is more introverted and more afraid of the surrounding world, can be even more strongly drawn in and this can be a kind of pathology. Then again, people also get lost in books or the fantastic world of movies.
Still, none of this is a sufficient explanation for the carnage. There must be some other pathologies, psychological predispositions that spring up in the family and elsewhere, as fertile soil.
On one of the papers found with the 13-year-old perpetrator of the massacre, he listed "primary targets" in English. Do you see the influence of video games there?
It gives shape to his campaign, but it is not the essence. If it weren't for video games, it would be something else. A hundred years ago, he might have been reading "Crime and Punishment" and hit someone with an axe.
Here and there, we have also seen congratulatory messages from young people on social networks, where they talk about mass murder in the slang of games, and discuss how many "kills" he had and the like. How to interpret it?
The same. Children form a way of communication through what they do and live, it's been like that since there have been teenagers. They play games and spend time on TikTok today, and they will use that terminology in real life.
I see general outrage along the lines of "how can children react so heartlessly"? But, kids at that age cannot conceptually understand what happened, they simply do not have a sufficiently developed brain system to process it. It's a neurological fact.
President Vučić said that the attacker imagined that in reality, as in the game, everyone has more lives.
Yes. Not only children, but also the elderly, especially the middle class, have the opportunity to live virtually for a good part of the day, without touching real things. Children are especially cocooned in the virtual. School, house, phone, little contact with the real. Then they can't even cover it.
"Western culture" was also mentioned, although it would be more logical to talk about American culture. Can it be said that something is imported from the USA?
Yes, and it was well received - the economic system. Individual profit is primary, everyone is for himself, and we are in the market competition in everything, from school, to work, to free time. This was grafted onto our society, which, whatever it was, was different until the nineties. We got a terrible mixture in which children grow up much differently than us, and we, who grew up in the nineties, significantly different from our parents.
Is that exactly why people, confused, cry out for answers and offer simple explanations for these massacres?
Searching for the culprit is preferred, a simple solution. And with us, everything is postmodern and still unclear - we have a dictatorship that is actually democracy, liberal capitalism, but with a socialist heritage. Almost no one believes in the system, except in the right of the stronger and more arrogant.
This is often avoided by invoking the past, and the people who do this are not sure what that past is. Some will invoke Tito, some the king, some the gender society and the death penalty. But they constantly refer to the times of their grandfathers when it was not like this. And it is not, but the answer is much more difficult and complex.
To me, turning from the collective to the individual, to acquisition instead of searching for a life in which you are calm and satisfied, seems key.
There is a lot of talk about the role of the media. The facts about these misdeeds can be listed quickly, but the non-stop live program and thousands of texts on the portals are looking for something new. Is that why there is a bit of speculation??
The media should fill the daily cycle, and such things are of interest to everyone, everyone feels affected, this is a trauma. And after all, those media also work for profit. They are no longer primarily there to inform, but are someone's money making machine. Inflation of content leads to guesses and various interpretations, so to some extent we both do that too.
The authorities quickly adopted some measures, such as the desire to rein in the darknet or to lower the age of criminal responsibility. Does that make sense?
That with the darknet is just rambling. That would mean banning a lot of things on the classic Internet, and that's not going to happen.
The first impulse of both people in power and those who pretend to be in power is to please the people, to act as if they are thinking and can do something quickly. Things are complex and I cannot say what the effects will be. But, let's say, who would be the first to be affected by lowering the limit to 12 years? Children who steal, or beg, probably many Roma children. Such speedy measures often hit the most vulnerable instead of being a solution.
*Mihailo Tešić is the editor of the Serbian edition of the online magazine VICE. He worked as a screenwriter and writer of narrations for video games, and the comedy show "Dnevnjak". He often deals with American pop culture.
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