Yesterday, a terrible tragedy took place at the Domodedovo airport in Moscow. Is there some way videogames could have caused this? Of course there is.
In a TV report on Russia Today, a channel that is financed by the government, news editors spliced together footage from Modern Warfare 2 and the video taken from yesterday's presumed suicide bombing. The reporter in the piece emphasizes twice that the game was made by an American company, and says it is very similar to the attack that happened in the real world.
Walid Phares, a "terrorism expert" from FOX News, said he was "troubled" by how closely fiction mimicked reality, less than two years after the game came out, and insists that we have to know if terrorists are using games to "apply the model."
In the events at the real airport, a suicide bomber walked in and detonated himself, killing himself and dozens more in a matter of seconds. That's not really what happens in MW2, and The New York Times points out that 'No Russian' more closely resembles the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Yet, say the people in the broadcast, both are eerily identical because they both happen in a Russian airport. The airport in Modern Warfare 2, incidentally, is not a real airport.
The report ends with the newscaster saying that "so far," no one has come forward to condemn the game. Though, they kind of just did.
[Source: New York Times]
Jan 25, 2011
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