You’re all alone on an alien planet, armed only with a handgun and the knowledge that an entire detachment of Marines has been wiped out by the creatures now hunting you down.
This is the world in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are said to have sought refuge, according to students at Columbine High School. The two teens who carried out Tuesday’s killing spree at the school in Littleton, Colo., were fans of the Doom game and even used it to get ready for their attack, one student said.
With techno music that pounds from computer speakers, Doom is one of several video games in which the player is a lone soldier who has to fight impossible odds, killing everything in his path until the game runs out of evil mutants, cyborgs and demons, or until the player dies.
Doom, like many games that succeeded it, leads players through winding, run-down industrial corridors, in and out of secret rooms and through ambushes as players strive to pick up progressively more destructive weapons, medical kits, armor and other artifacts.
As players kill attacking beasts, they rack up points. At the same time, they must continue picking up medical kits to prevent their own health–which deteriorates with every clawing and stray bullet–from dwindling to nothing.
One Columbine student, Alex Marsh, 16, a self-described member of the “Trench Coat Mafia,” of which she said Harris and Klebold were fringe members, said the boys played Doom to prepare for last Tuesday’s shooting.
“They did train on video games, like it was a real war,” Marsh told television reporters.
Other students said the boys began blending the game with reality by using paintball guns to practice shooting skills.
With its grim twisting hallways and myriad potential targets, there are parallels between the world of Doom and the reality Klebold and Harris likely encountered when they entered the rooms and corridors of Columbine High School.
Jean Cirillo, a clinical psychologist who works with teens and families in New York, offered an assessment of studies of human reactions to games and other violent media.
“For people who were a little angry, watching those things provided a needed release,” Cirillo said. “For people who were very angry, however, watching violence . . . increased their anger and helped them vent their energy negatively.”
She said the effect was more pronounced when the observed aggression was rewarded, as happens in a video game.
In his radio address Saturday, President Clinton highlighted the ultraviolent video games Harris and Klebold played as one of several possible societal causes for the Columbine shooting.
The president’s sentiments were shared earlier this month by the families of three teenagers killed in a shooting at a high school in West Paducah, Ky.
The families sued a handful of entertainment companies, including the makers of Doom, for $130 million, claiming the game, as well as violent movies, contributed to the 1997 shooting.
On their Web site, the makers of Doom, id Software Inc., have denied responsibility for the Colorado shootings.
“It seems like as the result of this, we’re going to start a culture war,” said Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist who has been monitoring reactions after the shootings in Littleton.
“(People are saying) it’s all because of the Internet and the video games,” said Butterworth, who suggested music, graphic movies and violent games should be relieved of at least some of the burden of responsibility.
“There is research that shows that when you play these things, you become desensitized, that it doesn’t bother them. But that doesn’t mean that a kid would then go out and do the real thing,” Butterworth said.
The games, he said, simply become trigger mechanisms for teens who, for whatever reason, feel disconnected from their families and schoolmates.
