School shooting video game was work of ‘a troll’
‘Active Shooter’ pulled after sparking outrage
The owner of video game marketplace Steam said it has removed a game where players could simulate a school shooting, a premise that sparked outrage among the families of survivors and turned out to be the work of a previously restricted publisher.
Valve Corporation said it has pulled Active Shooter, which was scheduled to launch on its Steam platform June 6.
Steam offers a developer program allowing smaller game designers to publish their video games — commonly played on PCs or Macs — on the platform.
Active Shooter was described as a “dynamic SWAT simulator” where players can choose to work as the member of a SWAT team attempting to disarm the shooter, or the shooter themselves.
After investigating the controversy surrounding the game, Valve learned a person identified as Ata Berdiyev was behind the game’s publisher, Revived Games, and developer Acid.
“Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation,” Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi said in a statement.
In the game, a box to the left of the screen kept track of how many police officers and civilians were killed. A video featuring the game briefly shows what appears to be the shooter firing at civilians as they try to run away.
The video game angered lawmakers and parents of school shooting victims.
“I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life. This game may be one of the worst,” Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was among the students killed during February’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Fla., said in a statement on Twitter.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson also condemned the game in a statement on Twitter.
“This is inexcusable,” he wrote. “Any company that develops a game like this in wake of such a horrific tragedy should be ashamed of itself.”
The game also spawned a petition on Change.org receiving more than 190,000 signatures urging Valve to remove it from Steam.
Steam includes several guidelines for inappropriate content including “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers.”
Valve plans to have “a broader conversation about Steam’s content policies” soon, Lombardi said.
Internet trolls, typically anonymous users who prank the unsuspecting on social media, have seized on school shootings and other violent incidents as a way to get attention or push an agenda. They shared images of purported victims of the deadly Manchester, England, bombings, individuals who turned out to be Internet personalities far from the attack. Doctored images of supposed mourners, some recycled from past tragedies, and suspects now regularly appear after mass shootings.
At the same time, the video game industry has come under attack — from lawmakers and President Trump — for violent games that they say desensitize people toward violence.
But various studies on games and violent crime, including one from the University of Texas in 2011, have indicated no correlation or the opposite holding true — such as higher rates of video game sales coinciding with a drop in crime.