34. Murder in Boston Blamed on Sega's Virtua Cop Video Game, with Lee Caraher

On a busy evening in Boston's financial district in 1995, gunshots ring out. When the smoke clears, a prominent divorce attorney is dead and a police officer is wounded. And Lee Caraher, then the Vice President of Corporate and Consumer Communications for the Sega Corporation, doesn't know it yet... ...but she's about to have a public relations crisis on her hands. Police would eventually uncover evidence that shooter John T. Lin "trained" for his revenge rampage by spending hours playing Virtua Cop, an arcade-style video game that puts a plastic replica pistol directly in the player's hands as they blast bad guys on a screen. And media coverage of the shooting would add fuel to the fire in the growing debate over video game violence that played out in the mid-90s. So in this episode, we rehash the story with Lee and parse the PR takeaways. And, since video games have been blamed for dozens of other heinous acts in the years since the shooting, we'll explore the relationship between violent media and violent behavior with two experts whose opposing views yield some surprising common ground. Clinton "Paperthin" Bader is an Esports commentator in Seoul, South Korea who provides expert play-by-play on professional video game competitions, which is a major form of entertainment in Southeast Asia. And Dr. Myriam Miedzian is a prominent critic of video games who served on President Bill Clinton’s Violence Prevention Task Force and worked on faculty at Rutgers and Barnard. She also wrote a 1991 book called Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence. While you're here, Sign up for the Podcamp Media e-newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices