So I signed up to their "your voice" forum and made a big complaint on the columbine massacre section saying basically "Doom is being scapegoated by the media, and I can't stand it, they are making utter BS to demonize it, nor can I stand how people in schools are being put in detention for merely Playing Doom, It did not cause Columbine!". However what would transpire next, would reveal to me how idiotic the populace of this small forum in Colorado were. It became apparent that these people on the forum Blindly beleived that Doom caused Columbine. I was insulted and attacked by an Anonymous Internet troll for 3 months along with 5-6 other gamers all trying to defend the game on the forum. This troll worked by a very specific and obnoxious formula. He would single out posts he didn't like and quoted them sentence by sentence replying to each quoted sentence with insults, death threats, constant curses and sexual innuendo, and worse... This kept on happening for hours each day from may to august 1999. The person threatened to "Crack my Skull Open" for merely Stating that "kids being killed should not lead to the rights of adults to buy and play violent games". This was a rude response to the quote said by the troll "All of you value your video games over the lives of the victims". But since the troll called us "Gamer Shitheads" this response of mine was necessary, because this person was insulting any gamers right and left on the forum. And when he called all of us "Gamer Shitheads" he personally insulted me too. The troll also told me to:
"Crawl up your mothers fly infested Cunt", "your mother should have aborted you with a coat hangar!!!" and much worse... The moderator of the forum did nothing. Didn't even care. Fucking asshole! The only post that was deleted was the trolls last one, which I will get into later. The fact I was being insulted, threatened, meant nothing to these fucking idiots on the forum and the newspaper. They didn't care. To them we were all like Eric Harris or worse...
By this point the death threats and worse made me want to get revenge. And that's what I did. I got the Doom Community I was in to fight for me on their forum. We were gonna make that forum go insane for 3 months. I got my best friend from High School, a guy I will only call "Hitman213". to sign up to fight as well. He came first and said that video games do not cause real violence, and something similar. Soon the troll demanded he change to his real name because the name "Hitman213" offended the memories of the victims. So he went back to his real name and mercilessly fought this troll but it took 3 months to get this fucking moron to shut up. Soon a whole bunch of idiotic posters from the forum kept attacking us for "not saying our respects". To them merely defending Doom was saying "Rachel Scott deserved to Die!" or something equally heinous. When A Guy named Gokuma from the Doom Central or Doom Nation Forums immediately followed Hitman213 in claiming "Video games don't cause violence, it's BS". But the Troll immediately said "WTF! You're all the same person with different accounts! You are the same person as Hitman213!!" It's like this person believed there were no gamers outside Hitman213 and me and we were all signing up with different accounts to defend doom. It was hilarious then and in a way it still is, but the person was clearly a complete paranoid wackjob..
They were literally zealots who believed everything they heard at face value, including the "Hack Psychologists Claims". The troll cited these claims. Then one of the Doom Forum guys "Gokuma" stated that psychologists are Charlatans and that Psychiatrists are a lot more credible. This did not debunk the claim though so the troll said "That's nonsense you Gamer Shitheads are trying to pan to defend your game!!!"
Right around then another Doom Forum Guy formed a new Account "Dr. Mingels", and said "Video Games actually have positive effects on kids". Immediately people made fun of him and called him "Dr. Mengelle" (Like in the Nazi War Criminal Sicko Butcherer). These people were likening Gamers to Fucking Nazi butchers? WTF! The Whole forum laughed at this. Seriously...
We had a total of 6 guys on the forum, who weren't assholes, Me (who had backed out due to emotional damage, not kidding), Hitman213, Gokuma, the guy that posted as "Dr. Mingels" who kept on trying to reason, uselessly with the idiots, Lets just call him Dan. With us we had a video gamer from the Forum "Mostly Harmless", and another guy in the Doom Community. Versus us were the troll, his actress friend, and some other posters. One was always there but was on the First Troll's side and actually "filled in for him" when he was gone. One showed up later complaining on how all gamers on the forum were idiots and we spent "all day twittling with our joysticks", insulting us more. The thing kept on going on. At One Point the Troll said "all the violence in the articles on DPO (showing off the massacre) is proof violent games were involved". The troll then said "you all made fun of the columbine shooting victims", blah blah blah, for defending doom. Then the final post by the troll went up "I have enough evidence to prove gamers get violent", or something quite "lawyerly" like that. Around then my friend is like "we need to know who this idiot is!" and started telling me about reverse email lookups. We decided to try a few. None told us any personal info. The troll then eventually shut up and disappeared, 6 months after it began.
But that last post was deleted no more than 5 minutes after it was posted. I found that very suspicious. It sounded like the person was a lawyer gathering evidence against gamers. The troll did have a lawyers email address, justicemail.com, "email for the law community". Some lawyer looking for clients did post on the forum. Forget his name. Could they be the same person? I don't know. For years I tried 100's of different reverse email lookups. None of the returned any results. In 2006 however, I found a similar poster on Gamepolitics.com, a moronic anti-video games activist attacking gamers, calling them "druggies". This person was more like the person who said "All gamers twittle with their joysticks all long" then the initial "lawyer" troll on the forum back in 1999. But this whole experience of the idiocy surrounding the school Massacre on the Forums and in Colorado is what inspired me to write blog posts debunking nonsense spread about violent games. The troll cited 2 nonsense claims, the "video games break down the inhibition to kill" one and the "Doom Will become Reality" one. I debunked both on my Debunking Other Nonsense blog, which debunked many many claims since 2011 almost on a daily basis. The whole stereotype of "Gamers" being violent psychos pisses me off, and so do all the bogus "Death Threat" claims anti-violent games activists keep saying (how gamers keep threatening their lives), because pro-video game violence trolls do the same thing. The nonsense this troll was saying, threatening to kill me, crack my skull open, threatening to "kick gokuma's ass" and more is proof. I really don't like looking back at this. We were ALL assholes on this forum. I'm not really proud of it. The kind of people who were attacking Games in colorado were like this, apparently. These people refused to believe anything but the "trustworthy" sources that made up crap. We were all being insulted for merely being Video Game players, by almost everyone on the forum for months on end. Being Compared to Nazi Butcherer? It doesn't get any lower than that.
