PC Games, asshole gunmen and the role of large official spaces

My husband's a big pc gamer. When he gets together with his PC mates its a bit like stepping into another dimension. Over the years I've learnt how to enjoy his hobby and I've played along with him (his PC linked to mine). I even recently played a game from start to finish on my own - Mass Effect - which I absolutey loved. Naturally, though, I tend to have an aversion to games (unless of course they have a killer story line). The repetitive music and the gratuitous violence; the lack of any real point, except perhaps for 'advancing' your 'character' in order to kill things in more spectacular ways - it just doesn't turn me on. But it does lead me to wonder about the link between school shootings and PC games. And it's a rather weird link that I have in mind. I get the argued for link between the random violence of PC games and the horrific random violence that these men and boys inflict, but I wonder about why they choose schools and colleges as their places of massacre (which is something that that argument doesn't account for). And the thing that comes to me is kind of strange, and I hope not irreverant: I wonder about the overlap in terms of space, both physical and symbolic.

The symbolic space interests me slightly less than the physical space (which is kind of a sick thing to say, I know) but they do overlap and tie in together. Symbolically I imagine these boys as powerless in the school or college space. That large, bureaucratic institution turns them into nothingnesses. And their response, in their quest for power and development, is to take the language of the computer game, the first person shooter, into that school space. To physically stride through those halls looking over the barrel of a gun. I picture them, physically, in those spaces, and I am struck by the particular size and shape of a school building: the large open corridors, larger and higher than what is necessary for a single human being; the many rooms that lead off of those passages; the offices that are out of bounds, that require special knowledge or rank or items (keys) to access. And I see how their game world translates into their everyday surroundings. They go from gaming to school, from school to gaming. And I imagine that they spend about the same amount of time doing both. And when they enter their school worlds the physical space mirrors that of the computer environment. Only here, they are not powerful. Here their development is governed by an other and is not inevitable.

I see these two worlds colliding. Their screens shifting one over the other. And I pity these poor, poor powerless boys. There is no reset button after such pointless bloodiness.