The UK tabloids this morning report the 15-year-old arrested for hacking TalkTalk was a “violent video game addict” who wanted to be a professional Call of Duty player.
The Daily Mail’s front page called the boy “a baby-faced loner who rarely leaves his bedroom”.
The paper looked at the boy’s blog and used it to accuse him of being “obsessed with violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto”.
The boy, from Ballymena in Northern Ireland, “spent hours playing violent video games such as Call of Duty, Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto” from the age of 10, the Mail claims.
The Mail also picked up on the boy’s aspiration to become a professional Call of Duty player, and printed pictures of Call of Duty (“killing”), GTA (“criminal mayhem”) and Resident Evil (“ghoulish violence”).
The Mail’s narrative portrays the boy as a loner who is “addicted” to violent video games. It then describes Call of Duty gameplay, mentioning a scene in which the player causes a Tube train to derail and explode.
It also mentions Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik claimed he had “trained himself” to kill his 77 victims by playing Call of Duty.
The Mail then goes on to discuss eSports, which, it says, sees games “played in competitions watched by thousands in arenas and broadcast to millions online”.
Full Story @ Eurogamer