Kids got in serious trouble for this back then too. I'm not sure I could find a article, but I do remember hearing about it happening in the news (post columbine). I'm pretty sure the kids who committed columbine also did this with a Doom level editor. So rightly or not, school officials would see this as copy-cat behavior.
There's got to be a name for this phenomenon where people focus in on a pattern that may be consistent between events but is actually an incredibly common set of factors that it's totally nom-predictive.
It is an error in Bayesian reasoning. All high school shooters play violent video games, but not all kids who play violent video games are going to shoot up their high schools.
It's usually presented as a group of "red flags" that sound rare in summation. Everyone knows kids play violent video games. What I see among school shooters is things like, has threatened classmate in the past, is on anti-depresents/in therapy and played violent video games.
Some of those things may indeed be a factor in the actual event so it might actually have _some_ merit to bring up but I also probably just described ~5% of kids so it's not at all useful for predictability but it's presented as a "we should have seen it coming" or "why didn't anybody do anything!?".
The violent video games thing is nothing more than a panic but mental health issues and a history of actual violence are the actual ingredients of a mass shooter, it's just not predictive.
The drugs more than the "mental illnesses" contributed to the shootings, it is theorized.
Charles Whitman conducted a mass shooting in 1966, and the supplies he hauled along with his guns and ammo were Dexedrine and Excedrin.
Once upon a time, antidepressants carried a black box warning that they may cause homicidal ideations. That's right, not merely suicidal, but homicidal. And many psychoactive drugs actually work to cause the symptoms they purport to alleviate.
It is alleged, perhaps by conspiracy theorists, that pharmaceutical and psychiatric evidence in the Columbine trials was actively suppressed. Who knows?
But it's an interesting synergy that every mass shooting is followed by political calls for "more mental health care" which translates to more budget to put more people on drugs, so if the drugs are causing the shootings, then you have the perfect storm, don'tcha?
I could easily see it being predictive. Not the violent game part, but the map editing. Conducting surveillance, and acquiring maps are well known important steps in evil-doing. It helps with playing around with various scenarios, figuring out your pathing, first open fire there, then fire a bit there, then exit through there. Police likely to come from there, taking them x minutes. They could be stalled by doing y. Etc.
