Video games marketed as violent and rated as for mature audiences are in the thousands. They have been made for tens of years and are not going to stop anytime soon. Although violent video games are a topic of discussion among many major chatroom dedicated solely to video games on websites like Reddit and Discord. Arguments happen every day varying from the disagreement on the color of a certain characters outfit in a Easter egg of some random retro game released in the 1980s or from hackers stealing personal information of players on games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto V. These online fights happen all the time so no one pays much attention to them but sometimes they tend to bleed out into the real world and problems begin to arise. There is a practice that is highly illegal but used by some gamers to hurt their intended target by acquiring their targets address and calling the police and stating that the person has a gun and is holding people hostage. This is known as Swatting and is a very prevalent issue in the FPS gaming community because people tend to be more willing to do it through violent video games.
A terrible incident that happened in Wichita, Kansas ended with an innocent person killed. Two men that were on the same Call of Duty: WW2 team got into an extremely heated argument on a previous bet of $1.50 and it ended with one of the men obtaining the wrong address of the man he intended to swat and called the police saying he was Brian and told them that he had shot his father and was going to shoot more people. The swat department acting on that information stormed the address provided to them and fatally shot the father of 2, Andrew Finch. He was taken to the hospital and later died of his injuries. This man’s life could have been spared if the serial swatter, Tyler Raj Barriss, decided not to swat his teammate. There have been hundreds of Swattings across the US and many other countries. It has become a big issue in the age of prank calls and bomb threats. It became a prevalent issue in the 1980s when bomb threats were being called into heavily populated locations like airports and train stations. Pranksters have adopted the method to be used in gaming communities and has become a real issue among much of the gaming community.