Shaffer Comments on Active Shooter Video Game

June 5, 2018

David Williamson Shaffer, a UW–Madison professor of educational psychology and a game scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, offered insights on violence in video games in a WTMJ radio interview on May 30, a day after public backlash canceled the release of Active Shooter. The controversial online video game would have let players move through a school fatally shooting police officers and civilians.

Shaffer believes Active Shooter is a very bad idea for a video game, but stresses all video games are not bad. “If I had one big take home from all this, it’s that parents should use discretion about what their kids are doing. You wouldn’t just let them pick up any book, you wouldn’t necessarily just let them go to any movie, you shouldn’t let them just play any video game because they think it might be cool.”

Shaffer is the author of the book, “How Computer Games Help Children Learn,” and has developed educational computer games on topics such as land science, biomedical engineering, ethics, geometry and graphic design.