Mainstream Media’s Coverage of Luigi Mangione’s Games Connection Is Embarrassing

Like most 26-year-olds in America, Luigi Mangione, the accused shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has a history of playing videogames. And like most mainstream media organizations in America, NBC News apparently thinks that fact could somehow be connected to Mangione’s alleged actions. In a piece published late Monday night on NBCnews.com, Alicia Victoria Lozano reports that Mangione played a “video game killer”* and was a member of a “group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins.” This is technically true, but also irrelevant, and straight-up hilarious once Lozano reveals what “assassin” game Mangione favored. It’s Among Us, Innersloth’s cartoonish deduction game that became one of the most popular games in the world in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic lockdown. How many Twitch and YouTube streamers has this “assassin” game turned into “video game killers”? If you know anybody under the age of 25, there’s a great chance they have a history with Among Us, too.

Lozano notes that Among Us is a “child-friendly whodunnit game” six paragraphs into her article, but the headline and first few grafs accomplish exactly what news producers and politicians want. It distracts from the actual issues that should be discussed in the wake of Thompson’s assassination–from the criminally opportunistic for-profit healthcare industry, to the deepening alienation of young men, to the prevalence and ease of acquiring (or even, as Mangione apparently did, printing) guns–and shifts the focus to a favorite target of government and mainstream media. NBC’s piece doesn’t argue this outright, but the wording of the headline and the framing of the article make its intention clear: the problem is videogames and their violence. It doesn’t matter how many studies disprove a link between in-game and real-world violent, or how abstract and cartoonish that videogame violence is; if an alleged criminal plays games with any amount of violence in them, that alone is worthy of headlines and hearings to media executives and politicians who don’t understand games, one of the most popular and important mediums of the last 50 years.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There are countless smart, experienced, professional journalists who know and understand games that NBC and any other TV station or legacy newspaper could turn to in times like this. Most of them are probably out of work right now, given the disaster zone that is media and games journalism in particular, and thus more than ready to pitch in at a time like this. Any journalist who has the slightest familiarity with videogames would know how laughable the framing of Lozano’s piece is–and any editor who tries to push this angle on their writers should think long and hard about why they got into journalism in the first place.

Journalists who cover games and are currently employed have done a good job looking at Mangione’s relationship with games. (Which, again, is a relationship almost every American under the age of 60 has had at some point in their life, with games being just as culturally significant as movies, music, or TV for decades now.) What appears to be Mangione’s Steam account was located quickly after the news of his arrest broke on Monday, and instead of treating it as possible inspiration for his actions, journalists who actually understand games and games culture reported on it as a weird footnote to a story that has fascinated the country. Mangione was involved with a game design club in college, and also interned for Firaxis, the developers of the Civilization series, as reported by Polygon. It is notable and interesting that somebody arrested for such a high profile crime has a connection to games beyond merely playing them, like most people do, and that’s worth reporting on by journalists and outlets that focus on games. It doesn’t justify mainstream outlets trying to fear-monger about that interest in games potentially influencing Mangione’s alleged crime. It’s this kind of embarrassing, unprofessional, utterly clueless coverage that has helped destroy trust and respect for legacy media outlets, and it wouldn’t happen if places like NBC let people who actually understand games report on them.

*: Obviously Lozano and NBC should’ve called Mangione a “videogame killer.”