Anders Behring Breivik, the 33-year-old Norwegian ultranationalist who has admitted to killing 69 people in a shooting rampage and eight more in a bomb blast last July, said during his trial today that he "prepared" for the attacks by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
As reported by The Guardian, Breivik said the game, which includes many tasks that could be compared with a real attack, was good for practicing "target acquisition" and for getting experience with realistic holographic gun sights:
"If you are familiar with a holographic sight, it's built up in such a way that you could have given it to your grandmother and she would have been a super marksman. It's designed to be used by anyone. In reality it requires very little training to use it in an optimal way. But of course it does help if you've practised using a simulator."
Breivik had previously mentioned Modern Warfare 2 as "part of my training-simulation" in a 1,500-page manifesto written before his rampage. However, in that same manifesto, Breivik also admitted to owning a collection of weapons which he practiced with often at firing ranges, showing extensive real-world preparations in addition to any claimed virtual "training."
Breivik's testimony also addressed his obsession with World of Warcraft, which he says he played for up to 16 hours a day during a sabbatical he took from work between September 2006 and December 2007. Prosecutors in the case had previously pointed to Breivik's obsessive WoW playing as a sign of his instability, but Breivik himself said that game was merely a hobby. "Some people like to play golf, some like to sail, I played WoW," he said. "It doesn't have anything to do with July 22."
Breivik's manifesto suggested that telling people you've started playing a massively-multiplayer game like World of Warcraft was a good way to help "justify isolation" and "avoid suspicion from relatives and friends" when planning an attack.
Breivik's game playing may become a key part of the ongoing trial, which is meant to determine his mental fitness. Defense witness and sociology professor Thomas Highjland Eriksen told Reuters that there's a chance Breivik "can't tell difference between reality and a computer game," and that during the attacks he may have been in a fantasy universe where he "becomes a knight, a defender of the civilization of Europe." But information about the detailed planning that went into the attacks, including meetings with other ultra-nationalists in London and Liberia up to nine years prior, seem to go against this line of defense.
UPDATE: Added additional context about Breivik's manifesto and training with a collection of actual weapons.
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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/index.php
