In one of the more egregious narratives to come out of the twenty-four-hour news cycle’s coverage of the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, NBC News attempted to create a connection between alleged assassin Luigi Mangione and the video game Among Us.
Thompson was gunned down in the streets of New York City by a masked assailant on December 4th. After that, a manhunt erupted for the suspect that went on far longer than it probably should have. Luigi Mangione was arrested in a McDonald’s parking lot five days later on December 9th.
Characters from Among Us – YouTube, GameSpot
Police seized a backpack containing a 3D-printed gun and silencer that’s believed to be the murder weapon. Mangione was also in possession of multiple fake IDs (including a passport), a hand-written manifesto, and a Faraday bag.
This bag blocks incoming or outgoing radio signals from any device within. Inside the bag, police discovered a cell phone, $8,000 USD, and $2,000 in various foreign currency.
Mangione became an instant celebrity following his arrest, with many Americans unhappy with the country’s healthcare system shockingly holding him up as some kind of hero for allegedly taking out an insurance CEO. Jimmy Kimmel even dedicated an entire section of his monologue to making jokes about how good looking members of his staff found the alleged assassin.
A screenshot of Jimmy Kimmel crying on TV after the election of Donald Trump – YouTube, Jimmy Kimmel Live
And, because we live in the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, anchors needed to fill time and find things to talk about surrounding this high profile story.
That’s what led NBC News to Alejandro Romero, a former college roommate of Mangione who was once in the same Discord server as him.
“I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us,” he said. “As soon as his photo and name popped up on X, my friend texted me asking if I knew him, and then either I was calling some ten friends or they were calling me,” Romero said. “I didn’t speak to anybody today who wasn’t already aware of what had happened.”
Romero noted that their group once played the game Among Us. In the game, one of the players is designated as a killer and saboteur.
A killer in Among Us, YouTube – GameSpot
That was all NBC News needed to hear. Much as we’ve seen mainstream outlets do in the past, the Peacock branded news outlet started to draw a parallel between violent video games and actual real world violence.
The article is titled “‘Extremely Ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls.” And while NBC News writer Alicia Victoria Lozano doesn’t outright say that Mangione was inspired to commit actual cold blooded murder from a children’s video game, she certainly implies it throughout the article.
“Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins, a member of the group told NBC News,” Lozano said in the article.
A cartoonish character death in Among Us – YouTube, GameSpot
She then describes the game, trying to pull the reader into following her train of thought.
“In the game, called Among Us, some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players,” she said, before noting that the game is popular with children, presumably to set parents on edge.
This reeks of more media blame cast on the world of gaming to justify the actions of mentally ill or deranged individuals. Gaming always seems to get brought into the conversation when tragedy occurs. Games like Call of Duty and the Grand Theft Auto series have been dragged through the mud by media outlets trying to make the case that somehow video games are radicalizing the youth of America.
A screenshot from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024), Treyarch and Raven Software
It harkens back to the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and 90s, in which heavy metal music and fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons came under fire from people like Tipper Gore as a force that somehow corrupted the youth of America.
It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.
Spencer Baculi, editor in chief at Bounding Into Comics put it expertly in his article on this situation when he said, “Far from an ‘innocent mistake,’ it’s clear that NBC attempted to blame the one video game mentioned throughout the entire investigation due to the ‘ease’ of which they could make that argument rather than taking aim at, say, Mangione’s reading of the Unabomber’s manifesto (which he rated a four on Goodreads).”
Do you believe the CEO assassin took inspiration from video games like Among Us? Or is the mainstream media once more attempting to blame video games and gamers for all of the world’s woes? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
