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Maybe it's all a game to would-be cop killers
Source: Edmonton Sun, January 5th, 2000
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Edmonton (Canada) Sun
Wednesday, January 5, 2000
Maybe it's all a game to would-be cop killers
Teen just playing: mom
By DOUG BEAZLEY, EDMONTON SUN
Dimension-hopping killer robots might have been the culprits behind a supposed plot to
kill an Ontario cop at a New Year's Eve bash, says a local sci-fi gaming fan.
"There are people that play these games who get so they can't tell the difference
between the real world and the play," said Lance Goodale, a clerk at Warp 2 Comics
and an enthusiast of the popular futuristic role-playing game Rifts.
Three young men were charged with conspiracy to commit murder late last month after police
in Brockville, Ont., twigged to their alleged plan to randomly stalk and stab a police
officer at a downtown party.
Police insist the plot was perfectly serious, but the mother of one of the three claims
her 18-year-old son was only taking part in a Rifts match.
Rifts is one of the most popular role-playing games in Edmonton, according to Darrell
Minty, manager of Warp 2's sister store. "It's right up there in the top three,"
he said.
Goodale said some of the Rifts plots are close enough to the stalk-and-kill scenario
alleged in Brockville for police to confuse the two. "In Rifts, there are scenarios
that are quite similar (to what happened in Brockville)," he said.
Rifts is set in a distant future involving dimensional travel and intelligent robots.
Players do battle, with the outcome usually determined by a dice roll. And hostility to
police, said gamer Jay Fowler, is key to the plot.
Minty, meanwhile, said he doesn't buy the idea that police could have mistaken a
role-playing game for a conspiracy to kill.
"An RPG is just a book, a piece of fiction," he said. "People who play
these games like to stay in a cosy room with a refrigerator nearby and eat cookies. This
is the sort of thing the media just loves to jump on."
CROSS-CANADA CRIME SPREE PLANNED?
But Goodale said there's a class of role-playing games called LARPs, for "live action
role-playing," in which players dress up as game characters and act out plots in
public.
"It's play-acting," he said.
The three Brockville-area accused made a brief court appearance yesterday. Dillon
Langlands, 18, and Lance Williams, 21, will get bail hearings on Friday. The third
accused, a 15-year-old, appears in court Jan. 12.
Police claim the three planned to go to a public New Year's Eve party and stab the first
cop they saw, grab the slain officer's gun and flee in his cruiser. The alleged plan then
called for a cross-country break-and-enter spree.
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