Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

I remember playing one of the early CS betas as a Half-life mod in ~1999. It was such a huge leap in gameplay and style from anything else out there.

Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.

My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.

   We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool

These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.

Kids got in serious trouble for this back then too. I'm not sure I could find a article, but I do remember hearing about it happening in the news (post columbine). I'm pretty sure the kids who committed columbine also did this with a Doom level editor. So rightly or not, school officials would see this as copy-cat behavior.

There's got to be a name for this phenomenon where people focus in on a pattern that may be consistent between events but is actually an incredibly common set of factors that it's totally nom-predictive.

It is an error in Bayesian reasoning. All high school shooters play violent video games, but not all kids who play violent video games are going to shoot up their high schools.