Luigi Mangione is a gamer. What does that tell us?

For years, gamers have counted CEOs¹ , congresspeople, and celebrities among their ranks. Now we can add “accused killer” to the list. (Actually, that may not be specific enough.)

Late Monday, Luigi Mangione, 26, was charged in Manhattan with murder, after his apprehension by police in a Pennsylvania McDonalds. New York police officials called him a “person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” a healthcare executive shot in the street in Manhattan last week. (I am on vacation, so this summary is admittedly a bit sparse, and may be out of date in the morning when this newsletter publishes.² If you aren’t caught up on the news, I would point you to the New York Times or Washington Post live blogs, which are likely the top items on both papers’ respective homepages right now.)

Immediately, online sleuths began surfacing elements of Mangione’s digital footprint. These included (among many other things) his LinkedIn — which appeared to show a stint as an intern at Firaxis, the makers of Civilization VI, as well as a leading role in launching a game dev club at UPenn³ — and an old article, since deleted, which touched on Mangione’s love of indie games.

What does this tell us about the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson? I would venture: virtually nothing.

There’s a long history of video games being blamed for the actions of their infamous fans. Famously, after the 1999 Columbine school shooting, a lot of public scrutiny was directed toward the computer games favored by the perpetrators. The two killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, drew on language from gaming culture to discuss their plans; Harris, in particular, wrote that the massacre would resemble Duke Nukem and Doom, among other things.

“They did train on video games, like it was a real war,” one student who was familiar with the killers told reporters at the time. The parents of the victims attempted to sue dozens of video game makers in the aftermath of the shooting.

Drawing a similarly direct line now — by which I mean “in this instance” but also, more generally, “these days” — would be difficult, because my gut feeling is that there is astonishingly little you can learn about a person from the games they play. I think you might be able to sort people into superficial categories of habit, i.e. “this person plays casually with friends” or “this person likes cinematic single-player experiences,” but I would be hesitant to profile someone on that basis. To wit: I’ve logged almost 3,000 hours in Valorant, and while I think you can come up with all sorts of mean things to say to me about that, I’m not sure you could conjure up a useful description of my life philosophy or state of mind based on that fact, were I charged with some heinous crime.

(That said, I’m updating this article Tuesday morning to note that at least one outlet did try and draw this line. “Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls,” reads one NBC News headline, referring to a group Among Us session Mangione participated in. “We were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us,” one of his classmates told the outlet. At times like this, I guess all you can do is laugh.)

Perhaps more telling was the feeling of banal familiarity around the details unearthed about Mangione.

“In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione told Penn Today, an online publication run by the university, in 2018. That is, in fact, roughly the same story I told admissions officers about myself just a few years earlier. This is a bit embarrassing to admit in retrospect, but I studied political science, computer science, and visual arts in college because I wanted to make heady art games about big Political and Cultural topics. At the time, I think this was a quaint, so-crazy-it-just-might-work college app personal essay subject. I suspect it is completely played out now.

Equally familiar is Mangione’s use of the game launcher and storefront Steam — a detail that demands to be reported because it gives weight to the emerging profile of him as a gamer, but which is totally unremarkable to anybody 30 or younger.

I had a similar feeling in 2023, when Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira was accused of leaking sensitive documents to friends and acquaintances on Discord. The fact of Teixeira sharing these things on Discord was interesting for its novelty, but Discord as a piece of software did not, itself, reveal anything about Teixeira, other than his complete youthful ordinariness.⁴ There was, I felt at the time, very little to say about the platform in relation to the leak. Teixeira’s ingratiating manner, his intense desire to impress virtual strangers online, even his racism and crudeness — none of this was explained by Discord, per se. Growing up, I knew people like Teixeira before Discord even existed. His reported behavior is maybe one standard deviation away from a “normal” male upbringing.

In short, as games have ingrained themselves in mainstream culture, particularly among young people, games and game-adjacent technologies have become so common that they are no longer useful (if they ever even were) for discerning the characteristics of their users.

This is not to cast aspersions on the sleuthing that uncovered these details. But I can’t help but feel that I’m learning less and less as the picture derived from the digital footprint becomes sharper and clearer, bigger and less discerning of which details matter.

My final, most ~out there~ take on all this is that I think games are increasingly less determinative of personality because (disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: in my experience) they have become less about embodying a power fantasy and more about:

1. Socializing with people online, or (more importantly for this newsletter’s purposes)…

2. Watching YouTube videos and reading Reddit threads about the “best builds” and how to understand a game’s systems.

A person who plays Call of Duty probably cares less about “being a cool soldier who kills people” than they do about leveraging dozens of hours spent on YouTube toward constructing a gun build that is more advantageously broken than anything their opponent might be using. I don’t want to overstate my case here, but I think more and more players are starting to view games in this way, putting even more distance between a game’s ornamentation (the skins, the story, the lore, etc.) and what players actually experience from moment to moment, and thereby also between a game and any obvious takeaways about the personalities of its players.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below.

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I can be reached on Bluesky at @LeaderGrev.

1. I meant Elon Musk (a Diablo and Overwatch fan) when I wrote this, but while writing this, I learned from a delightful Ash Parrish article in The Verge that “Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted that he’s ‘close to grandmaster status’ in Civilization and that it’d surprise him if anyone in the world could beat him.” Sam Bankman-Fried — also a gamer!

2. As I write this, one thing I can’t parse from current coverage is whether the murder charges filed against Mangione explicitly accuse him of killing Thompson. That’s the obvious takeaway from where things stand now, but the outlets I’m reading all say “Mangione was charged for murder” in one sentence and “a suspect was charged in the killing of Thompson” in another — but never all in one sentence. It’s the sort of thing that makes an editor go “hmm.” Not a conspiratorial “hmm,” but an “if you read between the lines, the writers and editors are being very precise about what exactly they know and can state as fact” type of “hmm.” This may be totally moot by the time this newsletter publishes, but it’s something I noticed at 11:30 pm ET.

3. h/t Stephen Totilo. I don’t know if he was the first to find this, but his Bluesky thread was how I learned about it.

4. Also: Discord almost immediately loses its potency as a boogeyman for what’s wrong with the youth when you explain that it’s gamer Slack. (Fwiw, there are very bad things happening to youths on Discord. Just read this.)