Dr. Jerald Block, one of the psychologists at the center of the Columbine Massacre, was generous enough to conduct an interview with GDN on video games and their connection to violence.

[GDN] Do you feel that the boys who committed the Columbine Massacre knew how to do so because of games such as Doom and Wolfenstein 3D?

[Block] No. Their actual know-how was probably more influenced by The Anarchist’s Cookbook which described how to make pipe bombs and target practice with actual guns. I have little doubt, however, that they mocked up and rehearsed the attack on Columbine using Doom’s engine (their “Tier” mod).

[GDN] Do you feel that these games were one of the reasons they committed the crime?

[Block] I believe it was the immersion into the Virtual and then the abrupt discontinuation of computer access that was one of the major destabilizing issues.  The content of the game may be a red-herring:  in a sense, the games were an outlet for aggression that, once the spigot was turned off, caused a tremendous amount of anger to be released on the world.  That being said, once they decided to kill people, they wanted to put them in "our world...a doom world" and match them up against monsters to see "who will survive" (with Klebold/Harris being the monsters)