"When I hear about a mass shooting, it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop: how long will it take before someone tries to connect it to video games? How long before we learned that the Virginia Tech shooter 'trained' for his rampage with a first-person shooter?"

Video games aren't exactly the first thing that pops into one's head when hearing about a horrible tragedy like last Monday's Virginia Tech shootings. But Game|Life's Chris Kohler, quoted above, captured the eventual thoughts of many gamers and games journalists in the wake of the tragedy. When will the discussion turn to video games? When is the blame game going to start? When is the other shoe going to drop?

It didn't take long. Mere hours after the shootings and a full day before the shooter would be identified, Florida lawyer and violent game crusader Jack Thompson showed up on Fox News to lay out the case for a violent game connection. The premature blame game continued with daytime talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw telling Larry King that the effects of violent video games on our society in general and psychopaths in particular was "common sense."

Video game violence has been a favorite media scapegoat for real life violence at least since the days of the Columbine massacre. To this day, accounts of the eight-year-old shooting often include the killers' proclivity for Doom. It's still not uncommon to hear the thoroughly debunked theory that one of the killers designed levels that resembled the school in preparation for the shooting. The mass media has also been quick to blame other school shootings -- from Paducah to Montreal -- on video games.

But a funny thing happened on the way from Columbine to Virginia Tech. Video game violence is still being discussed in the wake of this latest tragedy, but to a generally more limited extent. Based on my informal survey of the media landscape over the past two weeks, the tired arguments about game violence just don't seem to be getting as much traction as they have in the past.

Of course, the specialist press is the first line of defense against claims of games' deleterious effects. The game-specific sites had a few interesting takes on the issue: Kotaku thoroughly dissected the lies and errors in Thompson's Fox News appearance; Joystiq compiled a list of declarations for gamers who want to renounce violence (which I helped compile and write); and a post on 1PStart took a thoughtful look at how real violence affects our appreciation of fake violence. In general, though, the gaming media's reaction was the same predictable mix of shrill defensiveness and petty name calling that follows any negative portrayal of games these days.

The more interesting responses to the shootings were from the mainstream media, large swaths of which refused to jump in on the video game blame bandwagon, even after the killer was named. Rush Limbaugh used his popular radio show to point out that, while millions of people play violent games, "not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus." Howard Stern called Dr. Phil an "idiot" for suggesting that games caused the shootings. Hardball's Chris Matthews subjected Thompson to some blisteringly tough questioning, refusing to let his unsupported claims of causality go unchallenged. Two commentaries from MSNBC took the media to task for blaming games, as did a prominent opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.