On Monday, police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection to last week’s shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The handsome suspect and his alleged actions brought the internet together, and now we’ve been brought together again in the age-old practice of combing through Mangione's internet history. The literary-minded are diving into his Goodreads account, politics reporters are looking at his politics, and tech and games sites are looking at his gaming history.
It’s not a mystery why sites are doing this. At websites that depend on SEO, and even at news sites more broadly, it’s a pretty obvious thing to do: people are justifiably interested in Mangione, who he is and what might have motivated him. If some facet of that dovetails with the subject of your site, it’s a no-brainer to write it up, both to serve your specific readership and try to catch some of the spike in search interest before it expires.
And it even makes sense why non-journalists would read these stories, and why they’d do digging of their own. Often, readers do this because a violent event is so shocking, but what felt so unique about Thompson’s shooting was the general relatability of it all, a certain lack of outrage that crossed political divides. It wasn’t really a mystery why someone would do something like this to a health insurance CEO, one who oversaw a company rife with coverage denials and horror stories.
Nothing that’s been uncovered so far about Mangione, who was arrested on firearms charges (Update, 12/10, 8:50am--Mangione has since been charged with murder in New York, among other charges), changes that fact. Neither his reading or gaming history or the speculation that he suffered from back pain is necessary to explain what he might have done. The alleged gaming-related details of his life are pedestrian: He is an app developer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, where he helped start a game development club due to an interest in indie games. PC Gamer says his LinkedIn account suggests he interned at Firaxis in 2016 to help with Civilization VI, the kind of thing a young person interested in game development might do. On Reddit, a user shared an image of what could be Mangione’s high school yearbook entry, featuring a silly quote by YouTuber Dunkey that reveals nothing but the possibility that he watched YouTube, the way millions of people do every day.
Wired identified an Xbox account that shares Mangione’s name, which doesn’t seem to have been used in over a decade. That account shows playtime in Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War, and Alan Wake. PC Gamer also identified a Steam account potentially belonging to Mangione, noting that it’s the “admin of a small Steam group for the game development club that Mangione belonged to at the University of Pennsylvania.” That account has been more recently used, with top games including PUBG, Terraria, Rocket League, and Civ VI.
These are all the kinds of games a regular person who plays games plays, the way so many regular people play games. Mangione may have played Call of Duty, so often referenced in shootings as some kind of explanation, but it was over a decade ago, one wildly popular game in a possible history of popular AAA and indie games. These games tell us nothing about why a man was murdered in cold blood, and they don’t need to. We already know why. People are sick of this shit; of this broken system and the seeming invincibility of the people who perpetuate it, of the growing impossibility of living a normal life where you go to school and play video games and listen to audiobooks at the gym and if you hurt your back you’ll be able to get care for it without crawling through a labyrinth of hoops and bankrupting yourself in the process.
There is no mystery to unravel here, beyond the somewhat baffling choices Mangione may have made post-shooting, and beyond why the NYPD exists at all. We won’t learn anything new about Mangione by looking through his history. We already know everything we need to.
