A SWAT team
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SWAT tragedy should put an end to gaming’s worst hate attacks

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

A joke gone bad ended in tragedy last week, and it brings into the spotlight one of the worst aspects of gaming culture.

Last week, someone made a fake emergency call (known as swatting) to police in Wichita, Kansas, and the police shot an innocent man. On Friday, police in Los Angeles arrested 25-year-old Tyler Raj Barriss, who reportedly goes by the name SWAuTistic, for allegedly calling in the false report. Social media posts on the incident have continued this week. Let’s hope that this leads to increased awareness of these prank calls among law enforcement and realization that toxic behavior like swatting can have deadly consequences.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.