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I’ve been playing “Super Columbine Massacre RPG” recently. I decided to do so because it seems to have figured in a lot of arguments which have the terms “video games” and “art” placed in close proximity to each other. And also, controversy. For fairly obvious reasons.
It’s not a well made game. It has the look of a top-down console rpg from the early 90’s, and fairly simplistic gameplay. Get up, go to school, set bombs without getting busted, get your guns out, commit horrible slaughter. Most of the dialogue is taken from diaries and records on the two boys involved in Columbine. Although there are lots of optional levels and secret bits, there aren’t really any branching paths to the story in a moral sense. I suppose you can choose to kill more or less people, but people will die either way.
After all the cartoonish (although bloody) violence, you suicide or are killed, and then you are hit with a slideshow of photos of the real victims and their bodies, followed by shots of their friends and family grieving. Followed by childhood photos of Eric and Dylan. This device is curiously affecting. You do become more connected to the tragedy through having perpetrated it in simulacra.
As I said, it isn’t a well-made game. The gameplay is primitive. Someone else might have made a better statement about this event in videogame form, if they had tried. But the fact remains, noone else did try. Few people tackled this issue in any medium, let alone lowly video games.
It has got me thinking that the impact and consequences of violence might be an issue that games are uniquely suited to addressing. There has after all been so much violence in the last 20 years of computer games, so many conventions and tropes to do with it have arisen that could be subverted or tweaked.
*
Anyhoo, the "art" part of the debate in a nutshell: Obviously there was proportionally more media negativity heaped upon this game than there was upon, for instance, Elephant or Bowling for Columbine, and it was pretty clear that most of the people calling for it to be banned hadn't played it or even seen it, so I think we can leave out the quality of the game when we look for the reasons for that. It was just their preconceptions of what a video game is or is for that caused their objections.
Some relevant stuff:
The game reviewed by a Columbine massacre survivor:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/feature/columbine-survivor-talks-about-columbine-rpg-171966.php
The game's creator being interviewed on a current affairs show after a massacre in Montreal:
http://live.canoe.ca/TheShow/Archives/2006/09/14/1839452.html
Apologies for rambling.
It’s not a well made game. It has the look of a top-down console rpg from the early 90’s, and fairly simplistic gameplay. Get up, go to school, set bombs without getting busted, get your guns out, commit horrible slaughter. Most of the dialogue is taken from diaries and records on the two boys involved in Columbine. Although there are lots of optional levels and secret bits, there aren’t really any branching paths to the story in a moral sense. I suppose you can choose to kill more or less people, but people will die either way.
After all the cartoonish (although bloody) violence, you suicide or are killed, and then you are hit with a slideshow of photos of the real victims and their bodies, followed by shots of their friends and family grieving. Followed by childhood photos of Eric and Dylan. This device is curiously affecting. You do become more connected to the tragedy through having perpetrated it in simulacra.
As I said, it isn’t a well-made game. The gameplay is primitive. Someone else might have made a better statement about this event in videogame form, if they had tried. But the fact remains, noone else did try. Few people tackled this issue in any medium, let alone lowly video games.
It has got me thinking that the impact and consequences of violence might be an issue that games are uniquely suited to addressing. There has after all been so much violence in the last 20 years of computer games, so many conventions and tropes to do with it have arisen that could be subverted or tweaked.
*
Anyhoo, the "art" part of the debate in a nutshell: Obviously there was proportionally more media negativity heaped upon this game than there was upon, for instance, Elephant or Bowling for Columbine, and it was pretty clear that most of the people calling for it to be banned hadn't played it or even seen it, so I think we can leave out the quality of the game when we look for the reasons for that. It was just their preconceptions of what a video game is or is for that caused their objections.
Some relevant stuff:
The game reviewed by a Columbine massacre survivor:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/feature/columbine-survivor-talks-about-columbine-rpg-171966.php
The game's creator being interviewed on a current affairs show after a massacre in Montreal:
http://live.canoe.ca/TheShow/Archives/2006/09/14/1839452.html
Apologies for rambling.
