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What We Owe the Columbine RPG
Gamaustra's Soapbox this week touches on the lessons learned from Slamgate and the Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Author Patrick Dugan explores the ways in which SCMRPG challenged the media and gamers alike to think about what the medium of games is all about. Covered by everyone from Newsweek to Game Informer, it opened the eyes of non-gamers to the possibilities of the format and forced gamers to rethink their assumptions. "Game Informer's benchmark of game-specialized print journalism may very well inspire other major publications to follow suit with their own coverage, and in the capacity of Game Informer's readership, paints a symbol of solidarity. The twelve year old kid who thinks Gears of War is the best thing going can take a look at these graphics, popular before his birth, and get a sense that his beloved past-time is part of something greater, something he can defend to non-gamers as being inherently valuable." This issue is also explored in the final part of N'Gai Croal's interview with Jamil Moledina, which we talked about last week.
Ugh... The Gamasutra article starts with a quote, apparently from the creator of this game, claiming to be the world's second most famous game designer, and gets worse, spiraling into a narcissistic look-at-me diatribe about what an important cultural phenom this "work" is.
Nothing but a self-aggrandizing piece of tripe. Sorry, but I wasn't even able to make it to pages 2 and 3. Someone else will have to read the rest of the article. I can't believe this was actually published on Gamasutra. The interview was no less irritating. "The Artist's Way"? Gag.
Did I just wake up grumpy today, or is the article really that annoying? Bah... Get off my lawn!
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Since when did making a "game" using RPG Maker 2000 allow you to be famous? If anything, the game shouldn't have become popular because that program is so terrible, as are the games it is capable of making. This is as much of a game as those old terrible AOL Userpages (made using a drag-n-drop interface circa 1997) were web sites.
There can't have been much to see here; it's a waste of time.
The only reason to make a Columbine game would be to stir controversy. Yes, it's true--games can be a medium for whatever sort of story people want. Just as anime shows that "comics" can be used to tell any story people want. As we know, they range from serious literary works down to slapstick and porn (and sometimes, combinations thereof). Games are the same; the only question is whether someone wants to make such things into games. I mean, I think that Planescape: Torment probably qualifies as a literary work in its own right, for example.
But I honestly don't think a Columbine RPG has anything to do with that. I think it's mere attention whoring. And I really, really hate attention whores. You can debate the question "Is it art?" But I say, "Who cares!" No matter whether it is or isn't art, neither case requires that I (or anyone else) like it or respect it. And neither do I have to like or respect the one who created it.
Maybe gross-out contests like this were fun when I was 5, but I really wish these tools would grow up a little. As it stands, I wouldn't deign to give their game the time of day.