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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.
It's worth remembering some of the other things humanity's put out in poor taste...
In 1612, there was the righteous outrage at questioning whether God's creation, the Earth, was truly the center of the universe. This was much worse than poor taste or glorifying killing... This was going against God's will and outright seeking damnation. To quote from Wikipedia, "In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella, Father Tommaso Caccini (1574-1648) denounced Galileo's opinions on the motion of the Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy."
Also in poor taste, a self absorbed director made a movie that was little more than a pretext for ridiculing the life of one of America's most influential people - William Randolph Hearst. There was a massive media backlash against it, the film was a failure in the box office and it pretty much destroyed the career of the director. SCMRPG has nothing on the backlash against this "poor taste" project that tried to pass itself off as art. Of course, today we know it as Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie ever made.
Then there was the disgusting picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a burned, naked child in Vietnam. How on earth could we ever describe a picture showing a child burned by napalm as anything other than in poor taste and utterly without merit on artistic grounds? In this case, it went on to be one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century. wikipedia
Time and again, we dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable. Apparent attacks on powerful people, pictures of burning children, questions about our world's place in the universe. All of these have made us uncomfortable. All of these have been condemned as being in poor taste. It's usually only with the benefit of detachment that we realise that very discomfort they cause is where their value lies.
SCMRPG may be a lousy game. It may have many elements of terribly poor taste to it. But, if it makes us think and question even a little - be it about the massacre, how the massacre has been portrayed in the media, or even what we consider acceptable in an emerging media - then it has value. It's that kernel of value, even if in terribly poor taste, that the founding fathers recognized as so utterly important that they protected it in the first ammendment.
Ideas don't have to be good. They don't have to be well phrased. They don't have to perfectly encapsulate the idea. They simply have to be free to exist, to be judged for their own merits, for us to have a society raised up by daring to think rather than held back by censorship of anything that the majority doesn't find acceptable from their first gut reaction.
I can tell you didn't actually play the Columbine RPG. The game was packed with enough info to make a Biography for both of the boys, not to mention exploration into what made them do what they do and why they felt the way they did. It was pretty interesting for someone who got tired of the original media frenzy pretty quickly and tuned out.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, Im played the game and I will tell you it doesn't have the effect most people think. It still keeps a sence of morality, senclessness of the ordeal and ends with a poetic justice.
I does present what was going on in the minds of the killers but it doesn't justfy it. It shows them with their feelings hurt but doesn't gain sympathy for them. It makes them look like a couple crying punks. You start buy trying to sneek in and plant some bombs. Then after they fail to go off, you just kill people going from room to room untill you look out a library window. The killing quickly becomes borring and you think there is a point to it but later get let down hard. Then it asks you if you want to goto the next level. If you do, one of the boys kill the other and then kills themself. It shows them lifeless, bloody, and leaves you with the distinct vision of death isn't a do over.
After all that, you proceed to what appears to be hell with doom like charectors comming after you. You lost most your weapons that made you so incincable in the real world and now suffer death quite often. I have played it many times and you quickly get to a point were it is too hard to go any further unless you run around like a scared little bitch but it doesn't help. There doesn't seem to be a way out of hell!
Now, I'm sure it will leave different impresions on different people. But my impresion is that it show how stupid killing everyone was. How dumb killing your self was, and in the end, how it hurt you just as much as everyone else.
I suggest everyone play it.