Valve Slammed Over 'Horrendous' Steam School-Shooting Game (eurogamer.net)

Several readers have shared an EuroGamer report: Just a week after the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas that saw 10 people fatally shot and 13 others were wounded, Valve has come under fire for a Steam school-shooting game that encourages you to "hunt and destroy" children. Active Shooter, which at the time of publication is live on Steam and due for release on 6th June, is described by its developer as "a dynamic S.W.A.T. simulator." The idea is you're sent in to deal with a shooter at a school, but you can also play as the actual shooter, gunning down school children.

Now, an anti-gun violence charity has called on Valve to pull the game from Steam. The developer of Active Shooter is called Revived Games, the publisher Acid. Revived Games' credits include White Power: Pure Voltage and Dab, Dance & Twerk. "Acid", who plans to add a survival mode in which you play as a civilian and have to "escape or perform a heroic action such as fight against the shooter itself," took to Active Shooter's Steam page to defend the game. "First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft [sic] of a mass shooting," Acid said.

Comments

Re:Not against

[Jeremi]

Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?

Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.

I suspect it's the product of some naive, young, male programmers, who have spent too much time alone, dealing with other people only as vague online constructs, and thus never developed much empathy or understanding regarding how their words and actions can affect other people. When everything and everyone is nothing more than pixels on a screen, nothing matters, so why not make a game about mass shootings?

Re:Not against

[amicusNYCL]

Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?

Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.

You think? What about the complete disparity between people getting angry about a game involving school shootings, while also having absolutely no willpower to actually do anything about real school shootings?

Cops and robbers

[Stormwatch]

Let's play cops and robbers! But everyone has to be cops because robbers are bad!

Re:Not against

[zlives]

i am sorry, this is not the right time to talk about gun control in games. lets wait till the game has been out of news for a while for our tender sensibilities, and then we can not talk about it.

The real problem is having an open discussion

[rsilvergun]

of school shootings. Particularly one that might lead to stronger gun laws. This is also why the CDC can't, by law, do any research on gun violence.

A better question is why the NRA is so vehemently opposed to gun laws. You don't see the Auto makers campaigning against driver's licenses and insurance. My guess is they're worried stronger laws would bite into impulse buys. A coworker the other day went to buy a pistol for target shooting and home defense and go excited and walked out with an AR-15 and several boxes of ammo. His wife was pissed. If he'd had 7 days to think it over he'd have cancelled the order and settled for the $400 pistol over the $1000 AR-15.