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Slamdance Festival Yields To Pressure Re: Columbine RPG

by Erin on January 8th, 2007

It’s almost as though we’re asking for it; asking to be loathed and hated and regarded with general distatse by the ‘outsiders’. The gaming industry may not quite deserve the general pasting it has been receiving from lawyers and politicians, but with games like the following being made, it’s easy to tell why accusations of excessive violence and insensitivity are hurled at us with righetous abandon.

What am I rambling about? The Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Now you, from the comfort of your leather manager’s chair, can take on the troubled personas of Columbine gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in order to battle through the events leading up to the tragic happenings at the high school. It was, up until recently, entered into the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, an event which ‘exists to help aspiring game developers showcase their work. The festival aids developers through industry connections, peer interaction and national exposure’. It had made its way into the finalist category before being yanked by the festival organizers on short notice following protests and the threat of lost sponsorship money.

Apparently this is the first time in Slamdance history that outside pressure has influenced the outcome, and Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter has called the decision “deeply flawed”, but acknowledged that it was in the best interests of the festival as a whole. Kotaku has an excellent detailing of Slamdance’s forced hand.

A 1UP article seems to be trying to bring the censorship issue into play by questioning if ‘…’games as art’ is only OK so long as the art in question doesn’t push the comfort envelope’, but here, beyond the suggestions of lack of good taste, is an issue that rips the comfort envelope open and pokes around at the insides. The question I had about this reality/early FF/Zelda cross was: is it really a gratuitous attempt to make money by creating controversy, or was there some sort of deeper message behind the creation of the game? So I downloaded it and gave it a try for myself. What I found was not a shallow, uninformed and deliberately insensitive creation, but something that I would shelve in the realm of ‘Serious Games’; games designed to teach, to describe, to instruct and to provoke thought.

Even the thought of a game about the Columbine killings is enough to make me shudder, and I originally set out to write an article about how appalling the entire thing was, but I came to realize, as I played, that it was a commentary on not only the Columbine tragedy, but also society and it’s perception of the events. The screenshot included in this post is one of several points in the game where the creator criticises the biases that manifested during the post-shooting media storm, where Marilyn Manson became instantaneously synonymous with troubled youth (I’ll have you know that I own two albums myself), and black trenchcoats and goth presentations were clearly the mark of Satan.

In Super Columbine Massacre RPG, contrary to the preaching of many who were horrified at the mere thought of such a game (but who never actually tried it before declaring it evil), the player is not made to feel proud or excited about their role, but profoundly uncomfortable at having to try to view things from perspective of the shooters. It does what all good Serious Games on a subject such as this do; it makes you think about the situation from many different angles, not just the one that you went into the start screen with, it jump-started a wild discussion on everything from socially-conscious video-gaming to the marginalization of certain segments of teen culture, and it addresses a very distressing occurence in a media and a language that the digital entertainment generation can grasp. Watch the news all you like, but nothing will get you thinking and discussion difficult issues than being forced face them head on.

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POSTED IN: Culture, News, RPG, Serious Games