More Slamdance Drama

Hi from New Zealand. One reason I like to trawl through the blogsphere is the incredible news I hear which could only get through blogs. The slamdance contest and the argument over Super Columbine Massacre is just such a piece of news. I am appalled that anyone could even think of creating such a game: I am not convinced that murder can be viewed as art and that anything goes. There are standards–GTA is a fiction; Columbine was real. Thanks for your blog.

Harveymolloy - have you played the game in question?

I have. It is not for entertainment purposes, such as GTA. (Which is a good thing, because frankly, it isn’t entertaining.) It is a nontraditional way to explore the subject of how and why a tragedy like the one at Columbine occurs. We have studies on school crime, we have books and talk shows, but how many mediums attempt to understand the perpetrators of a crime by role-playing them?

I don’t understand the claims (or the perpetuation of those claims by the media coverage the game has received) that SCM makes light of the Columbine incident or somehow celebrates/idolizes the shooters. It doesn’t. It puts the player in the shoes of two very disturbed individuals as a way of trying to connect us in a virtual environment to what happened in a real one.

Whatever you may think of Harris and Klebold, they were just teenagers, and not so different from any others as much as we’d like to wish they were. A game where the player roleplays as them *should* be uncomfortable, disturbing, and unpleasant - just as a movie about them would be. That doesn’t mean the game is devoid of value, however - quite the contrary, it should be the very focus of things like Slamdance to try to find games pushing the limits of how games are traditionally designed and played.

If you want to get really into it, you could rationalize that GTA is -worse- than SCM RPG because GTA -is- fake, and was made to be violent for violence’s sake (not that I’m bashing them, I love GTA games), while SCM RPG is based off of a real event.

And I must be missing something, because why does Digipen have the rights of the IP of its students? When I went to college, what I created was mine. Do they function differently?

In general, if you attend any sort of a school, anything you make using their technology (scientific discoveries/software/etc.) becomes their IP.

It’s frustrating, as I have been part of a project that may go to commercial production, but other than being listed as a contributor, I’ll probably get nothing in the way of money.

You really, actually want to know why people might think SCM “makes light” of the Columbine incident?

Don’t be so naive. (Or willfully blind.)

“SUPER COLUMBINE MASSACRE!!!!”

It’s the title. No one will assume this is “art,” or “no different from Schindler’s List.” Get real. Word choice means something. That title, all by itself, shouts “Exploitation of a bloody tragedy! Come and look! Come and play! You too can mow down everyone you ever wanted to kill with an assault rifle, giggling all the time! Get yer tickets here!”

Stop whining that nobody sees the “art” in videogames when they willfully present themselves as exploitative. It’s exactly like romance writers titling books, “Love’s Lusty Surrender” and then being surprised when people call them trash. (And I am a romance writer, so I can speak.)

It could have just been titled “Columbine” and maybe you’d have a point. But as it is, the game community is just being ridiculous to suppose that the world at large will give you the time of day, much less find “art” in SUPER COLUMBINE MASSACRE!!!

Beyond that, it is truly weird that Digipen grabs student IP. Take about exploitative.

Matt–

Piffle. See my romance novel example. It doesn’t even begin to be reasonable to suppose that the broader culture will be able to sort out this game from the other violent games as an intentional attempt at irony or mockery.

I suppose all my decades of working as a serious artist in a genre universally used as the standard for trash makes me amused at the gaming culture’s desperation to be seen as “art.”

You can’t force the world see the art in your work, particularly not by complaining about it. It doesn’t happen that way. You just do your work, to the highest level of craft and passion you can summon, and let the chips fall where they may. That’s what artists do. Someday a hundred years from now maybe the world will recognize the art. Maybe it won’t.

But for now, I wish game devs and philosophers and pundits would just buck up and quit bitching about it as if it’s some sort of world-shaking issue that could bring the industry to its knees. I would respect your art more if you didn’t care whether people saw the art or not. Caring at all about that–contests and awards and such–erodes your very abilty to really create with courage and passion.

I played Super Columbine Massacre RPG (I wrote about it here) and entirely agree with you, Matt. People like harveymolloy who bag SCMRPG for making light of the incident are stuck in a paternal and outdated mindset: that video games are vehicles of childish fun, and therefore the raison d’être of every video game ever made is providing fun.

Do people recognise satire anymore? Why do people read a short column in a newspaper or watch a minute-long broadcast and take what is communicated at face value? That people could decide the nature of a game based on a short gameplay clip or a screenshot is by itself a great indictment of the hear-say attitude that is being fostered worldwide.

I played this game. As far as I’m concerned SCMRPG takes no sides: I found it extremely uncomfortable to gun down students in an environment that was very familiar to me (I have been playing turn-based RPGs for years), and yet at the same time I understood what Harris and Klebold must have been thinking: that in the end it’s just a game, and these are just pixels, and that I had done something like this hundreds of times before.