This is a repost from my personal journal, dated April 1, 2007.

Yesterday I was dirty
Wanted to be pretty
I know now that I’m forever dirt

Some children died the other day
We fed machines and then we prayed
Puked up and down in morbid faith
You should have seen the ratings that day

Yesterday, we had an ethics debate in class about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Some people were familiar with it, others had never heard of it, and were horrified to know it existed. I was aware of its existence, but not terribly familiar with it. The game places you in the shoes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, on the morning of April 20, 1999. Initially published anonymously, one survivor was so infuriated that he hunted down the identity of the creator, and outed them. When he publicly posted the identity of the man who developed this RPGMaker game, he said, “One of the girls who died was a friend of mine. Rachel. We were in the same church group. Anyone playing this game can kill Rachel over and over again.” As an educational exercise, I took it upon myself to download and beat the entire game today.

The game is more like an interactive film than a proper game. Gameplay is simple; most of the game involves walking through a school building, seeing students and teachers running wildly, approaching them, and then selecting the weapons to murder them with in a Final Fantasy-style RPG battle. If the innocent people fight at all, they do minuscule damage.

The game’s appeal and interest does not come from the action. Instead, like most eastern-style RPGs, you’re playing from cutscene to cutscene in a sort of interactive movie drawn out by repetitive battles. In the introductory sequences, you control “the boys” as they place propane bombs in duffel bags and film a last video of themselves the morning of the massacre, then sneak the bombs through the school and set them up under two tables in the cafeteria, before rigging your car with a third bomb, and hiding on a hill to watch and wait.

After none of the bombs explode, you make your way through the parking lot, engaging in inescapable battles to the death with every high school student you touch, all of them helpless before your array of deadly weaponry. You’re free to enter classrooms or pass them by, killing janitors, teachers, and all brands of boys and girls, such as the “Jock Type”, the “Sheltered Girl”, the “Church Boy”, and the “Openly Gay Man”. Cutscenes with dialog and/or flashbacks appear at critical moments, such as the first time you enter the cafeteria, seeing the controls that one of the boys used to run the lighting in a school play, etc.. After each major milestone, the music that you murder people by changes.

You get additional special abilities in combat after achieving certain acts, such as triggering the fire alarm, asking the girl in the library if she believes in God just before murdering her. You can download additional special abilities on computers, such as the ability to manufacture co2 bombs on the fly, if you use up all of your initial supplies. If you run out of ammunition, you can return to your car to get additional clips. Occasionally, you’ll encounter battles where groups of people will team up to try to stop you, but these are never challenging, as it’s usually a couple of sports players against madmen with automatic weapons and homemade grenades.

Once you get to the back of the library, you spot the police outside, and after a short shootout, can choose to commit suicide. Everything you do is explained in character and in the moment by the dialog between Eric and Dylan, forcing you to act in character. You can’t leave without carrying out the massacre; you can’t have mercy on people after you get into battle with them — you either kill them or die. Even when you commit suicide, the choice is to either kill yourself now, or shoot more people first.

After your death, you are treated to a long montage of images, including graphic photographs of Eric and Dylan’s bodies lying on the floor of the Columbine High School library, and pictures of them as children. Eventually, you are placed back in the game in hell, and fight through armies of DOOM enemies, picking up weapons like the chaingun, rocket launcher, and BFG 9000. You’ll collect pieces of the Satanic Bible to gain dark powers, fight demons, and eventually chum with Friedrich Nietzsche, who gives you in introduction to Satan himself, straight from South Park. Satan shows you a scene depicting some of the responses to the tragedy, and then Satan tells Eric and Dylan that they can “blow it all up” in good time, but for now, just to keep him company. Eric and Dylan agree, and the game ends.

PC World rated Super Columbine Massacre RPG as the second worst game of all time. They say “Whether Ledonne’s site has any constructive value whatsoever is still up in the air. But as a game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG is appalling.” This is contrasted against a recent controversy (inspiring the debate I had in school) about the Slamdance Festival dropping the game after initially declaring it a finalist, for the first time in its history. The controversy caused the entire game side of the festival to collapse this year, after one sponsor withdrew and half of the remaining fourteen finalists dropped out in protest of the decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the running.

I was talking to about this, and he observed that social roles allow us to excuse games with minimal plot. Absent context, this is a game in which you play as a team of two heavily armed people armed with guns and bombs, who must enter a building and kill everything inside. This is essentially identical to games like DOOM. There are two major differences. The most obvious is that in games like DOOM, you play as an upstanding citizen killing demons, aliens, and monsters, and in this game, you play as two disturbed teenagers massacring their classmates. The second is that this game has more plot, deeper characters, greater intelligence, and is based on the real world.

I guess it comes down to whether you’re looking at it as a lump of gameplay, or a lump of art. As a lump of art, I have no problem saying that Super Columbine Massacre RPG is much more meaningful than DOOM. As a lump of gameplay, the reverse is true. Super Columbine Massacre RPG is entertaining the way rubbernecking is entertaining. It’s fascination with disaster scenes. It’s the thrill that some people get when they see a scene in a movie in which everything they know is being obliterated in a wave of incredible violence. Society collapses, skyscrapers fall, cities explode, schools get shot up. But instead of just being an emotional retelling of the Columbine massacre, it uses video games as a medium, to tell its story from the perspective of being inside of it. Simultaneously, it uses the fact that it is a video game depicting a brutal massacre to cause you to think about the barrier between games and reality. Just as DOOM was blamed by some for part of the Columbine massacre, later school shootings were blamed in part on the fact that the shooters had played the Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Even the fictional hell scenes form a coherent first person fantasy, and I really feel like I’m walking through the boys’ dreams, a hell populated with images from the games they played and the books they read.

I can understand why Slamdance would declare the game a finalist. They were looking it as art, as social commentary, as an exploration of psychology and gaming itself. I can also understand why PC World would say it’s one of the worst games of all time. Still, I don’t think it’s appropriate to remove a game from the emotional and artistic context, and for that reason I disagree with PC World. I don’t plan on ever playing this game again, but it’s not one of the worst games I’ve played, not by a long shot. It’s just psychological.

I’d like to invite you to share your own opinion, whether you’ve played the game or not. You can find the game at its website.

Kotaku.com is known as the Web site for everything gaming. And that includes the intersection between gaming and the Columbine shootings.

On Thursday, my second set of excerpts went up on Kotaku. (The first were in February.) Each time, the discussion has been wide-ranging, and vigorous.

In February the excerpts, with an excellent intro by Kotaku Managing Editor Brian Crecente (and a former Rocky colleague) garnered 14,406 page views and 115 comments, by one count. The excerpts were also featured on the media Web site gawker.com.

On Thursday, I was moved by reaction to the Winnenden, Germany shootings to write an op-ed piece about the continuous, and wrong-headed nod to video games as the heart of the problem. There were 13,873 page views and 122 comments at one point.

Gamers may have a knuckle-dragging reputation. But I have read a sampling of the Kotaku reactions to my book, and I found them to be mostly high-minded. And more high-minded, I might add, than many of the comments posted on newspaper Web sites.

Kotaku is not necessarily the outlier. Another good forum for Columbine via the gamers can be found on Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Although I have a hard time endorsing that name.)

If you want to go beyond the discussions and excerpts, I understand my book, Columbine: A True Crime Story, a victim, the killers, and the nation’s search for answers is now on the shelves at Tattered Cover.

Daniel Golding from the blog Subject Navigator recently had a post describing Call of Duty 2 as a “war theme park.” He supported his argument by comparing the pre-scripted events from the game to the pre-scripted actions of  animatronic robots from the Pirates of the Caribbean and Jurassic Park rides. I agree with this description. The Call of Duty series has always been able to make its linearity feel natural through its use of big set-piece battles. Our actions may be limited, but we always feel like we’re a part of a much larger war happening around us. It’s intense, exciting, and fun. But should it be? This is war after all, and should war be fun? How should games deal with a subject as serious as war?

I’ll admit that “fun” is a loaded word as it implies a certain aloofness towards the subject matter, so I’ll stop using it. I think “entertaining” is a better word since it implies enjoyment but without the aloofness; even the most painful of films has to be entertaining in some way  in order to keep its audience. One of my college instructors saw the movie Crash at the behest of several students, and described it afterwards as “The best movie I never want to see again.” I took this to mean that the movie was entertaining enough to keep him watching, but its portrayal of prejudice was so disturbing that it was enough for him to experience it only once. How should a game deal with a subject like this? While a movie may make you squirm in your seat with unease, perhaps even a little disgust, at what’s taking place on screen, a game demands that you participate in it. How do you convince someone to participate in something that would normally make them uneasy just watching? Another way to look at this would be: How seriously should a game take its serious subject?

Neither of those are meant to be rhetorical questions. First off, a game should always take a serious subject seriously. I think one of the reasons Call of Duty: World at War, though well received, didn’t meet with the same critical glee as Modern Warfare, is because it took its subject too lightly (I think Modern Warfare took it seriously, more on that later). While there were plenty of big moments over the course of the story in World at War, all the action was happening around us, and not to us. Dimitri especially went through more than his fair share of tough times but he always made it through just fine, nothing that happened to him had any consequence so it felt like nothing really affected him, and therefore nothing really affected us. It was another theme park, we were never really in danger. The story was also very disjointed: I had no idea that 3 years passed between Dimitri’s first and second mission until I read about it on Wikipedia just now (had to find the name of the Russian). I also didn’t realize that I took control of a third character for the “Black Cats” mission who never appeared again. With its disjointed narrative and theme park-style set-pieces, World at War proves it’s not actually trying to say anything about war. It just wants to give us a fun experience (and just for the record, it is quite fun). This also answers my first question: How do you convince someone to participate in something that would normally make them uneasy just watching? Answer: Lighten it up so it doesn’t make them uneasy. Unfortunately this method kills any potential serious discussion.

I’m not going to start bemoaning the current state of the industry and its lack of “serious” games. I actually feel like things are heading in the opposite direction. There will always be games that are purely fun, even if they’re about something dire, and there should be; I like fun games (heck, the crashes in Burnout are pretty violent if you think about it, but ramming someone into a highway divider at 120mph never seems to get old for me). But there’s also plenty of room for a more serious yet entertaining experience, and gamers have proved that they’re willing to play through some uncomfortable moments. For example, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This game stayed entertaining by taking those big moments Call of Duty is famous for and making them even bigger. However, these big moments had tangible consequences on the characters; they were actually affected by the world around them, and as a result so were we. I would hardly describe experiencing (spoilers) Paul Jackson’s slow death as fun or even entertaining, and that’s precisely why I’d argue the game takes that serious moment seriously. This also answers my first question: How do you convince someone to participate in something that would normally make them uneasy just watching? Surround it with moments that are genuinely enjoyable.

There are plenty of games about serious subjects on the indie scene, and there we’ll find what is perhaps the best example of a game that forces its players to participate in something unnerving: Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Though a few years old at this point, there’s a good article on Gamasutra about the history of SCMRPG!) Shooting up a school is obviously not something people would normally do for fun, so how did SCMRPG! handle the subject? It used genre conventions and dated graphics to distance us from our actions. The game plays very much like an old-school Final Fantasy rpg: There’s an inventory system, the ability to equip objects, character stats, experience from battles, leveling up, etc. The enemies are all named after stereotypes or their jobs, such as “Preppy Boy,” “Janitor,” “Religious Girl,” “Jock,” and others; this lack of characterization furthers our emotional detachment from them. The 16-bit graphics turn the whole event into a pixelated cartoon. Despite all this, playing SCMRPG! is still unnerving at the very least. Every battle is extremely one-sided. Always gnawing at the back of your mind is the upsetting idea that perhaps the killers felt the same sort of detachment. The emotional impact comes after the protagonists have killed themselves, and a montage of real photos is displayed. Seeing the real photos of real reactions by real people drives home the point that this is more than a game, this actually happened, and suddenly our actions during the game take on an entirely new and disturbing meaning. (Despite my praise here, I think the hell portion of the game is completely extraneous and besides the point it was trying to make) So to answer my first question: How do you convince someone to participate in something that would normally make them uneasy just watching? Make the action less disturbing while the player performs it, revealing its full consequences after the fact.

There are many more games that take themselves seriously. Hush is set in 1994 Rwanda, during a genocidal Hutu raid on a Tutsi community, where we play as a Tutsi mother trying to calm her crying baby so as not to be discovered and killed. Another mainstream game is Grand Theft Auto IV, which removed the extravagance and absurdity from previous games to tell a serious story of a man stuck in a life of crime, and the consequences of such of life. And looking ahead we have Heavy Rain. As I said before, there will always be games that are just pure fun, and I hope there always will be. But I also hope there will always be games that take on a serious subject with a serious attitude, because I and other gamers (check out that Average User Hype for Heavy Rain on the 1up site) are more than willing to get serious. Seriously.

Jogo já é um pouco antigo, e lembro de ter ouvido falar nele antes, mas acho que é sempre interessante falar sobre.


Para os que não conhecem, The Super Columbine Massacre RPG é um jogo independente no estilo dos antigos RPGs de video games que aborda o tema do tiroteio em Columbine. Ele de fato te coloca na pele dos atiradores e recria com detalhes o evento, além de adicionar uma parte fictícia onde os atiradores vão pro inferno.

É famoso por começar discussões sobre vários tópicos e polêmicas envolvendo jogos, violência, o preconceito que jogadores e jogos ainda enfrentam hoje em dia, o que deve ser considerado um tema genuíno para um jogo, e coisas desse tipo.

O jogo criou uma controvérsia tão grande que até um documentário sobre toda a discussão foi feito.

Aqui, assista o trailer para o documentário Playing Columbine:

Para baixar o jogo, tente a página oficial de The Super Columbine Massacre RPG“

Fonte e detalhes sobre uma recente discussão sobre o jogo: Kotaku

I guess this is kinda old by now, and I certainly heard of it before, but I guess it’s always worth mentioning.


The independent game called “The Super Columbine Massacre RPG” is always a discussion starter on all things related to games, violence, the prejudice gamers and games still suffer nowadays, what should be considered a genuine theme for a game, and stuff like that.

The game created such controversy that even a documentary on it was made.

Here, watch Playing Columbine’s trailer:

To get the game, try the official The Super Columbine Massacre RPG website“

Source and details about a recent discussion about the game: Kotaku

Hearing this is rather disheartening as a supporter of T-, M- and AO-rated games being equally promoted and acknowledged in the industry as E-rated titles are. I really like M-titles. I do. I want there to be more of them. In the same way there’s like five bajillion R and PG-13 movies out there, there needs to be more M- and T-rated games. They’re what truly define the issues our cultures have to deal with today–the ugly things, the things people try to ignore. Racism, discrimination, violence, rape, political instability, historical precedents, human error, human flaws, conflicted sexuality and more. I love talking about human problems because they’re so many and they have so many sides to them. And the less you have to worry about reaching people’s standards, the less you have to worry about interfering with the art process. And I illustrate: Games Aren’t Art and its followup blog.

I recently stumbled on an old Columbine article while searching for an old computer game I can’t seem to find anymore. The interesting thing is, I recently downloaded and played the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! game, and was planning on reviewing it. Now I think I have enough links to be able to put this all together in one massive post. Fun, eh?

So when people argue games are excessively violent, they sometimes seem to use logic that absolutely blows my mind. Yes, I am aware of the existence of these violent games (though why Gunslinger Girls was on this list is an absolute mystery to me–I wasn’t aware boys were asking for this during Christmas). I am aware kids will want to play games like Grand Theft Auto and Halo. I am aware these games are not suited for them. But are you aware, General Public, that we know this already, and despite the angry outcries that we simply want to sell more games to more children and corrupt their minds, we’re constantly trying to improve ourselves by taking a look at what you say. I’m fascinated that people actually believe we’re trying to market adult games on kids. If I had kids, trust me, I wouldn’t be giving them Halo. They’d be playing Pokemon and Harvest Moon and Super Mario Bros., like 10 year-old-kids should. I’m sorry if our “confusing advertising and [] vague and poorly promoted rating system for videogames” isn’t enough for you. We kind of thought it would be a great idea to put people dying in previews for games that had people dying in them, for the sake of being obvious, and slap big Ms and Ts and Es on the front of game boxes with a subscript that reads “For Mature” or “For Everyone”. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I’m so sorry if it just doesn’t cut it. Next time, we’ll add little talking boxes, too, so when you pick up a game, it’ll scream its rating at you like a banshee.

And, of course, this year’s list of violent no-no’s. Funny that all of these are rated M and shouldn’t be played by children. M means not for children. I need to make a shirt out of that. One side: “I’m Rated M” and on the back, “Kids Shouldn’t Play Me.”

As Brenda Brathwaite just posted, people assume games are for children, and that all these violent games are harmful to them. Well, they’re not made for children That’s why we rated them ‘M’, for Mature. That doesn’t make them bad. Crash was a violent and impacting movie about stereotypes and people fighting with each other, and that won an Oscar for best picture–runner up being Brokeback Mountain, a movie about gay cowboys. Last my Church roared at me, homosexuality was evil. Not that I’m going to take their side on that, but why then are these the movies that are being nominated for Oscars, while videogames are being raged against?

Honestly, I’ve worked in a game store, and I’ve had all kinds of horror stories of adults yelling at me because I wouldn’t sell a minor a game. I couldn’t even get a word in with the man until I finally cracked as he was pulling his wallet out to pay for Grand Theft Auto. “SIR!” I roared, and half the store stared at me for a moment. “Do you have any idea why I refused to sell the boy the game?!” The man looked somewhat lost for a moment between being yelled at and realizing he had no idea why I had refused to sell the game. “Well, no. Why?” I took the game from his hands gently and showed him the M logo, implying it was for Mature audiences only. Then I read the rating contents on the back of the game in list fashion: drug use, sexual situations, extreme violence and gore… his eyes grew progressively wider and wider as I spoke, and when I was done he turned to the boy with a wild expression. “And you were going to buy this?” The boy stood there, looking numb, and pointed next to him. “I was buying it for him.”

He was pointing at his twelve-year-old little brother.

I have a younger brother. I played GTA with him. I made sure to point out, “Look, this is real, this isn’t, and obviously this is all cartoony so I hope you can understand that the main character is a total ****head and doing any of this in real life would mean we’d kick you out of the family.” And he got it. He understood. I also have a little cousin whose father got him an Xbox. My uncle and aunt are huge about raising kids. Big God people. Their firstborn was hyperactive so they had to learn a lot about parenting very quickly. And my uncle recently asked me if I recommended Medal of Honor Airborne for his 14-year-old, since he was looking for Christmas presents. And I know he chooses Medal of Honor because it’s a historical game, filled with learning impulses, and he knows my cousin needs to stay active and is extremely adept at First Person Shooters. I would have recommended Age of Empires 2 more, if he wanted my cousin to get an educated learning experience, but weighing RTSs versus the point and click nature of FPSs made me go for MOH.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with kids playing some violent games with guidance. My folks took me to R movies sometimes and sat me down after each, explaining what we just saw. And I think that’d good. It’s part of growing up, since we don’t have kids running around the downtown streets anymore and watching their friends get killed in freak accidents (and I allude to parents and aunts and uncles I know). We need to make up for all the lost growing-up-experiences.

So parents need to have a deeper influence on what their kids are doing. That’s why the ESRB is there. I hope people understand this, because it’s really important. We didn’t put the ESRB up to help ourselves. It’s not there to promote our games. If we had our way we’d get rid of it and sell every game as E–more profit that way. I joke at work all the time about the elements we could put in that would earn us an M-rating. The ESRB is there for you, Mom and Dad. Use it. Raise your kids. They’re not going to raise themselves. But they will want to play games.

Right now, the ESRB has to go on defense to counter the statements made by the Video Game Report Card. Though the ESRB recieved a satisfactory grade (B) for the way they’ve handled ratings, people still seem displeased. One of the statements issued was that the ESRB messed up on their rating forManhunt 2, which was originally written down as AO, banning it from most consoles (which I disapprove of–I think an AO rating shouldn’t bar a game from being on a console, but there you go, I don’t run the world). Manhunt 2 was censored a great deal and given the less-stringent rating of M, but, apparently, “PSP version of Manhunt 2 still contained violent content, although it was only made accessible by users who hacked into the handheld.” Oh, wow. So, what are you suggesting? Are you worried children will hack into their PSP to unlock Adults Only content? Are you serious?

First, let’s look at the improbablility of the situation. In the circumstance that a child finds themselves with the highly advanced technological ability to hack a console (my siblings can barely connect to the Internet) and they get possession of an already M-rated game which they technically shouldn’t be playing, yes, they are in high danger of finding adult content in Manhunt 2. Of course, if my child had that technological knowledge, I’d be more worried about who they’re talking to online that’s giving them these detailed instructions. Now, in the circumstance that a 17-, 18-year old (the age you have to be to actually buy Manhunt) gets a hold of Manhunt 2 and hacks it on his PSP… WELL. Technically, at that age, you’re legal, aren’t you? You have to be 18 to purchase an AO game and, oh, that’s right, you’re just a year away now. How is that making any difference whatsoever?

I think the issue here is just that people want to get rid of violence in games absolutely. And that, to me, is mortifying. It’s like saying “Let’s get rid of violence in comic books!” So Superman… will be… diplomatically engaging people threatening to destroy the planet. Or, “Let’s get rid of violence in movies!” So… Tarantino will be making… nothing. For the rest of his life.

You know, you have every right to censor what comes into your home. It’s your home. It’s your money. Kids can scream all they want but it’s still your rules. And if you sit them down and explain in a rational manner what it is you’re thinking when you make these rules, I’m sure you can get through to them. Or maybe you won’t. But that doesn’t mean you have to cede to them. I didn’t get to watch Titanic. I don’t know if I’m a better or worse person because of it, but there you go. Everyone else watched it. So what? I was kicking and screaming, but I realize now it wasn’t even that good a movie. I watched it recently and thought, eh, I didn’t really need to watch Leo DiCaprio wading around in water at that age. Your kids will probably understand when they’re older, too. Just make sure you have a reason for what you do.

We’ve covered ratings now. Rating gets in the way of the art process, according to my thesis. So what if a game ignores rating altogether? What if they try to do something that simply is unacceptable by most people’s ideals?
With the release of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! for RPGMaker 2000 came angry mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, friends, and that guy who just rails against anything on his blog. I was shocked when I first saw its name. I was shocked when I heard the premise. But I’ve had a lot of time to dwell on it.

I think one of the reasons people were most furious about SCMRPG! for is the fact that it’s simply a game about Columbine. They think, “How could you disrespect the deaths of so many people?” And it’s true–it’s a chin-out, bold and outrageous thing to do that hits close to home in the hearts of many. I mean, I don’t see that many games about the Holocaust, for example. It’s just not done. People won’t even make jokes. Hitler jokes are funny. But Hitler’s just one dude. The Holocaust was millions slaughtered.

Another reason why people think SCMRPG! is garbage is because it seems to be a game that makes fun of the idea that heavy metal and DOOM make people violent murderers. So it’s a game defending gaming and Marilyn Manson. By talking about murderers. In a way it’s a somewhat stomach-turning formula, but it more-or-less makes sense.

The creator, Danny Ledonne, worked with Emberwilde Productions to direct and document the production and reception of SCMRPG! called Playing Columbine, and the IGDA screened it a week ago or so. I haven’t watched it, but I’m going to look around the Net to see if I can find it. I’m not really sure how to react to the video, honestly. I don’t know if I can classify this game as art. If art is something that evokes emotion, well sure, this evokes a lot of emotion in me. Rage, pain. Then again, I felt the same way watching Schindler’s List.

The thing about SCMRPG! is that as I was playing it, I began to somewhat understand what the killers must have felt, and must have been thinking. It’s amazing. I realized that as a kid, I probably went through a lot of the same crap these kids went through. And yet I’ve grown up and found different ways to deal with my problem, whether by sarcastically critiquing the society around me or trying earnestly to help it change. I recognize, as I play the game, that these boys made the wrong decision. And I feel bad for them. That was the point of the game, I suppose, as put forth by Danny Ledonne in his artist´s statement. He wanted something more profound than just a memoir for people lost in the tragedy. He wanted people to see what the real issue was–not games and heavy metal, but neglect and loneliness, things we all suffer from. It’s all it takes to drive someone over the edge.

Something more recent to take a look at is the Virginia Tech Massacre video, done in Halo 3, sort of re-enacting Virginia Tech with as much delicacy as possible while trying to still illustrate the events. For someone like me who plays FPS all the time, it’s difficult to really think about this video in real life terms, with this actually happening to someone. But when I try to put myself in the situation of someone being shot, it’s really rather mortifying.

And that’s one of the things that really moves me about videogames–using a game, someone went ahead and made a memento for people to remember a tragic event. A game. You see a lot of games about World War II, but often they’re really all about war and how the U.S. won it. I want to see a videogame about the Holocaust. I want a Schindler’s List kind of game. Now there’s art.

Tom Brokaw recently made me shake with fury when he suggested that videogames and blogs were cancerous. Apparently, he believes that blogs and videogames move people to try and do the same the Virginia Tech Shooter did, and then he argued that showing the killer’s final note on the air wasn’t giving him victory and inviting people to emulate them, but rather putting people on guard and “show[ing] how dark he was, and what the reality is.” So… videogames and blogs promote mass-murder? And I point to SCMRPG! and the Virginia Tech Massacre video. Showing the Virginia Tech Murderer’s video was showing people his innermost, evil thoughts. And SCMRPG! wasn’t? That was the thesis of the game–looking into why those boys did what they did, and making you feel somewhat stricken because of it. These things are not promoting violence. As controversial as they may be, they are reflections of people’s reactions to the times, and show a general concensus in the population of disagreement with what we see, and a desire to change it–whether by probing into dark minds or making people have to face their emotions.

Games like Manhunt 2, people say, are filled with needless and wanton violence. What about movies like Saw? I still see Saw entering theaters. In fact, it’s thought-provoking movies like The Golden Compass that get slandered. Why is that? Why are we criticizing the wrong things?

See, the problem isn´t the fact that we give kids virtual guns. The problem is we don’t tell them what they’re for, and then we give them a reason to use them in a way they shouldn’t. Columbine, for example–nobody cared about those kids. They only had each other. They were alone. Nobody taught them what how to deal with what they were dealing with. I, on the other hand, recieved a lot of support from various teachers–and I mean real teachers: English teachers, Math teachers, History and Drama teachers. The issue is we don’t teach anymore–we let kids learn. And they will learn whatever they see, unless we learn to teach accordingly and make sure the things they see are given context.

If there really are blogs out there that promote killing and death, then move to try and stop them. Write counterposts. Link people back to you and be smart about it. Teach them. Don’t just point the finger and say “bad”. All you’re doing is giving people more traffic by leading the population with your all-accusatory finger.

And if you really think video games are about murdering and slaughtering innocents… well. I’m not sure what you’re playing.

Maybe you should be playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG.