[casual_games] slamdance competition

[David Wessman]

Wired has just posted an interesting article by Clive Thompson about the
Columbine game. I believe it presents an excellent argument for why it
should be taken seriously.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72491-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
 I, Columbine Killer

By Clive Thompson <http://www.wired.com/support/feedback.html?headline=I,
Columbine
Killer&story_id=72491&section_path=/columns&ftype=feedback&msg_type=1&aid=1368>|
Also <http://www.wired.com/storylist/1368-0-0.html> by this reporter
02:00 AM Jan, 15, 2007

I barrel into the Columbine High School cafeteria, pull down the fire alarm,
and the kids erupt into chaos. Then I pull out my Savage-Springfield
12-gauge pump-action, which I've sawed off to 26 inches for maximum
lethality. A jock stumbles across my path: With one blast, he lies dead on
the floor.

"This is what we've always wanted to do!" hollers my fellow killer, Dylan
Klebold. "This is awesome!"

The *I* in these previous paragraphs is, of course, Eric Harris -- one of
the two infamous teenage shooters in the Columbine High School shootings of
1999. I'm playing one of the most controversial games in existence right
now: Super Columbine Massacre RPG! <http://www.columbinegame.com/>, a
homebrew role-playing game that puts you in Harris' shoes.

As you'd imagine, the game has been sandblasted with criticism since it was
released early in 2005. Families of Columbine victims denounced it; a Miami
Herald editorialist called it a "monstrosity." The game -- and its creator,
the 24-year-old Danny Ledonne -- came under even more fire last year when a
school shooter at Dawson College in Quebec was discovered to have played Super
Columbine.

Still, it didn't capture the attention of the gaming community -- until last
week, when Slamdance booted the
game<http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/01/columbine_game_.html>out of
its annual Guerrilla
Gamemaker Competition <http://www.slamdance.com/games>. The competition
organizers had originally lobbied Ledonne to enter the game, and the jury
selected it as a finalist.

But as Slamdance approached, cofounder Peter Baxter decided that Super
Columbine was simply too hot a potato. There were legal concerns, he told me
(though he was vague about them); and "there was a question of our moral
obligations to the families of the victims."

Fair enough. If Baxter has moral concerns, he's certainly allowed to act on
them. But given how politically radioactive the game has become, you might
well wonder: What's it actually like? Does it exploit the tragedy for cheap
thrills? Or does it actually have artistic merit -- offering a new way to
think about Columbine?

Right off the bat, Ledonne tries to put his critics off guard by delivering
precisely the opposite of what you'd expect. Nobody will be able to use Super
Columbine to live out explicit fantasies of gore or train themselves to
shoot up a high school.

That's because it's anything but a graphically sophisticated, blood-soaked
shoot-em-up. On the contrary, Super Columbine was designed to look like a
clunky Nintendo game from the mid '90s, with low-rez, pixilated characters
the size of sugar cubes, and cheesy MIDI music. When you kill someone, the
avatar looks like a mashed red blot.

What strikes you, instead, is Ledonne's attention to narrative detail. He
painstakingly researched the killers' life stories using publicly released
police investigations of the pair, and the game thus includes all manner of
detail I never knew. When I started off in Harris' house, I found a box of
Luvox, an antidepressant he was on that prevented him getting into the
Marines. When I met up with Klebold in a basement, we sat down in front of
the VCR to watch the "I've seen the horror" speech from Apocalypse Now, a
movie they apparently loved.

Ledonne actually reconstructed copious dialogue for the pair, pulled from
real-life transcripts of what they said on the day of the shooting --
including survivor reports and their own videotapes of themselves. (He
estimates 80 percent of the dialogue in the game is lifted from real life.)
It's oddly mesmerizing: They wonder about what the reaction will be to the
massacre ("pass more gun laws, probably"), reminisce about old times, gird
themselves for battle and explicitly compare the attack to video games.
"It's gonna be like Doom, man!" Dylan exults.

You're constantly reminded of how creepily unbalanced Harris and Klebold
were. One minute they're tossing off nihilistic riffs: "When I'm in my human
form, knowing I'm going to die, everything has a touch of triviality to it,"
Klebold muses. The next minute they're quoting Shakespeare: "Good wombs hath
borne bad sons."

Harris is sad that his parents will be blamed for his evil acts ("My parents
are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I
was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse").

And they perennially break into bitter recriminations about the popular kids
they feel have tormented them. "If you could see all the anger I've stored
over the past four fucking years. I'm going to kill you all," Klebold
seethes.

The upshot is that Ledonne has done a surprisingly good job of painting the
emotional landscape of the pair -- whipsawing from self-pity to pompous
grandiosity and blinding rage, then back again.

When you actually get to the school and begin the attack, things become
subtler yet. As you wander through the hallways, the little pixilated
victims scurry around in semi-random paths, and any time you cross paths a
battle is triggered. You encounter the same six or seven kids over and over
again: the "Jock Type," the "Preppy Girl," the "Sheltered Girl", the "Preppy
Boy."

It's a neat stab at the mindset of the killers, who, for all their bombast
about being objectified by their tormentors, did precisely the same thing to
their victims. They didn't see them as individuals: They were just
metaphoric targets for their hatred. Indeed, in the game, as the killers did
in real life, you don't target any particular kids. You just wander around
killing randomly. And Ledonne's aesthetic decision to make Super
Columbineso retro-looking enhances this effect: The game's style
evokes the killer's
pared-down, simplistic, self-serving view of the world.

Ledonne also gets in a few sly jabs at video-game culture itself. When you
acquire your weapons, the game announces it with the sort of cheery dialog
box that is typical in an RPG: "You acquire a Fire Spell! You pick up a Frag
Grenade!" Except here, because the weapons are drawn from real life ("Eric
got a Hi-Point model 996 carbine rifle complete with shoulder strap!"), the
exuberant tone highlights just how psychotic and disconnected from reality
the conventions of video games can sometimes seem.

And this, really, is what makes Super Columbine so artistically interesting:
It uses the language of games as a way to think about the massacre. Ledonne,
like all creators of "serious games," uses gameplay as a rhetorical
technique. (In fact, to support Ledonne's artistic license, almost half the
finalists in the Slamdance competition have pulled their
games<http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000719.shtml>,
and USC's Interactive Media Division has withdrawn its
sponsorship<http://interactive.usc.edu/members/tfullerton/archives/007203.html>
.)

The game is hardly perfect, of course. Ledonne's sardonic touch sometimes
becomes a bit heavy-handed, detracting from its power. And his use of the
killers' many self-mythologizing quotations -- including material from
Nietzsche, Shelley's Frankenstein and T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, among
others -- wind up seeming merely ponderous, instead of thought-provoking.

But you certainly can't argue that the game merely trivializes the killings,
or voyeuristically revels in them. As the school shootings wind up, your
avatar commits suicide in the library alongside Harris. The game cuts to
real-life photographs of the killers' dead bodies, taken from security
cameras in the schools. These are the only photos of real-life carnage you
see in the entire game: Ledonne follows them up with a montage of news
photos of the survivors clutching each other in horror, then archival shots
of the killers as young boys, but he avoids any pictures of the dead
victims.

The overall effect is a bit bathetic, but still -- after all the pixelated
abstraction, the sudden appearance of real-life photos leaves you pondering
the mystery of the shootings anew. Though you know more, you still can't
quite fathom why it happened.

There was one final bit of gameplay I didn't understand at first. After you
commit suicide, you awake to find yourself in a parody version of hell. I
wandered around, being attacked by demons that -- in a hilarious meta touch
-- were plucked from Doom, the very game originally blamed for inspiring the
Columbine killings. But I didn't get very far, because the game became
suddenly very hard, and the demons quickly overcame me. I knew from reading
online descriptions of Super Columbine that the hell sequence goes on for a
long time, but I couldn't figure out how I could possibly play such a hard
level.

So I called up Ledonne to ask what the secret was. He pointed out that in
his game, as in any RPG, you become more powerful with each enemy you kill
-- "leveling up," as it's called. To survive in hell, you need to level up
as far as you can while you're still in the school, which means you need to
kill virtually every student in existence. I hadn't done that, so when I got
to hell I was too weak.

"It's a little joke -- you have to be really, really bad to survive in
hell," Ledonne said. "But I'm also making a point about choice in real life.
The killers made a choice every time they pulled the trigger, and it
affected them. You make the same choices in the game, and it affects you."
Wired.com (c) 2006 CondéNet Inc. All rights reserved.
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