Video game reopens Columbine wounds

[Robb]

Parents of victims are horrified; creator says it's for 'real dialogue'

An Internet-based computer game that puts players in the army boots and black trench coats of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they kill Columbine High School classmates is attracting attention and sparking controversy.

Called Super Columbine Massacre RPG, the game mixes cartoonish scenes with photographs of Harris and Klebold, pictures taken from newspapers and television stations and excerpts from their writings.

The game's creator, who refused to identify himself to the Rocky Mountain News, did agree to an online interview. He said he wanted to create something profoundly unique and confrontational that would "promote a real dialogue on the subject of school shootings."

Several Columbine families, after being told about the game, had plenty to say.

(more)

[Ringo84]

1. That videogame

Damn it to hell! This guy is not helping the dialogue on videogames.

The anti-videogame nuts will eat this up. We didn't need this.
Ringo

[Julius Civitatus]

2. What's the f#cking point of this game?

Please, someone tell me! What's the point of creating this game?
Dialog? Meant to open dialog?

BULLSHIT!!!

This is morbid, sick sadism.

:wtf:

[mdmc]

3. to crash a plane like 9-11

i would guess. that is what they kids fantasized about

[Kutjara]

5. Actually,

911 created a minisurge in sales of games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, apparently so people could see what it was like to fly a Boeing into the WTC and Pentagon.

[Name removed]

22. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[blondeatlast]

26. Dialog--titled "Super Columbine Massacre RPG" Riiiight.

You're damn straight--this is sick, sadistic exploitation.

[Kutjara]

4. Couldn't have done it better...

...if the game had been commissioned by the anti-videogame lobby. Leaving aside the moral outrage the game was no doubt calculated to cause (no publicity is bad publicity, right?), just look at the screenshot of the game in the article. It would have shamed a game designer in 1985, to turn out such crap. This was hurled together in a weekend expressly to cause uproar. It's a publicity stunt, not a game.

[Blue_Tires]

7. tasteless publicity stunt

and you're right, i was shocked by the rudimentary graphics in the screenshot...for someone to put this out on the cheap, i was at least expecting something better than the original Doom or Duke Nukem

[HuffleClaw]

6. bwahahhhahaahaaaaa

funny how SOME things are 'too sensitive', but its ok for the military to promote a game for kids that lets 'em mow down the 'bad guys'. and at the time, it was trench coats, and marilyn manson which were 'to blame' for the massacre!

[Endangered Specie]

8. mmm, this reminds me of "JFK Reloaded"...

the one whrere you try to duplicate the 3 shots 1 shooter assassination... :sick:

[blackhorse]

9. The need to promote dialogue

... seems to be on the part of the game's author:

Columbine marked me deeply," he wrote in the e-mail interview with the News. "I was in a Colorado high school then. I was a bullied kid. I didn't fit in, and I was surrounded by a culture of elitism as espoused by our school's athletes.

(from the original article)

The game is a poor way to promote constructive dialogue. However, the author's comments about his school highlight the "faux society" aspect of American high schools; the way they're set up with their built-in elite groups like cheerleaders and football players. The ironic aspect is so much of that stuff means nothing once high school is completed, but the kids are put into this "society", expected to take it seriously, and they do.

I think the game's author could do himself a big favor by seeing a counselor. He still has issues with his "faux society" experience; the energy he put into creating this game is evidence of that.

BH

[Chrisduhfur]

21. I Think you're reading too much into it.

I can't say for sure but I have a gut feeling that he did it for the shock value. In other words, he wanted to stir some shit up. But I may be wrong...

[GoddessOfGuinness]

10. Interesting bit here:

Richard Castaldo, who was paralyzed from the chest down in the Columbine shooting, downloaded and played the game after reading about it on a gaming Web site.

He said he wasn't sure what to think about it.

"It didn't make me mad, just kind of confused me," he said. "It kind of reminded me of that Elephant movie, but in video-game form. I think I get what he was trying to do, at least in part.

"Parts of it were difficult to play through, but overall, I get the feeling it might even be helpful in some ways.

"I don't think it's bad to discuss."

I wonder how others who were wounded feel about this. And I wonder where the other parents of those killed and wounded stand. I'd like to hear more than the opinions of 5 people before writing it off completely.

[Robb]

13. I think it speaks more

to the resiliency of the kids than anything. :shrug:

[rpannier]

11. Does he make $$$$ off the game

Because if he does...call me a synic...but...I think it's less about dialog and more about bucks.

[noonwitch]

12. How awful

The creator of this game is very sick in the head.

[Lochloosa]

14. G. Gordon Liddy has a unique take on this.

He said that the markmanship at Columbine High was astonding. Most of the kids killed were from head shots. The FBI said they have never seen that kind of kill to shot ratios.

And he explanation. They learned to shoot on video games. Hard to argue with him.

[MetaTrope]

15. Liddy's take-out

And he explanation. They learned to shoot on vidio games. Hard to argue with him.

Following that logic, we have an entire generation of overweight kids sitting in front of their Nintendos who could defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in a pro football game.

[Lochloosa]

16. Sitting in the stands with high powered rifles.

Yep!

[Chrisduhfur]

19. highpowered rifles with UP:DOWN:RIGHT:LEFT (A) (B) (C) (D) controls?

[wicket]

20. LOL

n/t

[Chrisduhfur]

18. Hmmm...

I've played a lot of video games where the object was to shoot and blow stuff up, but when I went shooting with my brother I couldn't hit a damn thing... But I totally "pwn all jooo n00bs" when it comes to counter strike... So I don't think my video game awesomeness helped me much.

I have a feeling that the target practice they got with REAL guns is what helped them with their accuracy. The only possibly legit argument I could see against video games is that it may desensitize people about violence. I personally don't agree with that 100% either, although I can see that it might help push someone who is already nutty over the edge... but I dunno.

[benEzra]

23. Liddy is off his rocker...

I suspect the fact that the Columbine shooters primarily shot their victims with sawed-off 12-gauge hunting shotguns at point-blank range had a bit more to do with it. Hitting a stationary target 5 feet away with a sawed-off shotgun is probably not all that hard. Now, hitting a moving target at 21 feet with a handgun takes a bit of skill (or tagging a B21 target at 100 yards with a short-barreled pistol), but hitting something at 5 feet with a shotgun, or 100 yards with a scoped hunting rifle, is not "marksmanship" by any means.

FWIW, the part about learning to shoot a gun from a video game is pretty much bunk. That comes from Dave Grossman, an authoritarian (and anti-gun) right-winger who wrote a book claiming that first-person shooter video games are "murder simulators." As both an avid gamer and an avid shooter, I can tell you that playing Halo on an Xbox doesn't do diddly squat for your ability to shoot a real gun...

In real life, there's not a big circle floating in front of your nose that shows where the gun is pointed at all times. The front sight on a video game gun isn't an out of focus blur, like it is in real life unless you're focusing on it. You can jerk the fire button on the controller and it doesn't jerk the gun off target. And so on.

If you're interested, here's a critique page by a law-enforcement trainer who is quibbling with Grossman's work:

www.theppsc.org/Grossman/Main-R.htm

[sofa king]

25. Yeah, I didn't buy Grossman's swerve into video games.

But the rest of Col. Grossman's book, On Killing, ought to be required reading for every Congressman who must debate sending people to war.

He's offered the best explanation for one of military history's most persistent conundrums: why, though weapons technology improved throughout the ages, did the casualty percentages of battles remain so remarkably consistent? Grossman argues that most people not only don't want to kill other people, many of them simply won't do it without undergoing a combination of conditioning techniques which were discovered by trial and error in the wake of World War II.

Grossman does an excellent job of demonstrating how those conditioning techniques led to increased firing rates among troops, which in turn led to increased rates of PTSD (that's a highly simplified explanation for the purpose of this post). Then, in the last few chapters, Grossman makes a wild leap at videogames, claiming that some violent games emulate the conditioning techniques taught to modern combat troops.

One of the big problems I have with Grossman's videogame-as-murder-simulator theory is that videogame players are intensely conscious that they are not behaving as they would in reality. I think that along with the lack of tactile and olfactory input helps defeat whatever conditioning the games emulate.

Rather to the contrary of Grossman's assertions, which he first made back in the Super Nintendo days, the falling violent crime rate seems to actually parallel the percieved increase in violence and verisimilitude of videogames. That raises the intriguing possibility that the cathartic release which accompanies such games may actually be keeping the violence on the screen and off the streets.

Speaking of which, I have the urge to kill someone right now, so I'm off to Battlefield 2. Probably the Dedicated Wake 24/7 server, should anyone wish to kill me back.

[benEzra]

27. Grossman tells a compelling story, but his data isn't any better

on his "killology" opinions than his video game opinions. Certainly his views are plausible, but the data he uses to buttress them are very shaky. That doesn't mean what he says is false, but it does mean that what he says isn't necessarily true, either.

The link I posted above (on video games) also gives "the other side" of the Grossman data on what he calls killology. Maybe he's right and maybe he isn't, but it appears that he often "tortures his data to make it confess", to use a science cliche...

http://www.theppsc.org/Grossman/Main-R.htm

[sofa king]

28. Hmm. I've been taking his firing rate stats as gospel.

I've always known that S.L.A. Marshall's firing rate figures were controversial, but I didn't know that Grossman relied so heavily upon them. Guess I'll have to take a second look at that.

Still, I'm sure the guy is on to something. The entire history of warfare supports the idea that without some sort of additional motivation, people just don't want to kill other people, even when their lives are in danger. It is a fact that most humans must be trained to kill--otherwise the world would be a very different place.

Oh, I forgot to mention this: your observations on video games being bad shooting trainers is almost word-for-word what a good friend of mine told me once. He's a combat veteran and avid gamer. Once I naively asked him if he was worried that playing FPS games might trigger his PTSD, and he just laughed and laughed. He said real combat is far too boring, too scary, too confusing, and too dirty for anyone to want to make it into a game. I think that's the crux of the matter right there: games are fun and people know they're playing the game to have fun. I've never met anyone who has said that about combat or murder.

[TroubleMan]

29. LOL....I'm a gamer and a former Marine.....that's way off.

In the Marines marksmanship is extremely important and you have to qualify with a rifle every year. Shooting a gun in video games would actually make you worse at shooting in real life. The two are completely different.

[Chrisduhfur]

17. hah! Yeah right he just wanted to stir shit up...

By giving it attention he is getting what he wants.

[superconnected]

24. I agree with Rohr-bough's statement -

"My initial thoughts, I guess, are that when people glorify murderers, they make murder acceptable," Rohr-bough said. "