Richard Castaldo talks about Columbine RPG

Columbine SurvivorTalks About Columbine RPG:

For those of you who don’t know what an RPG is, it stands for Role Playing Game. It’s a type of video game that deals mostly in fantasy scenarios. Popular RPG franchises would be Final Fantasy or Suikoden. Think of it as Dungeons and Dragons but as a video game. And yes, someone made one based on Columbine. I’ve seen it, but I haven’t played it. I’m not about to download that to my computer.

Anyway, Richard Castaldo, who I first mentioned here did an interview with Kotaku, a gaming site, about the Columbine RPG. I won’t reprint the whole thing, but I found this segment of the article most interesting…

Do you think it glamorizes what happened at Columbine?

There is a part where after the character’s representing the killers in the game die, and then the game shows an extended real-life montage of what happened that day. And it shows their blood-soaked corpses, and isn’t pretty. Which to me deglamorizes what they did. I’ve heard of some stories where some students try to make folk heroes out of these killers, which is very disgusting to me. I think people who have that mindset and then play this game and see that part it would make it real for them. As opposed to having this sort-of romanticized version that some people have.

But, at the same time there are some dialog in the game that comes up after you kill the students that refers to you as being “brave boys”, which i would hope was supposed to be ironic, because clearly what they did was not brave or heroic in anyway, it was quite the opposite. It has you killing students with absolutely no protection whatsoever. Which is what actually happened. So if the killers (or anyone else for that matter) thought that what they were doing was heroic in any way they were deeply fooling themselves. People ask me all the time, “Did you know them?” And my answer is of course no, i didn’t. And, I didn’t do a damn thing to either one of them. So, I think the game kinda highlights that. That there was no real rhyme or reason why specific people got killed.

And that’s from someone who was there that unfortunately did not come out unscathed.

So, think about that the next time you think that the killers weren’t cowards.