Yes, I’ve heard about the Virginia Tech game where you get to play as Cho Seung-Hui. I haven’t played it yet, but I have the feeling I’m not going to be as outraged about it as I was about SCMRPG.
It’s a flash-based game hosted at the bastion of bad taste that is Newgrounds.
I get the feeling that it’s just some guy being an ass rather than some guy being an ass claiming he’s making an artistic statement.
I can finally cross one off the list of bands I need to see before I die. I’ve seen Black Sabbath and Dio, and last night Type O Negative was added to the list.
Charlotte, NC does not normally attract the best metal bands since they get no radio play, so Type O coming to the area was something of a miracle for me. And they did not disappoint.
They opened up with “Magical Mystery Tour” by the Beatles. They also played songs from every album. The one that surprised me the most was “Anesthesia” from Life is Killing Me, as that’s one of my favorite Type O songs of all time. From the new album, they played “Profits of Doom” and “These Three Things”.
My only small disappointment was that their set seemed kind of short to me. I would hazard a guess that they played 90 minutes at most. It could just be that I’m not used to small club shows and that there were two opening acts.
Now if only Iced Earth would come to Charlotte.
Kids submerged in culture of death games:
I don’t know if this is a letter to the editor or not, but this may just be one of the most misinformed opinions about video games I’ve ever heard. It’s basically a commentary about how the media is to blame for crimes like Virginia Tech and blah blah blah…
What is appalling is what most consider to be mass murder is now being exploited as a profitable venture. The video game entitled “Super Columbine Massacre” allows the gamer to play the part of murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they randomly shot their Columbine High School classmates in the halls, classrooms, library and cafeteria. This real-life portrayal of a murderous rampage that took the lives of 11, ending with the double suicide of the killers, has been turned into a marketable source of entertainment.
Other games put the participant in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald during his assassination of President Kennedy. Another allows a shooter to take aim on Mexicans crossing the border. And yet another provides vivid instructions as to how to assassinate the president. All are presented in explicit and bloody detail. What is next: Terrorist-in- training videos?
What does this say about our society when “entertainment” vehicles are available to anyone that wishes to become a murderer at the click of his or her mouse? What possesses someone who seeks enjoyment from killing in cyber space? And what stops a person from acting out these fantasies in real life? Sometimes these people are not stopped and what took place at Virginia Tech is the result.
I can’t believe I’m defending games like SCMRPG and JFK Reloaded, but these games are niche games that you can’t just go out and buy at your local video game store. And SCMRPG is not presented in explicit and bloody detail. It’s cartoony at best, even though its message is disturbing.
Also, to make the leap from video games to “Terrorist-in- training videos” is absolutely ludicrous. Let’s not forget the age-old classic of parental responsibility, either.
If kids under the age of 17 are playing M-Rated games, it’s more than likely that the parents are letting their kids play it. But it’s much easier just to blame video games, isn’t it?
What do those three names have in common besides the fact that they’re overpaid talking heads? Well, two of them have placed the blame for the Virginia Tech massacre squarely on video games while one of them dismissed the idea, and it may not be the ones that you think.
Ok, Jack Thompson is the one that you think. That should have come as no surprise.
What did come as a surprise was TV quack, Dr. Phil. I was never a big fan of his to begin with, but I thought he had more smarts than this…
Well, Larry, every situation is different. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me – common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high.
What came as even more of a surprise was radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh coming to the defense of gamers.
Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that, it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers?
People have a tough time accepting a relatively simple explanation for something of this scale. But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns?
As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.
One of our favorite attention whores, Danny Leddone, creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG, is going to be a guest speaker tomorrow night at Loyola Marymount University’s First Amendment Week.
Tuesday will also feature another First Amendment event that will discuss video game violence in St. Robert’s Auditorium at 4 p.m. Participants will have a chance to play the controversial game “Super Columbine Massacre RPG” from 4 to 7 p.m. and listen to the creator of the game, Danny Ledonne from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Ledonne’s game, available on the Internet, reenacts the day of the Columbine shooting through the eyes of the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Recently, the game was pulled from the Slamdance video game festival due to its controversial content.
Again, I have to ask why do people keep making this out to be a first amendment issue? The government never said that he couldn’t make his atrocity of a game. The Slamdance Festival is not the government. The people who protested against the game are not the government. Read the following words carefully.
ONLY IF THE GOVERNMENT SUPPRESSES YOUR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS IT A VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
Learn it, love it, live it.
Don’t make me say it again.
Columbine game blocked from receiving Slamdance special jury prize:
It seems that attention whore extraordinaire Danny Ledonne tried to backdoor his game into the Slamdance Festival competition, but as a documentary rather than a game.
Ledonne showed a demo of his travesty of a game, Super Columbine Massacre: RPG, to Slamdance juror and filmmaker Brian Flemming. Flemming then discussed the “game” with two other jurors. The three jurors then decided they were going to award Ledonne an unofficial special jury prize. But their intention was to try to slip it past Slamdance director Peter Baxter by surprising the audience by announcing the special prize along with the film documentary award.
However, Peter Baxter caught wind of it and put a stop to the award, claiming that the award could not be presented to music clearance issues. The game contains midis of copyrighted music.
How do we know all this? Ledonne told Joystiq himself. I’ll give Captain Smug this much. He definitely knows how to market himself.
To make matters worse, Ledonne says he’s going to make a documentary about the game and all the controversy surrounding it.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was his plan all along. Create controversy and turn it around to a film career.
If Mr. Ledonne is still serious about not trying to cash in on Columbine, then he should put his money where his mouth is. If he successfully makes the documentary, any money he makes from it should be donated to the Columbine Memorial fund. But then the Memorial isn’t dedicated to his heroes. Only the victims.
I finally got to see the video of Super Columbine Massacre RPG’s creator Danny Ledonne’s interview on AOTS. You can see it if you go to AOTS’s video page and go back to 1/22/07.
I could tell it wasn’t going to be a heated debate when host Kevin Pereira basically stated that Slamdance’s decision to pull SCMRPG from its competition amounted to censorship. Why is it that people still don’t realize that censorship can only come from the government? A private organization like Slamdance has the right to let in or kick out any game they want.
Then Captain Smug himself, Ledonne, came on and basically acted like he was the Messiah of all video games, with Kotaku’s Brian Crecente acting like one of his disciples.
I thought at one point we were actually going to get a decent debate when Pereira asked Ledonne if he thought SCMRPG glorified Columbine. Ledonne avoided the question, and both Pereira and Crecente let it slide. This wasn’t as much of a debate as it was a bunch of ass kissing.
What they should have done is have someone with an opinion that actually was opposed to the game. Like a Columbine victim’s family member or a Columbine survivor. I bet it would have been a lot different debated if they did.
Granted AOTS isn’t exactly a bastion of journalism, but they did a great disservice to their viewers by having such a one-sided conversation.
Crecente, Ledonne Talk Columbine on AOTS:
I guess if I’m going to take this blog seriously, I have to start watching (ugh) Attack of The Show again.
It seems that our favorite attention whore, SCMRPG creator Danny Ledonne, was on AOTS tonight discussing his virtual abortion of a game with one of Kotaku’s writers.
I didn’t see it tonight so I’ll have to try to catch the replay over the weekend. If someone out there has a video of it that they can post on YouTube, please let me know.
Columbine game was pulled over legal risk:
In a follow-up to Alyric’s post about Super Columbine Massacre RPG Slamdance Festival co-founder has said that the reason SCMRPG was pulled from the festival’s competition was for legal reasons…
The “hurt” factor and a moral obligation to the public, along with a “very high” legal risk, were a few reasons given Sunday during a panel discussion about why the controversial video game “Super Columbine Massacre RPG” was pulled from a Slamdance game competition.
It didn’t help the game’s reputation, panelists agreed, that there was a “mushroom cloud” of negative and uninformed press and knee-jerk reactions to Danny Ludonne’s game.
“It was a very hard decision to pull Danny’s game from the competition,” said Slamdance co-founder and president Peter Baxter. “We have not got the time or the money to take on the first round of civil action on this.”
Prior to the start of the annual film festival and its newer video game competition, Slamdance was already getting outside pressure to distance itself from Ludonne’s game over fear of a civil lawsuit, possibly coming from relatives of Columbine victims.
But Ludonne’s game was described by panelists and the discussion’s audience members as part documentary and part “art” for its depiction of actual events that took place when its creator, now 25, was a sophomore in a Colorado high school. When he created the game and submitted it anonymously to an Internet address, Ludonne said he was trying to work through notions of how he identified with the two Columbine killers.
First of all, it cracks me up to no end that they misspelled Danny Ledonne’s name throughout the entire article. Secondly, SCMRPG is hardly what I would call art. And it’s more of a “fan tribute”, if you will, than a documentary. Documentaries are supposed to be impartial. SCMRPG is an obvious tribute to the Columbine killers, even though Mr. Ledonne says otherwise. And yes, I actually have played the game.
When the game was pulled from the competition, Mr. Ledonne claimed that this was a blow against free speech. I disagree. I think that it’s the best exercise in free speech. The protesters voiced their opinion and the founder of the festival listened. That is what free speech is all about.
Do I think the game should be banned? Not at all. We have the right in this country to make any kind of offensive piece of crap we’d like, just about. However, the game should not receive the praise that it has. It is not art. Art contributes something to society. The only thing this game contributes to is the designer’s own ego. It’s not close to a documentary due to its inaccuracies. For example, calling the victims generic names like “Jock” instead of using the actual victims’ names. If you’re striving for authenticity, why not go all the way?
Personally, outside of hero-worship, I think the game is nothing more than an experiment in attention whoring. It looks like the experiment was a success.
(Guest post by Alyric)
This story is a bit unusual in that there is no crime being blamed on video games – rather, the video game is based on a crime.
For those of you who have been fortunate enough not to hear about it, Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a game created by Danny Ledonne. You will not find a link to it on this site; not now, not ever. Essentially, the game allows you to play as Harris and Klebold in a virtual recreation of the massacre at Columbine High School. Not only that, the content in the game and the author himself glamorize what they did. This was, sadly, hero-worship; a tribute, of sorts. Trench has covered this story previously.
The game has been around for a while, but just recently it made headlines again. According to Newsweek, a Utah Gamemaker Competition dropped the Columbine game from consideration. In response, six of the fourteen finalists have quit in protest, and seven sent letters requesting the game’s reinstatement.
To be fair, I suspect that most or all of these finalists are ignorant of the true nature of SCMRPG and many of the remarks made by Danny Ledonne. Still, making such a public demonstration of support for something you aren’t familiar with is dangerous at best.
Consider a quote from the article by Jonathon Blow, one of the finalists that dropped out after SCMRPG was removed from the competition. “As long as we persist in believing that games are just for kids … we’re not going to get where we need to go.”
This quote, I can only imagine, broadly assumes that the game has been removed for violent content. Mr. Blow, this has nothing to do with violence, only the standards of public decency, and respect for the families that lost loved ones on that day. The game constantly refers to Harris and Klebold as “brave boys”, and runs a tribute montage to them after their deaths. How could the Slamdance Festival afford to be seen as supporting that?
If the lack of respect showed by Danny Ledonne towards the families of the people murdered at Columbine wasn’t bad enough, consider his refusal to respect the wishes of the organizers of the event; from the second article – But SCMRPG! creator Danny Ledonne has told other finalists that he plans to go to the festival anyway and distribute copies of his game.
Kudos to Peter Baxter, president of the event, for not caving into the pressure.