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Saturday, January 06, 2007
Super Columbine Massacre: Artwork or Menace?
Cross-posting from my blog at Manifesto Games. All right. As you know, we include in our inventory some free games--ones we think are particularly notable. Months ago, we decided not to include the Super Columbine Massacre RPG, because there's some controversy we don't need to court. However, this pisses me off: Columbine game pulled from competition. The competition in question is the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition, which runs simultaneously with the Slamdance Film Festival, and along with the IGF, is one of the few events which helps to focus attention on independently-created games--which, of course, is what we also focus on. And we therefore support the festival. I'm not going to focus on their reasons for pulling the game, nor to assign blame; if you want to explore that further, Ian Bogost has an excellent post on the subject. Instead, I'm simply going to make Super Columbine Massacre available here--and tell you why it is a work of art, an exemplary and important game, and worthy of your serious attention. Update: Andrew Stern, co-creator of Facade, last year's Slamdance game winner, has an open letter to the festival asking for Super Columbine Massacre's reinstatement as a finalist. Why Is Super Columbine Massacre Controversial? Super Columbine Massacre is controversial for one reason only: Because our culture continues to assume that games are "mere entertainment," that a game based on so horrific an event must ipso facto be in bad taste. Games are fun, Columbine was a tragedy and never the twain shall meet; a game on Columbine must by nature trivialize or cynically exploit the event. Q.E.D. Yet we do not make the same assumption about any other medium: a documentary on the Columbine massacre, or a novel, or a New Yorker essay would, a priori, be treated with respect, at least until the viewer or reader had experienced it, after which a judgment might be made as to its merits. And if the work proved insightful, somber,and respectful of its material, the world would consider it unexceptional. I will suggest, therefore, that no one is entitled to criticize this game until they have played it--and am morally certain that those who do have not. Because those who do will find it insightful, somber, and respectful of its material. Within the industry, Super Columbine Massacre has come in for a share of criticism as well--primarily because our industry is sensitive (and with good reason) to criticism that it is too reliant on violence and shock value for its success. The instinctive reaction of anyone within the industry when hearing about this game for the first time is inevitably "Oh god, we don't need this." But what we don't need is games even more tasteless than, say Postal; we don't need more ammunition for the know-nothings who attack games already. What we do need is games that challenge the stereotype of games as mindless, violent thumb-candy for boys--and games that show the potential of our medium to enlighten, to illuminate, to teach, and to move. What we need is games that approach the status of art. Like Super Columbine Massacre. Nuts and Bolts Super Columbine Massacre is built using RPG Maker (as was Aveyond). Color is 8-bit, and the screen is built using 16 pixel by 16 pixel tiles. Movement is in the four cardinal directions, using the arrow keys; all actions are accomplished by facing an item onscreen and pressing SPACE or ENTER. ESC brings up a menu that allows saves (in limited places), access to inventory, or quitting. Inventory can include a wide variety of weapons, as well as other items, some of which you need to give to other characters to trigger in-game actions. The whole looks like a mid-80s PC RPG, or an RPG for a NES. Combat is Final Fantasy-esque, in that combat transitions to a separate screen and is character-skill rather than player-skill based. (Yes, Harris and Klebold 'level up' as they kill people.) It's turn-based, although most opponents pose little threat to the protagonists (a jock may get in a hit or two), at least until the Hell levels. Cut scenes are created in-engine, although real-world images and occasional sound-clips are used at times. The game is highly linear, and completing it pretty much requires replicating the actions of the real mass-murderers. Dialog is primarily drawn from the words of Harris and Klebold themselves, and in dialog panels, they are represented by somewhat pixelated images of themselves. Player skill is important during gameplay mainly for purposes of avoiding NPCs (particularly during the early bomb-planting sequence, but later on for purposes of avoiding combat, particularly in Hell, less because it is dangerous than because it becomes tedious and repetitive over time--a common characteristic of Final Fantasy-esque games). There is some degree of puzzle solving, but it is fairly minor; as with most such games players need to grab every loose item they can, but at least there isn't too high a degree of "hunt the pixel." A typical gamer will find about five hours of play, though it can be completed in roughly an hour (a video of a complete run-through here). Enough of that. Design Choices Perhaps the riskiest artistic decision in Super Columbine Massacre is in casting the player as the murderers themselves--risky because we expect to identify with game protagonists, take pleasure in their actions, and share in their triumph. The emotion most games strive to evoke is 'fiero,' the joy of triumph over adversity--inappropriate, in the context of a story where there ought to be no joy, there is tragedy rather than triumph, and where there is scant adversity: unarmed children pose little challenge to the heavily-armed PCs. In another designers' hands, this choice would have been crippling. But the insight Super Columbine Massacre provides about its subject matter derives precisely from the fact that the player is forced to take the roles of the pepetrators. The player is exposed to their world: the music, the games, the heedless cruelty of high school life, the thoughts and words of Harris and Klebold themselves. Few people of intelligence and sensitivity emerge unscarred from the relentless anti-intellectualism and the cruel cliques of the American high school, and while most of us are not driven to murder (rather more to suicide), this game does a good job of evoking the thoughts and emotions of Harris and Klebold--without glamorizing or exculpating them. Once the massacre begins, the game becomes, for an experienced player, almost routine; encounter opponent, enter combat, select weapon, collect experience and items. Yet rather than being a trivialization of the event, this in itself is a critique of the conventions of the game qua game--the way in which slaughter becomes an end in itself and a means to advancement. No Conan, nor yet any real-world adventurer (save perhaps Tamburlane) ever personally slaughtered so many foes as a typical RPG requires, and yet we do so without thinking. In Super Columbine Massacre, you can't do so without thinking, precisely because of its connection to a real-world event. Though these are still pixels you are killing, you know they are stand-ins for the real-world victims--and it's hard to avoid a feeling of nausea after a time. Indeed, it is only the low-res, retro nature of the graphics that make it possible to continue playing: the game-ness of it helps to cloak the horror. It's an interesting tension, in fact--between evocation of the brutality of the event, and enough distance to continue playing, between the banality of the conventions of the RPG and the anything but banal nature of the material under study. Nor will the designer let you escape into the banality of gameplay; once the massacre is complete, he exposes you to a series of images, real world photographs of the corpses of the boys--and of the grief of the survivors and their families. The sharp-edged nature of these, in stark contrast to the pixelated images of the game itself, remind the player that this is more than "just a game"; it is a harrowing replication of a modern horror. Perhaps this is where the game should end, but in fact there is a sort of giant easter egg to follow: the Hell levels. Hell is surely where Harris and Klebold should be, but in perhaps another risky choice on the designer's part, they seem to like it there, as it's a lot like Doom. Indeed, the monsters they encounter and fight are drawn directly from that title. In the course of their journey through hell, they encounter the outer circle (per Dante, the place where those damned but not evil, such as pagans who never received the word of God, spend eternity), where people including Jon Benet and Confucius are encountered--along with John Lennon (damned for being an atheist, presumably), who sings "Imagine" to Harris. This elicits the response "If you weren't already dead, I'd have to kill you," which does sound in character. They also encounter Nietzsche, who proves to be a Nine Inch Nails fan, which also sounds in character. There's an element of humor here, in other words--and indeed, if an accusation of tastelessness has any merit, here, and not in the massacre sequence, is where it lies. After solving puzzles and encountering Satan comes the final cut-scene of the game: a ceremony outside the high-school, with the game putting in the mouths of the speakers a variety of the conventional sentiments the tragedy evoked. One speaker demands gun control, another a ban on violent media, a third the need to re-Christianize society. The sentiments are enough almost to make you wish you could take Harris and Klebold back to the school, at least in their game-character guise, and murder these idiots... ...because Super Columbine Massacre does a far better job of getting inside, and trying to understand, the events of that terrible day than these speakers do. A Work of Art? Those who deny that games can be art generally argue that games are mere entertainment, and therefore cannot aspire to that status. This is a form of category confusion; Harlan Ellison, for example, argues that being entertaining is the mininum criterion for a story, that any good story must entertain--but if it does no more, it is not much of a story. Naked Lunch, Burrough's novel of social pathology, is entertaining in its fashion--but it's also a brutal and harrowing emotional experience. Others claim that games are not (yet) art, because of the limited palette of emotions they can evoke: tactile pleasure, fiero, and frustration, certainly, but not (or rarely) tears or nostalgia or righteous anger, the vast panoply of emotions that film and fiction evoke. To my mind, this is category confusion again; architecture also has a limited emotional palette, but we consider it art. By this standard, however, one can certainly posit Super Columbine Massacre as a work of art: it evokes emotions rare in games--pity, horror, and repulsion. The great strength of games as a medium, the one thing games are able to do that other media cannot, is to illuminate their subject by engaging the player directly in the action. Other media can depict, but they can't bring you inside. Reading a novel or watching a film, you may identify in some sense with the characters, but you are never unconscious that you are outside, watching; in a game, by nature, you are inside, doing. Thus a game such as Zucker's Napoleon's Last Battles can help you gain better insight into the nature of Napoleonic warfare than reading Clausewitz; a game such as Sim City can lend insight into the nature of cities that's hard to obtain in any other fashion. And a game such as Super Columbine Massacre can lend insight into the events of that terrible day that newspaper reports, or somber and thouthful essays, cannot. Not necessarily better insights--but different ones--precisely because it makes you complicit in recreating the events. As gamers, and those who love games, our reponse to this game, and to the criticism of it, should not be to hide, or run away, or hope that it goes away. Instead it should be to say: You do not understand, nor are you attempting to understand. This is not a glamorization of the murderers, nor yet a trivialization of the tragedy; it is a work of serious artistic intent and accomplishment, based on considerable research, that in fact illuminates and reflects the horror of that day. Just as there are novels of the Holocaust, there can be a game of Columbine, and neither need trivialize a tragedy. Further Reading
Or you could play it. 93 Comments:
"a documentary on the Columbine massacre, or a novel, or a New Yorker essay would, a priori, be treated with respect"
I think you're making an apples to oranges comparison, the conditions of publishing, at first anonymously, over the internet - for free - are very different than publishing via New York print conglomerates. The title is an intentional satire on gaming, and to an extent, the media's hyperbolization of the tradegy. To put it in perspective, today, while this story was breaking and evolving so rapidly in what may well be an elaborate publicity stunt on the part of Slamdance (and an ingenious play if so) thirty thousand children died of disease and starvation. Also, a few hundred fetuses were aborted, if that is something you consider equivilant to a child's death. Yet these tragedies aren't exacerbated by the media, and therefore the public imagination, because their contexts aren't morbidly fascinating to our social paradigm, indeed the deaths I'm describing are well outside our social paradigm and therefore most convenient to ignore.
Don't read more into my comment than what I wrote... I am happy that someone can write and publish a game like this, I was happy that an indie art festival had the balls to select it, and I think Slamdance just lost a good chunk of credibility. I'm just concerned that some arguments (like freedom of speech outcries, or the specific bit I quoted) can go too far, to the point of burying the more real issues under a mountain of ridiculous claims.
Actually, I think I've been very careful NOT to couch this as a free speech issue. It isn't; Slamdance is a privately operated institution, and they have the right to make their own decisions, even if I think this one is misguided. Rather, I've tried to argue the artistic merits of the work in question, because that's the real point: this game deserved its nomination.
Oh, and no... In my case, the 'art defense' isn't an afterthought, nor not a 'true motivator.' I spent the day playing the game before writing a response. You won't see a similar response from me for the Kennedy assasination game, for instance. If I'd thought it was merely exploitative, I would not have raised a peep.
"Besides, my personal feel about SCMRPG! is that the "art" line of defense was an aferthought rather than a true motivator (or a resulting value) for the game, and I'm usually cynical about controversy-is-art debates."
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I remember reading the rules of a tabletop strategy game where the players played either police or protestors during a WTO meeting in Seattle. Another example I liked comes from The Forge, a multiplayer tabletop strategy game where each player plays both Native American tribespeople and US soldiers come to massacre them.
And a game such as Super Columbine Massacre can lend insight into the events of that terrible day that newspaper reports, or somber and thouthful essays, cannot. Not necessarily better insights--but different ones--precisely because it makes you complicit in recreating the events.
This is an important game. It is testing the mettle, testing the bravery and the breadth of the whole notion of what indie means, and I'm watching the reaction with great interest.
By brummbar: I think you've missed the point. It would certainly have been possible to do a tasteless and exploitative Columbine game; this isn't one. And yes, it might be possible to do a sensitive, disturbing, and important game about rape, or the KKK. Not that I have any clear idea how to do so. Although I do have an idea for a Holocaust game I'd love to do sometime. This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
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Imho, the indie movement needs to be inclusive (in fact, supportive) of games like this to encourage further experimentation and reassure those individuals making fringe games that their work will get a fair shake from indie distributors --without political correctness and cultural hang-ups interfering. Well, it's either that or hypocrisy, folks.
brummbar: I think you've missed the point. It would certainly have been possible to do a tasteless and exploitative Columbine game; this isn't one.
Enforcing a moral standard for content is not "hypocrisy" unless the Slamdance folks came right out and said that there ARE no content standards. Did they?
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Rich,
Haha, that's a good one brummbar.
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I observe that the makers of two Slamdance finalists (Braid and flOw) have withdrawn from the competition in protest.
By Open letter from current Slamdance Games finalists.
Games are fun, Columbine was a tragedy and never the twain shall meet
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This reminds me of the controversy regarding the recently published "War on Terror" boardgame, by Andrew Sheerin and Andrew Tompkins of Terrorbull Games.
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I can't belive you managed to write this much bullshit, Greg.
This subject is near to my heart, and I said something almost exactly the same as you a couple weeks ago during a discussion about whether a boardgame on the current Iraq war would be in good taste or not. Games can not only be fun, they can be artful and enlightening. For anyone who is a serious gamer, this should be obvious if you put some thought into it (although I think boardgames and traditional RPGs seem to do better than video games, which have to cope more with the mass-market).
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to me, playing this game was as cool and enjoyable as would be going to the graveyard, unburying the cadaver of my grandmother, and taking some pictures with her.
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The world is filled with people who think they have the right to never be offended by anything they see or hear. Probably always will be, as long as there are humans. Brummbar, I never suggested otherwise. The Slamdance people have every right to pick and choose who will be permitted as an entrant, and that is how it should be. However, they were placed in a position that would require them to either deny entry to an item which some believe has legitimate artistic merit, or risk the wrath of the humans I was talking about. Uncle Sam has nothing to do with this; it's all about John Q. Public.
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