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| 03.14.2007Controversy as Player-Created Content
I'd like to briefly make a few things clear about Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
- Ledonne distributed the game only to a few friends when he finished it in April of 2005. Awareness of the game has grown without his direction or encouragement, entirely through viral means. Therefore, it seems unlikely the game was engineered as a gambit for celebrity.
- Danny Ledonne is a filmmaker who grew up in Colorado around the time of Columbine, was deeply affected by it, and made the game as an expression of his thoughts and feelings on that experience.
- Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is not a great game, it suffers from both superficial level design flaws (the cameras in the hallway are frustratingly obscure for example) and the deep mechanical limitations of RPG Maker. Ledonne is the first to admit this.
The McDonald's Videogame, Disaffected!, and Ayiti: The Cost Of Life are games that imply a powerful political and social message through a periodic absence of fun, and are much better games. However, none of these titles has had the same impact as the Columbine RPG, and that impact, rather than the game itself, was the focus of my article.
You may not need to study the topography of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, but you should still pay attention to that meteor's effects.
I was inspired by Mr. Jurczyk's comment that the unsettling but (arguably) enriching experience of Super Columbine is a "next-gen" quality. It led me to this idea: the controversy the game generated is a form of player-created content. Every forum post, article and blog comment, every YouTube trailer rating and testimonial, every phone call or bar table discussion: player-created content. You don't even have to download and play Super Columbine to create content around it, its almost like an ARG in that sense.
With Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft competing over the relative quality of their player-created content platforms, its possible the Columbine RPG can teach us a useful business lesson, as well as an aesthetic one. -Patrick Dugan
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Letters to the Editor
