Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=879https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479I had to ask though, ‘Why an RPG’? As far as I know, Eric and Dylan were not RPG players, and while the media certainly has a habit of stereotyping the games industry, I don’t think anyone mistook Doom for a title from the Final Fantasy series. And, if as I suspect, the hook of SCMRPG is not its game but the commentary, every decision should be make with that consideration in mind. What sort of audience is the author trying to reach, and what sort of audience does a 2D RPG appeal to? Anyone who already thinks Doom encouraged Eric and Dylan to go on a shooting spree probably won’t be interested in playing SCMRPG, much less convinced to reconsider the issue. By the same token, are more rational non-hobbyists going to go through the trouble of hunting down and installing this game? Probably not. Self-acclaimed gamers are much more likely to play SCMRPG, but gamers are also much more likely to think that Doom didn’t set the shooters off. So while there may be some value in exploring what Eric and Dylan’s psyche, there isn’t much the game suggests that gamers aren’t likely to already believe. Thus, I’m left wondering who exactly this game was meant for.Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:35:54 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479&iddiary=6513https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479I’m not sure what to think about SCMRPG anymore. After finally sneaking through the school to plant the bombs, there was a brief interlude in which Eric and Dylan prepare in the park. The conversation they have, while slightly disturbing, offered some insight into how the two may have rationalized their actions. In their minds, murder was justified not only because they had been antagonized by their peers, but also because each shooter had adopted a philosophy that might be – with considerable manipulation – considered existentialism. This theme is... addressed? in some fashion at the end of the game, but more on that later. After their chat in the park, the boys suit up and start shooting. The combat itself is bland, uninteresting, and tedious. I found myself avoiding ‘combat’ with students and teachers because it was so flat; one might make the argument that this feature is suppose to characterize the helplessness of the shooter’s victims, but it does little to invoke my empathy and instead is mostly just frustratingly slow. The cut-scenes that are played at certain locations, however, are far more interesting, and made me want to press on in spite of the monotony. Like the cut-scene that played in the basement of Eric’s house, these expositions are the sort of content I expect from a game with a title like SCMRPG. Each interlude offers touching stories from the daily lives of Eric and Dylan, juxtaposed with poignant and appropriate quotes such literary classics as T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The experience of transitioning from senseless, absurd violence to intimate personal moment and back again is, frankly, amazingly executed, in so I am pained to say that everything after the deaths of Eric and Dylan is confusing and inappropriate. And when I say inappropriate, please understand that I do not mean offensive. For my own purposes, I do not subscribe to the idea of political correctness. No topic should be subject to censorship simply because the possibility exists that the content may be objectionable. It is up to the author or creator to justify offensive material as relevant to the purpose of the piece, and that purpose should foster positive thought and discussion. No, when I say inappropriate, I mean simply that the ‘Hell’ portion of the game simply didn’t serve to enhance the meaning of the first half, and, if anything, it detracted from it with absurdity, slapstick jokes, and throw-back references (which is not to say that there isn’t a time and a place for the absurd, only that this wasn’t it). Nothing about the second half of the game helped to further my understanding of Eric and Dylan. I don’t see why it was relevant to include an island montage of game pop culture, or make reference to Satan from South Park. And while I think I would love any other game in which I get to wander Hades and talk to Nietzsche on the subject of existentialism and spirituality, this game was simply not the time or the place to include such content. It’s also apparent that the author or authors of the game were promulgating agnosticism or atheism, which I personally have no qualms with – as I subscribe to the latter of the two doctrines – but it feels as though that current detracts from the purpose of the game as I understood it to be in the first chapter. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can appreciate where the authors may have been going with the second half of the game, but that the tone and subject of the first half is insoluble with the content of the second half. In fact, I would be willing to wager that at one point in the development process, the end of the first half was the end of the game, particularly considering the way in which the chapter closes with a tribute to the victims and to Eric and Dylan. (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:37:37.)Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:35:43 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479&iddiary=6512https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479I have to confess that I am not interested in talking about the ‘ethics’ of directing Eric and Dylan in SCMRPG as they shoot their way through Columbine, because I think we can all agree that it’s unsettling – and that’s very clearly a deliberate decision made on the part of the author. Now, I’ve yet to finish the game, but it should be apparent from the title alone that SCMRPG is a satire, and not an invitation to revel in the violence. It remains to be seen, then, whether the caricature is relevant to the message being delivered or whether it is simply an investment in shock value. My experience so far suggests that there may yet be some merit to the game’s audacity. The game starts in Eric’s house and unfolds in typical RPG fashion, down to the last detail; menus, sounds, dialogue boxes and most noticeably, the game’s sprite art are reminiscent of some classic SNES games. Dylan calls Eric and the two talk about their plans for the day. From here the player is free to explore the house, which is mostly a chance to examine the things in Eric’s life. There is the obligatory copy of Marilyn Manson’s album and a copy of Doom. Interacting with the pizza box or the TV in the starts some interesting cut-scenes which examine an excerpt of a real video the shooters produced before the murders and an expository flashback explaining the planning that went in to the massacre, respectively. Both of these features were particularly outstanding inasmuch as they were able to capture some of the boys’ humanity even while limited to pixilated graphics. For example, the flashback scene explains a bit about how Eric and Dylan prepared for the shootings, but it also serves to show that they were very real people with real problems and a day-to-day life, and not simply killers that appeared for a moment on that fateful day, only to disappear again. That praise being said, let me say that the level following the house in which I had to guide Eric and Dylan to the cafeteria to plant the bombs was one of the most frustrating moments I’ve had in recent memory. I spent close to twenty minutes trying to get past this section of the game, which is disappointing not only because I consider myself a gamer and as such, should be able to overcome what seems like a simple obstacle, but also because it only served to impede my progression through the game. If I wanted engaging gameplay, I would probably not first turn to SCMRPG. The point of the game, as I understand it so far, it to provide me with a vehicle for understanding who these two men were and why they did what they did. I do not want to spend nearly half an hour trying to sneak past cameras and students, particularly considering there is no checkpoints – if you get caught on the way back to the parking lot, you start over outside the building and have to repeat the whole process. Please, in the future, make the game secondary to the story.Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:35:20 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3479&iddiary=6511https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401I couldn't help but notice that there were basically two kinds of people in C.J.’s neighborhood: gang members and scantily clad women. In the interest of fairness I took the bike that I “liberated” from someone around the city for a while to see what the other neighborhoods were like. My impression was mixed, to say the least. The character models that roamed Grove Street were decidedly absent from affluent communities - which I mean in a very literal sense. Models (the physical shape of a person) are often retextured cleverly to give the impression of multiple unique characters without having to pay an artist for the time spent working on a new body shape. The models for the poor neighborhoods were exclusive to the models used in rich neighborhoods – that is to say, the models used in Idlewood had a certain physiognomy that wasn’t reused for the people living in Mulholland. The people in Idlewood were a bit overweight and appeared to have a different demeanor than the people in, say Rodeo. What do we make of this? On the one hand, these stereotypes are fairly offensive and anyone who believes that the density of thugs and prostitutes on Grove Street’s streets is a literal translation of low income communities would rightly be accused of racism and sexism. But how are we to account for creative freedom? Topics such as gang warfare, drug trafficking, corruption and solicitation should not be taboo simply because the actions themselves are illegal or unethical; thousands of classic novels and films chronicle these and other subjects that are hardly morally upstanding. So, yes, GTA:SA is sexist; women are portrayed as nothing more than the subordinate sexual conquests of male protagonists. And yes, the characterization of the neighborhood is, at least, offensive. Grove Street is portrayed as a place where everyone in the community is violent, a drug user, or a prostitute. And more to the point, this was deliberate. I think that more attention could have been paid to the balance of character types. Idlewood is supposed to be a dangerous place, but that shouldn’t mean that every character should be a stereotype.Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:37:30 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401&iddiary=6346https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401I’ve gotten to a mission in which I had to stamp out a drug dealer selling cocaine to Grove Street. It’s a particularly interesting mission because it raises some complex moral issues. The Grove Street Family is concerned with the number of ex-members that have become drug addicts and therefore useless to the community. In response to this, they go out and beat up a street pusher, and following this they kill several dealers in a crack den. How would a utilitarian address this situation? In resorting to violence they have undoubtedly caused unhappiness for the recipients of their attack, but if they’ve eliminated a source of hard drugs in the neighborhood, couldn’t it be argued that the good generated by their actions outweighs the harm they had to inflict? Let us assume that this was also the only viable answer to the problem. Let us say that the police have a deal with one of the drug lords in which the dealer is given immunity in exchange for information, bribes, what have you, and that anyone within the police force who isn’t a part of this corruption has too few resources at their disposal to do anything but put a few peddlers away, so the source of the problem is never stymied. The dealers cannot be reasoned with to move elsewhere, and waiting for the situation to get better is also not an option – the incidence of drug use in Grove Street is exploding. In such a situation, C.J. and Ryder’s response to the problem would be the right thing to do. This seems counter-intuitive to our sense of reason. Simply because a problem is intransigent does not make murder acceptable. It seems that for this problem, Utilitarianism fails to offer a solution. Other ethical frameworks such as Kantianism and Social Contract Theory would refute C.J’s actions as immoral, but they are incapable of offering an alternative.Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:17:00 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401&iddiary=6344https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401I should preface this with a notation that I have never played any game in the GTA series, though I have been aware of it and its content, and, as a Game Dev major and gamer, I have had pretty extensive exposure to similar titles. Given the nature of this assignment I thought the best way to approach San Andreas would be to give special consideration to the decisions I made as the game progressed. That didn't go so well. The opening cinematic served to acclimate me to the GTA universe. In short, everything is going wrong for C.J. His mother's been killed, old enemies from a corrupt police force are threatening to frame him for a murder, and he's been kicked out of a moving car in a neighborhood where he's not welcome. And he's only been in town for less than an hour. This cut scene is essential to establishing the mood and aim of the game - when the cards are stacked against you this badly, reflexive measures are sometimes excusable. With the introduction over, I started playing, and upon reflection, I completely forgot to follow my own advice. The first objective is to get back to Grove Street territory, and in order to do so, the game suggests you "use" a bike in the alley where you were dumped. But this in itself is a choice, and I completely neglected to look at it as such during my session. I think I have been conditioned to follow commands presented by games as requirements and not suggestions, and, at least in this case, this is exactly what was being conveyed to me: a suggestion. Given the nature of the game, I very easily could have WALKED to my destination, but instead I instinctively "used" the bike. If my actions in San Andreas were actions in the real world, we would not say I "used" the bike, but rather that I stole the bike. Whose bike was that? Convention indicates that it must have been SOMEONE’S bike. And yet, because San Andreas is a game world and not the real world, the bike really wasn’t owned by anyone; it was there because a game designer put it there. Given this, can any ethical framework grounded in reality be applied to this situation? Kantianism puts forth that I can steal the bike only if I can will it that anyone else be able to reciprocate. But I CAN will it, because my character is the strongest agent in the game. Even if I will that any AI agent be able to do any action I am capable of, C.J. is always at a distinct advantage because my control over his actions allows me to plan and react in ways that the artificial intelligence cannot. It is as though San Andreas exists in the “state of nature” as described by Hobbes, only C.J. has a perpetual monopoly on power. As the game progressed it became clear to me that the only way to continue the plot was to follow the game’s mission structure. At one point my “mission” was to go eat something at a fast food joint, after which Ryder robbed the store at gunpoint. I had no choice to make in the matter; a cinematic fired, Ryder tried to rob the cashier, and we ran. My only choices were to follow the game’s order to flee the scene or to stand and take a shotgun blast from the clerk. It seems that choice, at least in as far as it is concerned with the direction of the central story, is virtually nonexistent.Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:49:39 CSThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3401&iddiary=6328