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Hazmat24's Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC)
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| [November 2, 2008 09:00:50 PM]
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Running away isn’t an option (or if it is, I didn’t find it), which I suppose is true to the situation. It’s unlikely that either of these boys would run away from anything at this point. They were on a mission to kill people and no one was going to stop them. They had this obsession with hatred and ending the lives of as many people as possible with the fervency of religion. What they did was moral to them and they obviously felt they had to do it.
They mention at one point something about changing the gun laws. Almost like a dare to the government to try and change the laws or…I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant but I think that if gun laws were tighter, they still would have gotten their hands on weapons and they still would have shot up the school. The collectable items were more symbolic than anything. The CD, the book, and the game all point to media as a possible influence. If someone were to immerse themselves completely in that lifestyle of death and killing I imagine it would take a toll on your mind eventually. I wondered during the shooting if they had taken any sort of drugs beforehand, just to dull themselves to what they were about to do.
I found myself trying to avoid people in the halls so that I wouldn’t have to kill them. I just wanted the experience to end as fast as possible. Ultimately I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone and I wouldn’t ever play it again.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Nov 2nd, 2008 at 21:01:10.
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| [November 2, 2008 08:48:29 PM]
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When I sat down to play a second time and actually got into the school, I was surprised to see that the fighting style is turn-based. This seemed to really make the game feel like a game. At that point I shifted into my gamer mode and it became me shooting pixel people. I lost a lot of the earlier sense and bad feelings that I was out to kill students and it became business as usual—shoot the enemies….though the ‘enemies’ in this case weren’t attacking me.
The Frankenstein scene seemed out of place, but I don’t know much about the facts concerning these two troubled students. I’m assuming they had some sort of project involving Frankenstein at some point.
There was a part where you can enter a bathroom and it appears that someone is getting beaten up by a group of students. The creator’s choice to add this seemed strange. My first thought was to fight the jocks beating up the student, but then I wondered what the point would be. I would only succeed in suffering some damage (that I could heal easily) and ‘rescuing’ the bully victim. This made no sense because I was already going around shooting at random and killing people; the sudden option for redemption, however slight, made me wonder what sort of message that creator was trying to send.
Was s/he trying to glorify or denounce the Columbine shootings? The montage of pictures at the end made me think this was a tribute to the shooters, though I’m not sure if it was meant as positive or negative. Obviously some thought went into this game, I just don’t know if it should have. I don’t understand why this exists.
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| [November 2, 2008 04:40:53 PM]
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As soon as I heard about the new gamelog and that we had to play a game that detailed the events that took place at Columbine High School in 1999, I was prepared to be disturbed. I assumed prior to playing that this would be your standard shoot ‘em up, how-much-blood-and-gore-can-we-show style game skinned with students and a high school. The fact that the game actually shows backstory, ie-Dylan and Eric planning their attack and discussing it, made the whole experience more poignant and surreal. Players are forced to see that these teenagers were ‘real’ people and not just pixilated tools created to wield a weapon. The game makes this event less of a news story puts it in more human terms.
In terms of ethical decisions, I think any sane person would agree that what Dylan and Eric did was, to put it bluntly, unethical and wrong. Shooting up a school can’t be deemed right by any theory we’ve talked about. Utilitarianism doesn’t work because far far more people were made unhappy by the outcome. Kantianism can’t justify what they did—shooting people at random is not a universal law. Social contract theory that basically says if it’s moral for me to act one way, then it’s alright for everyone else to do so also—definitely not alright in this case.
An incident of this magnitude that affected so many people’s lives and continues to affect people’s lives can’t be explained in one theory. I think just as humans at our core we know some things are wrong and bad and that’s enough of a reason to justify doing or not doing an action.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Nov 2nd, 2008 at 16:41:44.
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