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Monday 23 February, 2009
After planting the propane bombs, I had to get back to the parking lot to plant the car bombs, but somehow I was caught walking through the hallway and had to start over from outside the school and had to plant the same bombs again. After I successfully planted the bombs and sneaked my way back to the parking lot, I went into the trunk of Dylan’s car and retrieved the weapons in the black duffle bags. I met up with Dylan at Clement Park. A minor cut-away scene showed Eric and Dylan talking about how all of their problems will now go away with this act of violence. Eric later meets with Dylan at Rebel Hill, which is where the two of them wait to watch all of the timed bombs go off. They wait in anticipation but realize that the bombs set in the cafeteria as well as the bombs set on the cars weren’t correctly set, so they panic and realize that they had to take action soon. This was when they first decided to storm the school and begin with the school massacre. Eric spotted a friend in the parking lot, but told the friend to scurry along because he said that he didn’t want to see his friend get hurt. I assumed at this point that the objective of the game was to kill everyone in sight, starting with the people in the parking lot. When I ran into the first real victim of the game, I was schocked to see that an RPG action, turn-based battle system was displayed. On the bottom left of the screen, it showed what type of clique status that the student had, such as “preppy boy” or “goody goody girl.” Then, I had to decide whether to kill them manually or automatically, using the game’s automatic battle system. I killed a few people in the parking lot using the automatic system. The screen shows how many hit points the victim took and how many experience points I received after committing the murders, which is actually very disturbing to me. I eventually enter the school and continue with the game’s main objective.
After killing a few students in the main hallway, I explore the rest of the school, going upstairs and into classrooms. The classrooms were filled with students and teachers. I not only used firearms to attack the students, I also used the pipe and napalm bombs made by Eric and Dylan. Even though the graphics of the game was rudimentary, it was very eerie to see the pixelated gore and blood after killing the victims. I continued to explore the rest of the school when I realized that this was the only objective of the game. I was actually too disturbed by the premise of the game to continue the game and decided not to finish it. I thought the game was very disturbing for trying to simulate a huge tragedy. I think that it’s wrong to exploit a tragedy and use the first amendment to excuse its development. One positive thing that I did experience was that playing the game gave me a chance to understand more about what went on in the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. However, there are other ways to understand the tragedy that are more sensible, sensitive, and non-violent. I think the creator or creators of the game should be ashamed for exploiting the tragedy of the massacre and pretending that it’s just another way to inform and educate the public. I don’t know what happened from completing the rest of the game, but I would rather not find out.
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