Sunday 16 August, 2009

For the third time when I started playing this game I started up with my saved game again and continued to kill the people in the cafeteria. I found the game to still be boring and repetitive. The difficulty is that the game itself is very simple and the reality of what happened at the real shooting is too sad to make this seem fun in any way. In the cafeteria there were a lot of people running around who I got into battle with and ended up killing all of them. As I went to exit the room there was a flashback that one of the characters had about how he sat alone at the lunch table always. He said he hated all of the people at school because they always ignored him and eventually he realized that he was "above them all". After this cut scene finished it returned to the current time in game and they decided it was time to take what was keeping them from death. If this game was being compared to another game like Doom, it is way too easy to compare it. In Doom it is easy to be killed but in this game it makes it almost impossible to lose or have to play over. I never found where to go or what to do in the end of how to finish the game.

Perhaps that really is the message of this game, that taking a life in a high school was too easy and there are some lessons that have to be learned from Columbine. Maybe it really isn't about the guns but dealing with how students interact with each other and recognizing if there are problems and treating people in the ways that they need to be dealt with as preventative measures. The game over all seemed like it was put together as a school project and that it was designed just to show a students interpretation of what it feels like and all of the stereotypes and biases that still exist in the minds of teenagers that are propagated by the mainstream media. The tragedy of the Columbine incident goes further then the fact that the disturbed teenagers had guns. The tragedy began when the disturbed teenagers were not treated for having these things in their mind. They were never dealt with or talked to about these problems they had. The anger and the rage that was inside of them could have been seen by many people they know and perhaps it was simply ignored. The real lesson is how we interact and deal with people.

You note that the game is based on a tragedy and this renders the game incapable of helping produce fun. However, there are countless other games that are also based on real world events (many of which are also tragic), but we don't often think of them that way. For example, playing a first person shooter based on WWII. Why do you think that is?