Saturday 23 October, 2010

Super Columbine Massacre earned its reputation for controversy. The story demonstrated several non-standard viewpoints and provided an ideal subject for critical thinking and analysis. One of the more striking controversial subjects in the game was the treatment of religion. In the context of the game, high school students are enemy monsters. Depending on label type, such as nerd or cute girl, attack and defense patterns varied. Most students either attacked or huddled in fear. Religious students, however, had the power to heal. This was where the creator’s subjectivism appeared. The religious students could only heal themselves and almost never attacked unless first taunted into becoming berserk. Their main action was to kneel and pray, instead of fleeing or defending themselves, increasing their “holiness”. All their ability allowed, however, was an extended time of beating on them. This was a definitive choice of the game’s creator; he forced players to use harsher weapons on religious students to kill them. Furthermore, after killing enough religious students, Eric purposely asks if they still believe in God. The response was essentially [I don’t know, it’s what my parents believe…]. After which the two shooters call them morons and kill them. It seems the whole game has an underlying message that believing in any sort of religion is a crutch for idiots. The developer does not offer any logical or factual supportive basis for this approach; he simply presents a string of suspect, opinionated examples. Even if game character conversations were based on reality, the high-stress environment would still inhibit most people’s rational train of related thoughts.
After the two shooters die, the creator continued to mock religion by creating an “after the fact” level where the two player characters fight on in hell. Hell was portrayed as a great video game, based on the real-life game Doom. On the “Island of [Lost Souls]”, the boys find a wide range of characters all “unjustly” sent to eternal damnation. Each of the doomed characters makes fun of the Christian God by saying such things as: “He is culturally [insensitive]”, “…He said no androids in heaven…”, etc. It seems the creator focuses primarily on Christian Catholicism for the definition of God. Yet, when the shooters confront the evil iconic figure (devil), the creator chooses to personify him as the well known character Satan from the popular television show South Park. This character usage creates a sense of relation and comfort to players familiar with the show. Basically, the author encourages players to view religion as non-sense and wrongfully oppressing.
In short, Super Columbine Massacre gave an extremely biased opinion of religion without proper argumentation or facts. It used singular, opinionated examples to provide an overall explanation of the creator’s seemingly personal views. The creator has a right to individual feelings, but also has the responsibility of being more ethically astute when producing an object for mass viewing or usage.

The game seems to have a tension between Ledone's ideas and what Eric/Dylan may have believed. In particular, their hatred of those who had faith. Curiously, their atheist/nihilistic view is proven wrong in the game both through the religious students (and their abilities) as well as the existence of hell...