Monday 25 October, 2010

I played for another half hour today. I entered more battles, which were impossible to escape. Once entering a close combat battle, I was forced to kill a student. Students are categorized into different cliches, such as the Jock kid, Preppy girl, etc. They could have easily been given names, but I think this was a mocking of how schools create these different labels of people.

The more I read the text, the more I believed that the game took real conversations from the Columbine shooting. I looked it up and found that this was true. It is hard to know what exactly was true, and what is fabricated for the story.

A conversation which stood out to me was the famous "Do you believe in God?" conversation.
The girl yells "Oh, God! Help me!"
Then the player's character, Dylan asks "Do you believe in God?"
The girl replies "Yes...no...I don't...know."
The player's character asks "Why?"
The girl replies "It's...It's what my family believes."
The player's character, "Pathetic."

You then are able to kill the girl labeled "Church Girl."
This is conversation which was later turned into the book, "She said 'Yes.'"

I thought this was disturbing, because it forced me to think from the killer's perspective. It pushed my thoughts from my standard, Christian mentality, into the mindset of the killers. I played a character killing a peer because she believed in God...or because she questioned her own faith to live.

I think everyone can agree that these killings were wrong, and the killers were horrible. However, I think as a gamer, I am disturbed as I enter the game in the mindset as the killers.

"However, I think as a gamer, I am disturbed as I enter the game in the mindset as the killers."

Which would seem to be part of point of the game. You can't really have that experience in other media. Fortunately, it's a "safe" experience, because once your done playing, you easily exit that mindset. No?