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Tuesday 26 October, 2010
This is the third time playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG; up to this point I have been rewarded a couple of cheeseburgers for killing people. The point is the game rewards unethical behaviors and does not reward ethical behaviors at all. According to the context of this game killing and stereotyping is acceptable and every person involved in this kind of immoral act should be rewarded.
After killing a good number of people in the game, a player is rewarded a cheeseburger. I thought that this was just suppose to be a part of a narration, that I only deserved a cheeseburger for killing innocent people, but when I checked my inventory, I found out that I had cheeseburgers. This whole thing bothered me a lot – you take a good number of human lives and you devalue it until it is equivalent to the value of a cheeseburger. Also, the Idea that some lives are worth more than the other shouldn’t be tolerated. In the game, some people are worth more points than the other. I don’t know if Eric and Dylan were following any kind of point system when they performed this kind violent act, since this game is based on a real tragic event. I think the designers added this to be a part of gameplay, but what they did not put into consideration is that this can cause harm to our society. As players are been forced to perform these type of acts in the game against their will, there are not too many choices the game presented to the players and they are only left with one choice to do what they are been told to do in the game. If players were presented with many choices, and the game rewarded only moral behavior, and penalized wrongdoing, this will be a different game.
Games are not just a form of entertainment, they can be used as a good tool to educate people and make the players reflect on who they are in terms of their ethics. Designers should take a forefront and full responsibility to make games to be used as an education tool and entertaining in an appropriate way. What they should not forget is that if their creation causes harm to our society they are causing harm to themselves too, unless they are from another planet where this is actually accepted. It is like having one source of drinking water and for some reason you poison the whole source. What do you think will happen? You will die of dehydration.
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