Monday 8 August, 2011

During my second time playing Super Columbine Massacre, I noticed a few basic similiarities between it and other games I have played. I noticed that at least in the beginning, it starts out the same way many role playing games on gameboy do: The player wakes up in his room (for some reason the room always looks the same, has a computer and a tv-usually with gaming console attached) and receives some sort of message about what he is supposed to do next, as in meet someone, go outside, etc. The images also reminded me in particular of Golden Sun, and vaguely of the times I played the Pokemon gameboy games. While playing, I wondered if there could be any sort of copyright infringement which could be claimed by Nintendo™.

When the game uses Marilyn Manson and other bands as examples of what the two kids were used to listening to, I wondered if they received permission from those bands to portray them in that manner, or if they had not needed nor pursued that option. After wandering around and looking at the familiar things in the game, I decided to procede with what I had been doing before- randomly jumping students, teachers and workers. Immediately, I tried to figure out what happened to all the equipment that was mentioned in the list of items that the students had taken from their car. Unfortunately, I did not find any trace of the numerous explosive devices listed, nor any menu which would tell me that I had them, and was merely unable to use them. This disappointed me, as I wanted to set up a bomb or two at the entrance to the lunch room, and wait till it was about to go off to pull the fire alarm, rather than merely pulling the alarm with no visible consequences.

As I wrote the past sentence, it suddenly struck me that while playing the game, I had suddenly experienced the urge to randomly maximize the destruction I could cause, even though I would not receive a benefit of any kind for doing so. It seemed to me that the developers wanted to show people that even though before playing such a game, a normal person might deny ever being able to entertain thoughts of enjoying causing someone pain, after playing the game for just a short amount of time, it suddenly becomes obvious that when playing the game, the focus is on maximizing chaos, destruction and death- all for enjoyment.

"It seemed to me that the developers wanted to show people that even though before playing such a game, a normal person might deny ever being able to entertain thoughts of enjoying causing someone pain, after playing the game for just a short amount of time, it suddenly becomes obvious that when playing the game, the focus is on maximizing chaos, destruction and death- all for enjoyment."

Good point. In some sense, enjoying virtual violence and chaos is easy (maybe even natural?) but doesn't necessarily imply that you enjoy real world violence.