Columbine RPG Slammed

I would buy a game called Super Columbo World.

Super Rockford Files please.

I remember two of them, but only one of those was popular.

I’m Okay isn’t really comparable is it?

For a start, it had a pissing on brains bonus round.

Now *thats* class.

I played CMRPG and I didn’t really find that it moved me or made me understand the shootings any better. And when you take the theme away, the game (as I said above) is mediocre imo.

And if you find I’m OK to be the same way, that is totally fine with me. :)

But I will say that anything that stirs up shit is generally okay in my book.

Wait, did you just give me carte blanche to stir up shit, Derek?

Righty, how d’you embed gay porn into these comments… ;)

I didn’t care much for the game but if it was genuinely a finalist in the competition, to pull it on account of pressure is a pussy move in the extreme especially from a festival that tries to be as “alt” as Slamdance.

It shows how far video games have yet to go as a credible form of expression – I doubt the festival organizers would have crumbled so readily were it a film being so loudly protested.

If a games not supposed to be played, then the whole point of its existance is worthless, surely?

Poor reportage I can find anywhere, I don’t really need it from a game as well.

Flow’s out too.

http://www.thatgamecompany.com/blog/index.php?itemid=17

Everyday Shooter, Once Upon a Time, and Toblo have also withdrawn, and several finalists have written an open letter of protest.

http://tinyurl.com/yz2vxx

Is there some sort of address I can subscribe to so I can find out when a good game withdraws from the competition so I can start caring? ;)

tits or gtfo

raigan: So if this wasn’t standard “some American goes crazy and shoots up the place”, what it was, then?

I guess it’s just that I can sympathize more in this case than with the gangs or postal workers.

My understanding was that shooting deaths due to gang-related violence are common. Or, not rare.

Actually, i think you’re right — if someone made a game that dealt realistically with the social and economic problems which generate gangs, that might help me understand their situation in a sympathetic light instead of dismissing it out of fear or ignorance.

A game where you must earn money (to feed your family, pay rent, etc) by performing horribly boring tasks to earn $5/hour, in an environment of segregation and large disparities between the affluent and the poor, OR get a gun and start committing crimes to earn money at a faster rate, while feeling more empowered or in control of your situation, might be quite effective.

raigan:

It might just prove that shooting people, in video games, is more fun than performing horribly boring tasks. This is actually the reason I avoid MMORPGs, in which you have to chop down trees and kill rabbits (i.e. click your mouse and watch) for hours or days before you can actually do anything remotely interesting (but usually just more clicking and watching).

In reality, most jobs — not just the ones that pay $5 an hour — involve performing horribly boring tasks. I can personally attest to this. So performing horribly boring tasks in a video game after coming home from work would seem redundant to most of us, not to mention masochistic.

It’s worth mentioning that, in the hypothetical game you describe, the player who chooses a life of crime would inevitably end up terrorizing other (virtual) people who are also working at low paying jobs to feed their families and pay the rent, but who don’t go out robbing and killing their neighbors. Poverty and immorality are not one and the same, nor is the former an excuse for the latter (I know you weren’t implying this, but many people do).

Even if it could be made fun to play, I guess a game about a guy who does honest, hard work to feed his family in an imperfect world just wouldn’t drum up the press of something like “Super Gangbanger RPG.”

raigan,

The problem with your movie analogy is this: great movies that are “painful to watch at times” are not boring, frustrating or annoying. They might evoke unpleasant emotions but they keep us glued to the screen because we feel invested in the story and characters.

I would say movies that are boring, frustrating or annoying are those where the camera is constantly shaking, the story makes no sense, the acting is terrible, etc.

Now, the creator of such a movie might be intentionally trying to abuse the viewer but this doesn’t give the work merit, in my opinion.

While the point of Disaffected (the Kinko’s game) is to annoy and frustrate the player, its success at doing so doesn’t make it a good game from the player’s standpoint. Do you think gamers will remember Disaffected ten years from now, much less be playing it?

I think Disaffected and other games like that (the airport security game comes to mind) can be effective as amusing little advertisements for political causes, but comparing them to what we traditionally think of as videogames is like comparing apples to oranges.

Games CAN tackle serious subject matter but they still have to be engaging and user-friendly (again, in my opinion) to be successful AS VIDEO GAMES.

“If the end result of our hypothetical game is that everyone ends up running around committing crimes, then great – they’ve learnt that (part of) the cause of this sort of behaviour is due to it being an easy solution/path of least resistance (in the short term, with a narrow and selfish view perhaps) to the situation the person/player finds themselves in.”

More likely they’ll learn that its a game and what they do in the game has no bearing on real life.

You just can’t apply the real world correctly to a gameworld or vice versa I don’t think, because people, as on the internet in many cases – don’t behave how they would if something were really happening.

Besides which, the reality is – that there’s so many variables in the mix as to how anyone makes a decision or ends up in a situation be it good or bad in life for a game to possibly replicate.

At best, it would be a simplification – at worst, an insult to the players intelligence. (SCMRPG falls into the latter category as far as I’m concerned).

Life just isn’t black and white. People, generally are just huge unknown quantities who don’t know how they react to something until it actually happens to them.

“Games CAN tackle serious subject matter but they still have to be engaging and user-friendly (again, in my opinion) to be successful AS VIDEO GAMES.”

I agree wholeheartedly. The play scene in Psychonauts had a million times more depth and sincerity than SCMRPG manages in an entire game.

I guess I’m just more worried that this whole furrory is a desperate lunge at the coat tails of credibility. And it disturbs me that the best we can offer up as an example of games tackling real life subjects is something as poor as this.

The fallout? Can’t say it was unexpected. But Leddone must be wetting himself reading most of the comments dotted around the rest of the internets on his “artistic” work.

If we want games to be taken seriously, then we’ve got to stop offering up laughable stuff like this as art.

Perhaps if they’d not pulled the game from the competition, but left it in for review *then* panned it we’d be in a better situation. I seriously doubt anyone would blink an eyelid had it been royally anihilated within the competition – yet here we give Ledonne fodder for his delusions and provide him with *exactly what he wanted from the offset*

For my next trick – Super Princess Diana Tunnel Racer.

To the extent that a game is able to make a player feel emotionally invested in its characters and storyline, it is only by falling back on the techniques employed in movies, comics or literature.

We don’t get to know the characters in Metal Gear Solid by running Snake around military bases. We get to know them by watching and listening during the noninteractive bits. The game steps aside and the movie steps in. It is the same for every game I can think of.

Video games (the interactive portions) can do a pretty good job of getting your adrenaline pumping and even giving you a good scare. They can put you in another time and place. This is the suspension of disbelief at work. It is a more refined way of playing make believe.

But video games are not really well suited to evoking more complex human emotions. That is why they always insert a movie (or the pixel equivalent of it) when they actually want you to give a damn about the characters.

The current fad of wanting games to be “something more” would lead one to believe that video games as they are just are not good enough. It calls to mind the little girl who cries to her mother when one day at bath time she realizes that she doesn’t have what her little brother has.

No movie or book can give you the experience you get from playing Super Mario Bros. So why should video games try to do what movies and books can do better?