Inquiry #3: Videogames, Simulation, and Reality
Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a retro-looking game reenacting the last hours of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as they proceeded to brutally murder a dozen students and injure many more at Columbine High School in 1999, outside of Denver, Colorado.
The game was released anonymously on April 20, 2005, the sixth anniversary of the shootings, and almost immediately sparked a series of controversies which have not died down to this day.
Ian Bogost, a preeminent videogame theorist, has written that the game “is brave, sophisticated, and worthy of praise from those of us interested in videogames with an agenda. The purpose of this game is not to celebrate the events at Columbine, but to attempt to represent them from the perspective of the perpetrators. This is a worthwhile effort, and one truly unique to videogames as a medium.”
For the purposes of this assignment we will assume that Bogost is correct, and that Super Columbine Massacre RPG is worth studying, however appalling, provocative, or sardonic you may find it. You will need to play the game to its conclusion, which should take about an hour, for this assignment. SCMRPG is installed in rooms 340 and 341 in the Johnson Center Lab (be sure to plug in headphones), and you can also download the game (only for PCs).
The heart of this inquiry is a 3-4 page analysis of the way that Danny Ledonne, the once anonymous game designer of SCMRG, incorporates “realia”-real images, music, documents, and other tokens of realism-into this game, and how the realia contributes to the significance or “message” of the game. In the first few minutes of the game alone, the player encounters pixilated references to the real world Doom, MIDI versions of Nirvana’s music, a Marilyn Manson album cover, and still images from a home video that Harris and Klebold filmed.
Please don’t discuss every piece of realia you discover in the game. Instead, focus only on several that you judge to be most important to the game. Aside from the fact that these references were a part of the killers’ lives, why does Ledonne use them? What is the impact of injecting these specific historical documents into the game? Are they used ironically or seriously? What is the dynamic between Harris and Klebold’s relationship with these objects, the game designer’s relationship, the media’s relationship, and the player’s relationship? For example, the Marilyn Mason cover art may mean one thing to Harris and Klebold and something else to the game designer and something else entirely to the media in the aftermath of Columbine.
Your inquiry is due in class on Thursday, April 3.
