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You may or may not have heard of Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which is, at base, a reconstruction of the events of the Columbine shootings with you as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as a member of your party - in the style of a traditional SNES-style RPG. (It was created with the construction kit RPG Maker 2K if I'm not mistaken.) Now, as far as the game itself goes, I think it's actually better than the rather clumsy "artist's statement" indicates - violent video games i.e. Doom were blamed as a contributing factor (something the game riffs on amusingly, you can pick up a copy of Doom and use it to increase your attack strength).
The weird artificial format of a SNES-style RPG, the fact that the only characters given any depth are the main ones for whom you see cutscenes and have music, everyone else is just an anonymous sprite, gives a sense of disassociation and distance which can be compared to that perhaps experienced by someone who goes around a school shooting people to death. The little victory quips sometimes uttered by your characters as you gun down another student or teacher - and it's incredibly easy, you're armed and they're not, this isn't a game as such in that the only challenges are when you have to plant bombs without being caught - just add to that, as do the references to RPG conventions, like Catholic teachers being able to pray for extra HP.
Whether or not you feel it's effective it's clearly a good candidate for entrance into an independent game festival like the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. And it was, originally, but they pulled it.
The ... game ... was removed this week ... after the festival's founder made a "personal decision" based on moral grounds and concern for the future of the organization.
"On the one hand a jury selected this game, and as a result of that decision it leads to our organization supporting their creative decision," said Slamdance President Peter Baxter. "On the other hand there are moral obligations to consider here with this particular game in addition to the impact it could have on the Slamdance organization and its community."
"Ultimately it was my decision to pull this game and I hope that a choice like it will never have to be made again." (source)
This hasn't been popular. Water Cooler Games has the best coverage but to summarise, at this time six other finalists have pulled their games from Slamdance, and one of their sponsors (USC) has pulled out, all because of the pulling of SCMRPG. In an extra twist, one of the games, Toblo, which was pulled by its authors, students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, has been forcefully reinstated by DigiPen, who officially hold the IP rights to things produced by their students, though I have to say that that's probably a condition that's only survived because it's never really been used. The students who wrote the game will still be going to Slamdance, but won't accept awards, and will doubtless give interviews which won't be exactly overwhelmingly positive, so this seems like a really boneheaded move on DigiPen's part.
I'm heartened (+20 HP) by all of the solidarity going on. It seems like there's a real recognition that there's a community of indie game makers here and they're not acting as competitors, they're defending their own against what I'd certainly say is censorship based on a misunderstanding of intent that should embarrass any competition that claimed to be at all intelligent, and a pre-emptive cowardly reaction to potential money issues. (I would have thought that any serious organisation would have realised that sponsors pulling out if they had SCMRPG in the lineup would be extra publicity anyway; it's not like they're going to be raking in cash as it is.)
But, you know, discuss. I'd love to hear what you lot think. SCMRPG is free to download if you want a look, and, as somebody who actually spends more time making games (in SL and Inform) these days than playing them, I can say that it's turned me on to RPG Maker XP, with which I am currently making a hacked-up version of my aborted NaNoWriMo novel. |
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