Video Games (Swinging in the Backyard)

My good friend and human genius, Jordan, emailed me a link today to this article, I, School Shooter by Dave Owen over at Polygon.

(Allow me a second to plug Polygon and SB Nation, two sites that kill it in their respective coverages. I'm real impressed with what Vox Media has accomplished in the past few years and I'm glad it's having such success.)

The article explores the independent video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and features interviews with the creator, Danny Ledonne, who was in high school at the time of the Columbine shooting, and Samuel Granillo, a filmmaker who attended Columbine at the time of the shooting.

The game itself is an RPG where the player controls Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and recreates their rampage against helpless students and teachers.

Owen writes, "With SCMRPG!, Ledonne seeks to understand the event by putting the player through as accurate a representation of the massacre as possible. As he developed the game, Ledonne read through the 96,000 pages of reports released by Jefferson County police, and frequented websites that compiled firsthand accounts. He estimates that around 80 percent of Harris and Klebold's in-game dialogue is what they actually said during the attack or wrote in their personal journals beforehand."

Exploring school shooting through art is nothing new and has been done successfully (Elephant, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and less successfully (American Horror Story [though I will give that show credit for capturing the horror of such an event pretty powerfully, if exploitatively]), so I don't really care to debate the merits of Ledonne's work or the success of its execution. I'd rather discuss his stated motivations and how they intersect with gamer culture.

Owen writes,"The aim was, by having players walk in the shoes of the shooters, to trigger a conversation that Ledonne believed the media wasn't having. Following Columbine, a huge number of elements were blamed: bullying, violent video games, antidepressants, gun culture, the internet."

Throughout the piece, Ledonne comes across as fairly articulate and informed about the power of using this particular medium to explore such a uniquely horrific event.

Ledonne said, "The goal of a game is to give the player an opportunity to experience something in a new way. So the layout of the school being identical to Columbine was less important than recreating the feeling of walking down the hall, chasing students who are unarmed, shooting them down and then reflecting on the anxiety or depression of the shooters themselves, and reflecting on the havoc they have caused as a result of their own histories and the choices that they made."

I think the first half of Ledonne's quote speaks to the real value in his work, which is that it is forcefully and confrontationally experiential. There is a marked psychological difference between seeing shootings depicted on film or on the page and actually executing them within the context of a game. It's a twisted form of skydiving, where instead of pointless thrill seeking, one engages in a pointless exercise in depravity, and, hopefully, uses the experience to inform his or her own existential understanding and morality.

I think what's less valuable is the second part of Ledonne's stated aim, getting the player to consider and/or empathize with Klebold and Harris. What they did is something no healthy person would ever do, and no amount of exploration will ever lead to a satisfying explanation of why they did it or even a real understanding of their mental state.

Ledonne goes on to explain why this was such a personal project for him.

Owen writes, "Although he aimed to spark a wider conversation, there was also a personal need for Ledonne to try to understand why Harris and Klebold made such a fatal decision. They were bullied, ostracized from their classmates, and their hatred grew in isolation from the world. Ledonne found that he could empathize with this aspect of their lives, and he worried that, with only one or two different decisions, his life could have taken a similar course."

Ledonne said, "What makes [Harris] and [Klebold] compelling historical figures is the fact that what they experienced in high school is incredibly common, but that the choices they made for the shooting are thankfully rather uncommon," he says. "The shooting at Columbine kind of forced me over the course of several years to re-evaluate the course of my life."

It's these statements that bring me to my real point. Honestly, it's somewhat unfair of me to use Ledonne as a jump off for this discussion, but I read this article today and it stirred up some thoughts that I routinely have when reading about video games and, particularly, video games and violence.

Why does Ledonne identify with Harris and Klebold? Because they were bullied? Because they liked Doom? Why do data points like these make Ledonne (who admits in the article that he was never remotely near a "school shooting" level pathology) feel like he's in some way spiritual kin with these two men?

Gamers (a term that is now so culturally loaded that I am loathe to use it and most especially to ascribe it to myself [and I'm really not a gamer, the only system I possess is a 3DS and I got it for Christmas this year]), are rightfully very quick to point out the fallacy of media using video games as a scapegoat for destructive and anti-social behavior, but what they (and the media to some extent) fail to recognize is that gaming culture proudly carries the banner for deliberate social isolation.

This is probably a holdover from the early days of geek culture, where we're led to believe that D&D players and computer nerds were utter pariahs.

(A depiction that I question on two levels. First, it's actual accuracy. Most of our understanding of early geek culture is filtered through the lens of film and television, mediums where geeks have profoundly more influence than their erstwhile bullies. Secondly, I wonder how much of the isolation these early nerds brought upon themselves through the arrogance that comes with being on the cutting edge - follow @bitcoin_txt to see a living example of this behavior from a safe distance. If you want in your face mortification, wander downtown Austin during SXSW Interactive.)

Regardless, it's always odd to me when people choose to associate themselves with monsters just because they feel like they've had a similar formative experiences and interests. I question whether it's healthy behavior. If gamers wanted more respect from the mainstream (which they already have, aside from steadfastly backward institutions like television news), it seems like they would try to present a friendlier public image. Instead, when they're not warring with mainstream culture, they're warring amongst themselves.

At times I feel like this kind of behavior is slowly slipping away, as gaming has become essentially ubiquitous, but then I wander over to /r/games and I'm quickly disappointed. Gaming is one of the last bastions of the ironic detachment of Gen X. As more and more media start to be subsumed by the New Sincerity (which, to be fair, has been warped by cultures that intersect with gaming into something that is almost equally off-putting [cf. Bronies]), it's only natural that there will be creative people seeping into the industry that are influenced more by David Foster Wallace than by 90s-era Vertigo and it's possible that the product that so many blamed for turning gamers weird will in fact be the vehicle through which the culture is redeemed.

Until then, I will play Pokemon Y only behind closed doors.