Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Thought's on the Columbine Video Game?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Thought's on the Columbine Video Game?



    Columbine Victim Talks About Columbine RPG
    READ MORE: columbine, columbine super massacre rpg, editorial, feature, news, serious gaming
    By: Brian Crecente

    Richard Castaldo, who was last paralyzed from the chest down after being shot in the arm, chest, back and abdomen by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold during their attack on Columbine High School, emailed me recently about our post on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG.

    Castaldo, who hopes to one day work in the gaming industry as a sound designer, is a regular reader of Kotaku and wanted to let me know that he had downloaded the game and played it.

    He was kind enough to agree to a short Q&A about his thoughts on the game.


    What made you decide to download and play the game?>
    I saw it through Kotaku actually, and at first it just surprised me that someone would make a game like that. And I know most peoples knee-jerk reactions would probably be that it is horrible and disgusting and stuff like that. But, I just thought I should play it to see what it actually was. I didn’t think it was necessarily bad, if i was done the right way, which at least part of it seemed to be.

    What did you think of it?
    It probably sounds a bit odd for someone like me to say, but I appreciate the fact at least to some degree that something like this was made. I think that at least it gets people talikng about Columbine in a unique perspective, which is probably a good thing. But that being said there are a lot of things that are har to play or watch. And it seems to partially glamorize what happened. It shows a stark-contrast between fantasy and real life in an interesting way.

    I like the part in the game where if you go up to the water fountain theres a thing that comes up that explains that the water in denver is a little bit hard because it contains calcium and magnesium but is harmless. Answering the hypothetical question of “Was there something in the water, that caused this?” Clearly not, and the causes for this are not easily apparent.

    Did the idea that you were playing as Klebold and Harris upset you?

    It’s all third person, so your kind of looking down on this thing as all of this horrible stuff is going on. It reminded me of the movie ‘Elephant”, because it showed a lot of stuff in cutscenes that they were doing that led up to that fateful day. It showed them doing a lot of stuff that supposedly influenced thei actions. TherLike it showed them being bullied, and how much they hated it. But, then the people they actually killed had nothing to do with that.

    Do you think it glamorizes what happened at Columbine?

    There is a part where after the character’s representing the killers in the game die, and then the game shows an extenended real-life montage of what happened that day. And it shows their blood-soaked corpses, and isn’t pretty. Which to me deglamorizes what they did. I’ve heard of some stories where some students try to make folk heroes out of these killers, which is very disgusting to me. I think people who have that mindset and then play this game and see that part it would make it real for them. As opposed to having this sort-of romanticized version that some people have.

    But, at the same time there are some dialogue in the game that comes up after you kill the students that refers to you as being “brave boys”, which i would hope was supposed to be ironic, because clearly what they did was not brave or heroic in anyway, it was quite the opposite. It has you killing students with absolutley no protection whatsoever. Which is what actually happened. So if the killers (or anyone else for that matter) thought that what they were doing was heroic in any way they were deeply fooling themselves. People ask me all the time, “Did you know them?” And my answer is of course no, i didn’t. And, I didn’t do a damn thing to either one of them. So, I think the game kinda highlights that. That there was no real rhyme or reason why specific people got killed.

    Do you think the fact that it’s a game trivializes the attack on the school?
    I think that ultimatley a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression. But, you do end up killing literally hundres of representations of high- schoolers. But ‘m not sure the ulitimate intention was to trivialize it. It seemed like the purpose was to expose people to what happened in a unique perspective. There are probably a lot of people that would find it and play it out of curiosity. And find out more about Columbine than they usually would have were it not in game form. And in this process learn that what they did was not glamorous in any way. There is a weird part after the school where you die, and then go to hell, which I suppose is appropriate. And it looks like that part kind of does make heroes out of them to some degree, because you’re killing demons and such. Which is kind of an odd digreesion. I think its supposed to resemble the fact that they played violent games and such. Which is the primary audience of this game, people that like violent games. Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games why not learn something important in the process? And in that process I think it might become apparent that what they did was not heroic in any way and shouln’t be glamorized. But it is a mixed- message at best.

    Does the game’s use of low-res, 16-bit-era graphics make it easier to deal with?
    That’s the weirdest thing about it, that the graphics are so primitive by today’s standards, but the subject matter is very serious. You play as these cartoonish little characters doing horrible things but the impact gets sort of lost afterawhile. Untill of course, you actually see what really happened, and it becomes real. Which I suppose was the point in making the game, to make people remember and also that if you were to glamorize this, you don’t really understand what happened. I would be so bold as to say that the effect is very post-modern.

    I understand you want to get into the video game business, what are you hoping to do?

    Well, I know a quite a bit about sound and music. I have recorded and produced some bands, as well as my own stuff at my place And obviously I’m very interested in video games. So. I Have been trying to get an internship within the industry. I have a resume, and experience and all of that. I really enjoy the sound effects in games. And have made my own sound effects and incorporate them into some of my own music. When my old band was recording a demo here, I tweaked one of the guitar effects, and the guitarist said that it, “sounded like a videogame” so I guess that statement turned out to be prophetic.


    Gamer was on deadly road

    Wednesday, May 24 at 7:38 AM


    The 24-year-old creator of a Columbine video game called the school shooting a wake-up call and said he was headed down the same path as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold before their rampage.

    “It was a bit scary, once I learned more about these boys, because it was like I was looking in the mirror and I didn’t want the same fate for myself,” said Danny Ledonne, a filmmaker in Alamosa. "The main thing that kept me from doing drugs was having a couple of friends that did drugs and watching what they went through and saying I don't want that for myself.

    "The same was true of Columbine. I had thoughts of hurting myself or hurting someone else and Columbine forced me to take a long hard look at those ideas and walk away from that,” he said Tuesday.

    Ledonne, who was a sophomore at Alamosa High School when the Columbine shootings happened, created Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a free game that mixes cartoonish scenes with photographs of Harris and Klebold, pictures taken from newspapers and television stations and excerpts from their writings, last year.

    He initially distributed the game anonymously, but after a friend of one of the victims discovered his name, Ledonne decided to come out as the creator.

    About 10,000 people downloaded the game in the year since its creation, but another 30,000 downloaded it in the week after the Rocky Mountain News wrote about it.

    The game is no longer on Ledonne’s site, instead it has popped up on a number of other sites and download services. Ledonne initially accepted donations to defray the cost of hosting the game, but stopped when he took the game off his site. He said he is making no money on the free distribution of the game.

    Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, was unavailable for comment Tuesday, but he said previously that the game disgusts him.

    “You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent,” he said.


    Columbine and Kubrick
    At just 5-foot-2, and “a little bit more effeminate” than other boys, Ledonne said growing up he was always a prime target of bullying.

    “I was an easy target to be picked on, and that started in kindergarten,” he said. “It was the kind of bullying that most kids who were bullied experienced.

    “When you get pushed everyday and when you are ostracized not once, not twice but years in and out, your perception of reality is distorted ...

    “If you don't know if you can make it through this hallway without being called a (name). If you don't know if when you go into the locker room, you are going to be thrown into the lockers or a trash can.

    “These things really do warp your understanding and your perception of humanity in some almost irrevocable way.”

    But two things happened in 1999, during Ledonne’s sophomore year, that changed his life and spurred him to “forge himself” into a new person.

    The first was the death of director Stanley Kubrick.

    Ledonne said shortly after the famed director’s death he caught an airing of Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and it opened his eyes to the potential impact of movies.

    “Until then I didn’t know I could have an analytical, cerebral relationship with films,” he said. “I realized that you can actually make a movie that has levels to it, that suggests different things about our culture and could actually inform the way we conduct our lives and what we demand of our government.”

    About a month later Harris and Klebold killed a dozen students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others on April 20, 1999, in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

    “Stanley Kubrick died in March of 1999 and Columbine happened in April of 1999, so there was a flood,” Ledonne said. “Oh, and that was the first time I was seriously interested in a girl who rejected me. Within a period of like three months a lot of my life was turning upside down.”

    Ledonne said Columbine had a “pretty significant psychological impact” on him.
    He started taking martial arts, got more involved in filmmaking and went to a therapist.
    “I had to ask myself how can I deal with this, how can I change this?” he said. “I feel like I pulled myself out of there.”

    By the time Ledonne graduated from Alamosa High School he had become a different person, graduating with nearly a 4.0 grade point average, named English student of the year and voted most likely to succeed by his classmates.

    But Ledonne said it was all a facade.

    “I did a lot of theater, I became an actor, and all of life’s a stage in that way,” he said. “I played the part of someone you would like to hang out with. Not that I was this evil demon child inside, but I was actually a much more introspective, reserved person.”

    “A helpful guy”
    Ledonne moved to Boston where he attended Emerson College, studying film.

    He said he wanted to get out of Alamosa, which he described as “this little town” and wanted to get out of Colorado.

    At Emerson,Ledonne came to realize that he didn’t want to live in a big city and that he didn’t want to pursue a film career in Los Angeles.

    He said he graduated magna *** laude from the college and then moved back home to create his own production company.

    Emberwild Productions deals mostly in editing other people’s wedding videos, he said. Ledonne also spends a lot of his time filming events for the community and volunteering.

    Ledonne does work with an after-school program, does promotional videos for non-profits and even helps out at his old high school.

    Kerry Adams, Alamosa High’s media technology teacher, describes Ledonne as a “really helpful guy.”

    “We have a media technical class where we teach kids how to take video and put it on computer and then on a DVD,” he said. “Whenever we run into problems he is the first one we call.”

    Adams said that Ledonne is known around the community as the guy to call for help with those sorts of problems.

    He described Ledonne as a pretty shy kid in high school, but also “sort of a sneaky comedian.”

    Ledonne said he understands that people may have trouble reconciling the image of a helpful, well-liked volunteer with the person who made a game based on Columbine.

    “It’s funny, people, when they hear about this game I made, they see me as this little monster, but I do so much work in my community to make this a better place,” he said. “It’s laughable that they charge me with being so deplorable.”

    “I work for an after-school program, I also am a volunteer DJ at a local radio station. I work with kids for crying out loud.”

    The game
    In November 2004, Ledonne discovered a program called the RPG Maker. In essence the software allows a person to plug in the images, text, story and objectives for a game and then does the programming automatically.

    “Almost immediately upon seeing this program I thought ‘You know I’ve always wanted to make a video game,’ and then I thought ‘What would I make a video game about?’ and the answer was so clear.”

    Even though Ledonne had moved on from being the loner-kid who was constantly bullied, even though he had graduated from high school and college, Ledonne had never forgotten Columbine and the impact it had on him.

    “It never went away in my mind,” he said. “And honestly that’s not a fixation that I have some personal uniqueness to. Columbine hasn’t gone away in a lot of people’s minds and I don’t mean people who live in Denver that experienced that trauma themselves. People around the globe are fascinated, sometimes morbidly or sometimes out of some deeper curiosity I suppose, as to what happened and why.”

    Ledonne still remembers vividly his reaction to Columbine back in 1999 when it shocked him out of his downward spiral.

    “My reaction sort of had the same duality that a lot of people or at least some people had to 9/11 and that would be, I can’t believe this is happening and it’s about time,” he said.

    Ledonne is quick to point out that he didn’t think the violence was good, just that it was inevitable.

    His creation of the game was his way of dealing with and expressing that, he says.

    “I have inside me the same interest everyone does in understanding the shooting, because it is one of the darkest days in American history,” he said. “I just choose to confront it in a unconventional manner and that’s hard for people to deal with, but it is important because I am reaching people my age and younger who do understand the world through video games.”

    Ledonne said he knew going into his project that the message could very well get lost in the medium.

    “I understood outright that if I wanted to write a book it would be pretty evenly accepted even if it contained some critical points, people would still regard it as an acceptable form of communication,” he said. “But saying the same or similar things in a game is both so new and so outside of the context of what people are used to looking at a video game for.

    “This is a medium in which people use to drown out a few hours of their life after they get home from work or something. This is not the place you turn to for a challenging, moral program.”

    Ledonne sees his game as something akin to one of his favorite movies, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

    “Dr. Strangelove isn’t a film that advocates nuclear war, it isn’t a film that glorifies nuclear war,” he said. “This is not a game that advocates school shootings, or glorifies Eric and Dylan.”

    Since the game has started to spread and his name has become public, Ledonne is starting to see his life change, perhaps permanently.

    He’s received threatening e-mails and phone calls and reporters from around the world want to interview him.

    Ledonne is also preparing for Alamosa to discover the game he created and react.

    He suspects it will be much like high school, when he told a friend he was an atheist.

    “She looked at me and said you can’t be an atheist, you’re too nice,” he said. “I think a lot of people will think: ‘How can you make that game you’re so nice?’”
    Some food for thought, I'll post my thought's in the next post.

    Oh and before I forget:

    columbinegame.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, columbinegame.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!
    "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"​​

  • #2
    My Related history:

    I don't know if my discovery of this game is benifical to me or terribly destructive or a mix of both. Let me give my thoughts on this game, and on the whole entire incident.

    Much like the author I was on a terrible self destructive path, that the columbine incident pretty much forced me out of, but not painlessly.

    If you want to know where my real pain lies, and where the darkness that shadows my depression for years has originated from, then read on, the honest truth is not a pretty truth as you will discover. I have post tramuatic stress disorder, depression, and schizotypal/oid, due to this mess.

    I was picked on terribly for most of my secondary education, due to my lack of social skills, by the time I had entered high school I had become so bitter, angry, and hateful that things were about to get much worse.

    Years before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold massacred students and Columbine High School in Colorado, I was on a similar path as them, and it is a miracle that something of the sort never happened with me.

    circa 1997-1999 I was a hateful mostly against homosexuals and hispanics (both of which I have traits from FYI) teen, listening to metal music like Rammstein and KMFDM, and obessed with Nazism and Fascism, much like the two killers at Columbine.

    I was at the mental capacity to murder, kill, eliminate, and massacre people in even the scale of the holocaust, while most neo-nazis don't believe in the holocaust, I did, and still embraced some of the doctrine, although I was never anti-sematic (never had reason to be).

    Needless to say by the time I entered high school people had stopped picking on me, and were increasinly becoming afraid of me and my rhetoric.

    I was planning on becoming a terrorist for hire as my life goal, and wanted to subjagate the better part of the free world under an awful rule that would have been mine killing millions of people wholesale genicide.

    By 1999 I had just began to post at Apolyton, some people call these the good old days, but I was not in my right mind, and anything funny I said was more then likley accidental. I had such classic quotes as "gays should be hanged by there genetilia," Shortly after I arrived at Apolyton Mark and Dan announced a moderator for Apolyton Off Topic, Ming, coincidence I think not, though to this day they deny it.

    So as you gathered I was pretty ****ed up, but things were about to become more heated as I started on a worse path of self-destruction.

    Shortly after the first school shooting in the 90s, but before Columbine I was sent to detention and In school Suspension for having a naked girl on my calculator ti-83 I believe. The person who told on me I gave a threat to that would change, shape the rest of my life. I told him that "*his name*, If I was to do something like Jonesburo it would be much much worse." Shortly after saying this I had caculated that this was a very bad idea, and before I could be told on I flew to the school counciler to seek assistance"

    Needless to say this thing got blown out of proportion (or did it?), I ended up with an offschool suspension for a day and mandatory therapy, but within the next day a kid at my school who I barely knew told classmates that I had planted a bomb in the cafeteria, needless to say I was soon talking to the police, the SBI and then the FBI. Well I had come close to breaking the law but didn't, so they didn't do anything to me, but by the time columbine came around, I was constantly being accused of things, and even changed my clothes from the dark militant grey and black that I used to wear to normal looking.

    Throughout all of this I developed an Ulcer, and secretly still wanted to kill and massacre many people, but then something changed about me I discovered my sexuality and decided that I could live and let live, so long as found a relationship to suit me.

    Depression started mainly because I had such a rough time in High School, both before and after I came out (which was a partial calculated move to repent and to seem more harmless, all it brought me was isolation). By the Second half of my senior year I had tried to commit suicide, and was sent to the hospital, so I was homeschooled for the last few months. A terrible time for me, that I had barely started to recover from, and then the discovers of THIS GAME.
    "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"​​

    Comment


    • #3
      Thought's on the Game:

      Besides bringing back the biggest painful part of my life, it has given me several unanswered questions, and I bet a lot of stuff I'm going to have to discuss in Therapy soon.

      What makes me different from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, (well besides not being killers and dead); well I'm very similar except that I never had a planning parter, and had a bit more Ambition. I can aim a gun at near perfection, but I never had access to guns unsupervised, people were much smarter then to give me access to such a thing even illegally as I had no older friends or many at all for that matter. I did however have access to bomb paraphenelia, and had one of my best friends not died in a go cart accident I might have had access to his uncles immense armory.

      I know the mindset it takes to do this kind of thing, I have been there before, In a sense I think that the columbine killers did me a service, they got people paniced enough to investigate what I (someone in my opinion far more dangerous) was up to.

      Its been a painful process for me, and reading the above article on the author of the game, I can see that some of my feeling were not alone. I and everyone is just so god damn lucky I never planned anything, athough I wanted to soooo bad at times.

      The authors intent is for this game to provide discussion of the incident well it has certainly done that, whether or not his portrayl of video games as a good market for thought provoking socialogical experminents, remains to be seen as helpful or appropriate.

      What I do know is that this game has awakened me to the sources of pain that have been eating at me for years, whether this is a good thing or not I don't know.

      thoughts, comments, questions?
      Last edited by Thorn; May 24, 2006, 20:37.
      "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"​​

      Comment


      • #4
        Attached Files
        Unbelievable!

        Comment


        • #5
          I imagine that more people would enjoy a game in which you killed jocks, than one in which you killed terrorists.
          Only feebs vote.

          Comment


          • #6
            I must say it was rather entertaining.
            Unbelievable!

            Comment


            • #7
              The graphics sucked though. And really? I knew the story already, so... meh.
              B♭3

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Q Cubed
                I knew the story already, so... meh.
                You knew they'd have gay sex on a Pacific island and punch demons with brass knuckles in hell?
                Unbelievable!

                Comment


                • #9
                  I suppose that's why nobody made a Titanic video game, although enough people went to the movie not knowning the ending.... ROFLMAO!!!

                  Seriously though, i'd be interested to hear from a Parents point of view on this, (which reminds me through out all of my mess my parents were always gettting death threats, stupid people, didn't release I could trace their number so I KNEW WHO THEY WERE Bwahahaha)

                  I know this topic is a bit um emotionally draining for some, well except that callous minority of you people heh.......
                  "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"​​

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Richard Castaldo, who was last paralyzed from the chest down after being shot in the arm, chest, back and abdomen by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold during their attack on Columbine High School


                    How many times has this poor guy been paralyzed?
                    KH FOR OWNER!
                    ASHER FOR CEO!!
                    GUYNEMER FOR OT MOD!!!

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Thorn

                      circa 1997-1999 I was a hateful mostly against homosexuals and hispanics (both of which I have traits from FYI) teen, listening to metal music like Rammstein and KMFDM, and obessed with Nazism and Fascism, much like the two killers at Columbine.
                      WTF? What is wrong with Rammstein and KMFDM? Are they racist or homophobic? Quite the opposite, at least from any related lyrics I have heard.

                      Reminds me of the soldiers playing Metallica in Iraq as psy-ops, and Metallica teling them to stop.
                      Pentagenesis for Civ III
                      Pentagenesis for Civ IV in progress
                      Pentagenesis Gallery

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Well, one thing wrong with Rammstein is that they suck.
                        B♭3

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Thank you for your posts Thorn.

                          Reading the thread title made me think WTF!?
                          But reading through that article makes it all a bit more understandable. I don't have any intention of playing the game though. It looks kinda rubbish, and the whole Columbine drama doesn't mean to me what it may mean to others. I have plenty of problems, but none related to wanting to kill anyone, fortunately. Good to see some good stuff coming out of that massacre though.

                          Good luck.
                          Civilization II: maps, guides, links, scenarios, patches and utilities (+ Civ2Tech and CivEngineer)

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            I don't think this is good, BTW. He is exploiting a tragedy for fortune. He speaks of good intentions, but I am not a sucker.
                            Pentagenesis for Civ III
                            Pentagenesis for Civ IV in progress
                            Pentagenesis Gallery

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by NeOmega


                              WTF? What is wrong with Rammstein and KMFDM? Are they racist or homophobic? Quite the opposite, at least from any related lyrics I have heard.

                              Reminds me of the soldiers playing Metallica in Iraq as psy-ops, and Metallica teling them to stop.
                              I wasn't saying anything was wrong with their music, I was saying much like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold I listen to that music..... I was making a comparison....

                              I don't think he was exploiting it for money, just trying to pay for bandwidth, his site has reached over 30gb of bandwidth usage since its start..... but now he's wised up and put them up on non-his severs.....
                              "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"​​

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X