Wired has a review of the controversial computer game created by 24 year old Danny Ledonne, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!:
Super Columbine ... [is] artistically interesting: It uses the language of games as a way to think about the massacre. Ledonne, like all creators of "serious games," uses gameplay as a rhetorical technique ...
The game is hardly perfect, of course. Ledonne's sardonic touch sometimes becomes a bit heavy-handed, detracting from its power. And his use of the killers' many self-mythologizing quotations -- including material from Nietzsche, Shelley's Frankenstein and T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, among others -- wind up seeming merely ponderous, instead of thought-provoking.
But you certainly can't argue that the game merely trivializes the killings, or voyeuristically revels in them. As the school shootings wind up, your avatar commits suicide in the library alongside Harris. The game cuts to real-life photographs of the killers' dead bodies, taken from security cameras in the schools. These are the only photos of real-life carnage you see in the entire game: Ledonne follows them up with a montage of news photos of the survivors clutching each other in horror, then archival shots of the killers as young boys, but he avoids any pictures of the dead victims.
The overall effect is a bit bathetic, but still -- after all the pixelated abstraction, the sudden appearance of real-life photos leaves you pondering the mystery of the shootings anew. Though you know more, you still can't quite fathom why it happened.
Read more here.
