Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (16 page)

The game quietly launched on the Internet for download on April 20, 2005, the sixth anniversary of the shootings. For a while it went mostly undiscovered, but when the academic Ian Bogost wrote about the game in May 2006, it began to gain attention and notoriety. Many press outlets decried the game for making entertainment out of others’ suffering. Ledonne is adamant that this is not the case.

‘I don’t regard this game as entertainment,’ he says. ‘Many have written about how morally challenging this game is to play. A review in Salt Lake City said: “I hate this game with all my heart not because it was made, but because the real Columbine massacre occurred.” And, that, I think, is the real point.’

Like the horrors reflected in the children’s games of the camps, Ledonne’s game aimed to make some sense of the atrocity, or at least to provide a crude route towards understanding and empathy. Its primary purpose is to give the player an experience of the lives the pair led, the horrific and tragic acts they perpetrated, and their eventual demise at their own hands. It aims to provide players with the killers’ perspective—their feelings of alienation and loneliness, their withdrawal into an isolated world in which they used media—including video games, but also music and books—to rekindle their feelings of alienation.

As Bogost put it: ‘This game is certainly not meant to make us excuse Harris and Klebold, or to forgive them. But it does ask us to empathise with them, to try to understand the situation they perceived themselves to be stuck in.’

In this sense, the game shares an ambition with Michael Moore’s
Bowling for Columbine
and Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant
, films which respectively dissect and recreate the events at Columbine, and which were awarded the Palme d’Or in consecutive years. Ledonne’s game, by contrast, was banned from an awards event. In October 2006, Sam Roberts, the Guerilla Gamemaker Competition
director of the independent Slamdance film festival, emailed Ledonne encouraging him to submit the game to the contest. Ledonne agreed to submit his game as he considered the award’s existence as evidence that ‘all forms of art can be valid tools for societal exploration (even painful topics like school shootings).’ The game was shortlisted for the award until, a few weeks later, the event’s organiser, Peter Baxter, announced the game’s removal.

The festival organisers blamed the decision on fear that a media backlash against the game’s inclusion could scare off sponsors, or even attract a civil lawsuit, something that could throw the festival’s future into jeopardy. The decision drew condemnation from many who believe video games have the power to investigate violence, not just as a mode of interaction, but as a real-world topic.

‘There are moments in the game that push the idea that games can be emotionally difficult, that they can be satire, that they can be critical social commentary,’ says Ledonne. ‘If all people want is entertainment, this isn’t a very good choice; the graphics are sub-par at best, the gameplay is clunky and limited, and there is so much reading involved that someone looking for a “murder simulator” would best look elsewhere. But entertainment aside, is it “wrong” to make a film that centres on another’s suffering? What about a book? A painting? A song? A theatre production? Why are games different? If there are films about the suffering of Christ, why could there not be video games? Video games absolutely should be able to approach the same issues other art forms do, albeit in the manner that is inherently unique to gaming.’

It’s this ‘inherently unique’ aspect to video games that is the cause of so much consternation when it comes to their depicting sensitive issues and events. While
Bowling for Columbine
and
Elephant
address many of the same issues as Ledonne’s game does, there is a key difference, in that here you role-play as the antagonists.

‘I disagree with the contention that because video games are interactive they must somehow be treated differently to other creative media,’ argues Ledonne. ‘This is a dangerous line of argument, because of course every medium is in some way distinct from the others. Surely this tired concern about how “interactive” games are is merely a reaction to their infancy as a medium. I can’t think of a single medium that hasn’t had a share of controversy for whatever unique expressive qualities it has.’

Ledonne points out that similar criticisms of tabletop role-playing games like
Dungeons & Dragons
were made in the 1970s.

‘I suppose the same arguments could be wheeled out against an actor who plays an antagonist or children playing Cops and Robbers,’ he says.

Bogost agrees: ‘Interactivity is one of the core features that differentiate games from passive media like film. In a game, we play a role. Most of the time, the roles we play in games are roles of power. Space Marine, world-class footballer, or hero plumber. Isn’t it about time we played the role of the weak, the misunderstood, even the evil? If video games remain places where we only exercise juvenile power fantasies, I’m not sure there will be a meaningful future for the medium.’

The idea that video games can allow a player to take on the role of an antagonist is not a new one. The difference with Ledonne’s game is that the position is forced upon you as you recreate real-life horrors. Why re-create historical tragedy, when within fiction there is less risk of wounding people who were affected by the real events?

‘We can learn about the system of ideas, values, historical circumstances, and personal feelings that drove their decisions,’ explains Bogost. ‘I’m sure every American wonders how and why the
9/11 hijackers could choose to commit the acts they did. Is it enough just to wonder? Should we not try to understand? Understanding and empathy does not mean apology or excuse. It’s worth flipping this point on its head: from the hijackers’ perspective, what do you think someone can learn by playing a game in which people value global capitalism over faith? In which people can learn to become soldiers of America’s Army to pursue that goal? Who gets to be right?’

‘Games offer a window through which we can see the world a different way,’ says Ledonne. ‘I suppose that’s a lofty jump for some people to make, and as a result video games are often scrutinised because the power of role-playing can be very potent. But I think this is something to study, redefine, and embrace … not flee from.’
Custer’s Revenge
, the game for the Atari 2600 launched in 1982, received widespread criticism, and raises the question of whether meaningless evil can be validly portrayed in games.

‘We shouldn’t confuse expression with sensationalism and offence,’ says Bogost.
‘Custer’s Revenge
was probably created to offend, not to inspire or raise questions in its players. That is not because it depicts rape, by the way, but because it fails to offer any meaningful perspective on rape, from a historical perspective, from the perspective of the perpetrator, or from the perspective of the victim.’

‘It’s important to remember that while
The Birth of a Nation
is a deeply racist film by today’s standards, it is also an important landmark for filmmaking itself,’ says Ledonne. ‘Perhaps the same importance cannot be placed on
Custer’s Revenge
, but nonetheless perspectives of sexism and racism should have the same accessibility in video games as they do in a variety of other mediums. Watching
Triumph of the Will
or listening to Nirvana’s “Rape Me” can be very valid experiences for an audience to have. So long as an issue exists in the real world, artists will feel compelled to represent it in their work … including via video games.’

Yet video games’ detractors seem nervous about ascribing such freedoms to the medium, or celebrating them. Video games involve play, and play is associated with childhood. For that reason, even subconsciously, many struggle to accept true creative freedom in terms of the medium’s subject matter.

‘If games are to truly explore the world we live in instead of merely allowing us to escape from it whenever we press the power button, then games need to have the artistic licence to approach any subject,’ says Ledonne. ‘I think it is possible to make a game on virtually any topic that comes to mind, and the game should be evaluated on its content rather than its form. Is there any subject matter that should be off-limits for sculpture or acrylic? Of course not. What matters is what the work contains.’

Bogost agrees: ‘No topic is off-limits to art of any kind. We must not be afraid to try to understand our world, even if such progress seems difficult or dangerous. Clearly there are more and less meaningful ways to simulate any topic. But no subject is a priori off-limits. It is then the job of the critic to tell us whether it is good or successful.’

Whether or not there should be limits to fiction is not a new question. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra, who rescued the manuscript of
Lolita
from a backyard incinerator at Cornell University. Beset by doubt over the book’s subject matter, which examines an older man’s infatuation with a teenage girl, Nabokov hoped to burn the novel before it reached the public. Likewise, the American literary critic George Steiner had second thoughts on the publication of his 1981 novella
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.
, in which Adolf Hitler survives the Second World War and is given the opportunity to defend his crimes. Steiner had the book recalled and pulped.

The question of whether—or to what extent—literature should
allow readers into the minds of terrorists, murderers, and abusers both fictional and historical is one that continues to trouble authors. But if video-game creators share such qualms, it hasn’t stopped the production, in the course of the past forty years, of games that ask players to march in the boots of legions of despots and criminals, both petty and major.

Most would agree that no topic is off-limits in games, even if examples of games that have tackled difficult territory with grace and assurance are scarce. But in games the author doesn’t always control the action. Players are often given free will, even the free will to act out unspeakable evils that the game’s creator may not be able to present in context or with appropriate virtual consequence.

This becomes a greater issue in games that present not carefully authored stories to follow, but rather entire systems in which the player is free to behave in ways of their own choosing. In 2013, in anticipation of the release of
Grand Theft Auto V
, a forum participant asked whether players would be able to rape women in the game. In the post, which was widely shared and condemned on social media, he wrote, ‘I want to have the opportunity to kidnap a woman, hostage her, put her in my basement and rape her everyday [
sic
], listen to her crying, watching her tears.’ When our world facilitates this kind of behaviour (and attaches to it grave consequences), should a game not be allowed to do the same in its careful imitation?

A 2011 Supreme Court ruling recognised that video games, like other forms of art and entertainment, are protected by the First Amendment as a form of speech.

‘For better or worse,’ Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the decision, ‘our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment.’
As such, the vision of opportunity expressed in that rather worrying forum post is permissible. But if this freedom is necessary to maintain the artifice of the world, it can be argued that the designer has a responsibility to engineer the virtual victim’s reactions in order to communicate something of the pain and damage inflicted.

Fictional characters, whether they appear in novels, films, or video games, are never fully independent entities. They are conjured by words on a page, directions in a screenplay, or lines of programming code, existing only in imagination or on a screen. A creator has no moral obligation to his or her fictional characters, and in that sense anything is theoretically permissible in a video game. But a game creator does perhaps have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not to waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.

Questions about video-game violence will continue to gain urgency. History has shown that the video-game medium curves towards photorealism. As the fidelity of our virtual worlds moves ever closer to that of our own, the moral duty of game-makers arguably intensifies in kind. The guns in combat games are now brand-name weapons, the conflicts in them are often based on real wars, and each hair on a virtual soldier’s head has been numbered by some wearied 3D modeller. The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of Cops and Robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases. How much more repellent might
Custer’s Revenge
be if rendered by contemporary technologies with their ever-more-realistic graphics?

The rise of motion control (where physical gestures replace traditional button-control inputs in video games) and virtual reality (which fool our minds into thinking we have bodily entered into a
virtual space and role) will, for many, accentuate those concerns. Some games now no longer merely require your mind and thumbs, but also your entire body. In a hypothetical motion-controlled video-game version of
Lolita
, it would be possible to inhabit the body, as well as the mind, of protagonist Humbert Humbert. A virtual sex crime might elicit a very different response if, instead of pressing a button to instigate it, you were required to mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries—even if, as in Nabokov’s work, it was included to illustrate or illuminate, not titillate.

In the aftershock of an act of madness, some seek prayer, others revenge—but most seek sense in the senseless moment.

In the hours following the Sandy Hook massacre, a news outlet erroneously reported that the shooter was Ryan Lanza, the brother of gunman Adam Lanza. Poring over his Facebook profile, many noticed that Ryan had ‘liked’ the video game
Mass Effect
. Emboldened by an expert on Fox News drawing an immediate link between the killing and video games, an angry mob descended on the developer’s Facebook page, declaring them ‘child killers.’