Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. The game puts the player in the shoes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and attempts to paint a picture of their motivations, plans, and actions on that terrible day. It's a controversial topic to be sure, but exactly the kind of subject we should be taking on in videogames: hard problems for which there are no easy answers.
I knew that public reaction to the game would be largely negative. I've received plenty of hate mail just for talking about the game. But I don't think I was fully prepared for the widespread ignorance that has accompanied reception to the game. I think those of us deeply mired in the fields of Serious Games or Games for Change or Videogames with an Agenda or even just videogame development underestimate just how long a road we still have to tread for videogames to be treated as a medium of expression commensurate with film, literature, and art.
After my coverage, Kotaku's Brian Crecente interviewed a Columbine survivor about the game, a terrific, careful, and enlightening piece of coverage. He then wrote an article for the Rocky Mountain News with the careful headline Game reopens Columbine wounds. The article was balanced, including interviews with victims' families, with survivors, and with the game's then-still-anonymous creator. Brian then also posted the full interview with the creator on Kotaku. All of this coverage was very good, both as journalism generally and as videogame coverage of an unusual specimen.
Then the AP wire got their hands on it.
Wire services are dangerous. They pull the "best" news from local sources, cut it down into soundbites, and then send it out all over the world for reprinting. Brian's fantastic coverage was cut down to a fraction of the size and detail. But more interestingly, the story got retitled, and retitled again everywhere. The careful ambiguity of "reopening old wounds" was contorted into wholesale disapproval and censure. USA Today ran it as Columbine video game draws relatives ire. A local Denver TV news program ran it as Columbine Video Game Sparks Protest, Disgust. You can find others at Google News.
The widespread attention the AP wire story brought only begat more press coverage, the most important of which is yesterday's Washington Post story by frequent game writer Jose Antonio Vargas. Vargas explained that the creator had been "outed" after a friend of one of the Columbine victims managed to discern his identity and post it to the game's discussion boards. Danny Ledonne has now gone on the record as the game's creator.
But for me, the most interesting feature of the Washington Post story is how Vargas characterizes the role of vidoegames as cultural commentary. Take a look at this:
For it's one thing to have a documentary ("Bowling for Columbine"), a movie ("Elephant") and several books ("No Easy Answers," "Day of Reckoning") about that dark day, but it's quite another to have a game.
Vargas does not expand or support this claim in any way. Why is it "quite another thing" to have a game about Columbine? Is it because videogames do not have the power to address such issues? Is it because they do, but the public does not understand them? Vargas does not offer his opinion, but instead uses an appeal to emotion to explain it away. This paragraph follows the one cited above:
She was too distraught to keep talking.
Of course, our hearts go out to Ms. Sanders and everyone who lost friends and loved ones that day. Would she have had the same reaction to an interview about "Bowling for Columbine?" Or about "Day or Reckoning?" It's hard to say. But the notion that an artifact in a medium about a subject is a priori hurtful, damaging, immoral, corrupt, or otherwise objectionable should send up a huge red flag for those of us interested in videogame expression. Despite the widespread press coverage, the news stories are not about the game's representation of Columbine. They are about the fact that a game that represents Columbine in some way exists. Clearly most of the authors, interviewees, and readers of these stories have not played the game (which has logged 30,000 downloads since these stories broke earlier this month, a relatively small number given the massive exposure). Many of the journalists who have called me about the game have admitted that they haven't played it, claiming technical problems with their office computers or trouble downloading when I press them.
If he had played it, perhaps Brian Dwyer of News 10 in Syracuse New York wouldn't have argued that "games like this prove just how important anti-violence programs are," since the violence in the game is deeply disturbing and meant to force the player to consider the dire and tragic state of affairs that made these boys take the fateful actions they did.
Perhaps Stefanie Cohen of the New York Post might not have called the game's creator "twisted" and "sick" in her article, and she may have understood that the game's "amateurish scenes" and "clumsy 2-D graphics" invoke the fatal amateurism of Harris and Klebold.
Readers, we have our work cut out for us. We must remind ourselves that public opinion and the popular press gets more milage out of soundbites for shock value than for careful, researched journalism. Despite the relative renown and value of game jouranlists like Brian Crecente, their work caters to those of us who already have deep videogame literacy. Once these stories get out into the broader press, we can expect naïvité, ignorance, and journalistic laziness. Don't look for support from the Electronic Software Association (ESA) either; while they are the predominant supporters of videogames as speech, they are also funded as lobbyists by the major publishers, and thus support those corporate interests alone.
Finally, I want to say something about ineffability, a disturbing trend in American politics and culture that goes beyond the medium of videogames. One of the common objections to this game is that it offends, or might offend, victims of the tragedy and their families. Embedded in this sentiment is the notion that any representation about a difficult topic or event is simply off-limits. Recently, we saw some debate along these lines about the film United 93, which tells the story of the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. But even coverage of that film argued for its value, largely because the journalists and reviewers actually went and saw the movie before they felt qualified to write about it. Even in the second- and third-tier press, writers asked "how can we not see this film" and argued that "it's never too soon for an important movie.". Not so for Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Consider this snippet of an editorial from the San Antonio Express-News.
...
If his intentions were as pure as he claims, the producer could have sparked a dialogue without assaulting the feelings of those already hurt enough — the loved ones left behind.
Danny Ledonne rightly offered that the victims, despite their egregious suffering, do not own the public response to an event like Columbine. Another counter-argument comes from Richard Castaldo, who is paralized from the waist down from his Columbine injuries. Said Castaldo of the game, "It's weird for me to say this, I guess, but there's something about it that I appreciated, seeing the game from the killers' perspective." Of course, this is the power of the videogame, both the medium in general and this game in particular. It's not easy, and it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be easy to try to understand the perspective of the killers. But if we are really interested in avoiding these tragedies in the future, we must admit that such empathy might be productive. In his fantastic book Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones argues that a complex array of influences create school shooters, perhaps the most important being a support network, including parental support. Playing from the vantage point of these fatally troubled kids might help spark a greater interest in interrogating the complex scenarios that produce tragedy.
Most of all, I am deeply worried by this culture of ineffability, a culture that would rather not talk about anything at all for fear that it might make someone uncomfortable. This trend descends from Theodor Adorno's argument that the holocaust becomes "transformed, with something of the horror removed" when represented in art, thus his famous statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. These events are considered "ineffable" -- unspeakable, unrepresentable. It is a tired sentiment that we must move beyond. Of course topics like 9/11 should make us uncomfortable. Of course Columbine should make us uncomfortable. But that is no excuse to put these issues away in a drawer, waiting for some miraculous solution to spring forth and resolve them for us. If we do so, history is much more likely to forget them. I don't care if we make videogames, films, novels, poems, sidewalk art, cupcakes, or pelts as a way to interrogate our world. But we must not fear that world.
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