Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Super Columbine Massacre RPG pulled from Slamdance festival

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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.

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Super Columbine Massacre RPG pulled from Slamdance festival

by Ian Bogost January 5, 2007

categories: Political Games

In what is apparently a first for any exhibitor, film or game, Slamdance has pulled Super Columbine Massacre RPG (read our previous coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) from the Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. The decision was apparently driven entirely by pressure from festival sponsors, some of whom pulled funding after learning that the game was to show in Park City.

Brian Crecente has a more detailed version of the story over at Kotaku, including some responses from me, and I recommend you read that for now. We'll be following up on this story over the coming days.

Update: N'Gai Croal blogs a dead-on critique of Slamdance's hypocritical decision

Comments (4)

You can also read some responses at Game Politics ... (their article mostly recapitulates the Kotatku story, but the reader comments are interesting).

Ian Bogost on January 5, 2007 3:15 PM

Oops, I guess we're stripping html these days from comments. The Game Politics story is here: http://gamepolitics.com/2007/01/05/sponsor-threats-force-removal-of-super-columbine-game-from-slamdance-festival-competition/

Ian Bogost on January 5, 2007 3:20 PM

Wow, this is terrible. I'm sure the festival organizers, including Sam Roberts, whom Ian and met last year when we competed there, are devastated by being forced into this. They courted SCMRPG! for the festival, but in hindsight, it was a little too risky. Sam is a good guy who wants to push on the frontiers of gaming; he must be very disappointed. But he and the other organizers should be proud they had the guts to originally include it in the festival, I hope people realize it was against their wishes to pull it. It would have been unfair to the other finalists to have not pulled it, leading to the festival being cancelled.

It's unclear how much this will tarnish the reputation of Slamdance, or the broader game industry somehow, but hopefully this event will lead to more debate and discussion about games as a medium for serious expression. Although school shootings are a very incendiary topic, I think it's a better tool for debate than, say, the more puerile controversies over the right to have prostitutes and hidden soft-core sex in the Grand Theft Auto games.

I also recommend everyone rent Elephant, if you haven't already — a movie on the same topic as SCMRPG!, which won the top prize at film's most prestigious festival, for crissakes! The irony is thick here.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/21/entertainment/cannes/main554985.shtml

andrewstern on January 5, 2007 8:11 PM

For those like me who aren稚 sure they can stomach actually playing the game, but want to know what it痴 about artistically, here痴 a really good review with some spoilers at the end.

http://tinyurl.com/ye5nkl

(By the way, while I don't feel up to playing the game myself, I agree that this decision sucks.)

josh giesbrecht on January 5, 2007 8:29 PM