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Oct 27th, 2010 at 10:43:34 - Columbine RPG (PC) |
Ok, I don’t even know where to begin. But, I can say there is more to this game than meets the eye (so to speak). Interestingly enough, I can honestly say that this is the first time in my long history of gaming, that I didn’t enjoy murdering people, innocent or not. The gameplay is extremely dull, fortunately, there was a reason. And because of that, I couldn’t help but focus my attention towards what I perceived to be a brilliant underlying psychological theme(s). The creators did a fantastic job at portraying the middle/upper-class suburban high school environment by means of stereotyping and or representation. Looking back on it, the whole game is a stereotype in and of itself, or at least it was at first. Like, oh morbid graphics, lame mechanics, dull gameplay, pretty much everything you’d expect at first glimpse of the main screen. Heck, even when I started downloading it, just by the poor quality icon, I thought it was going to be bad (gameplay wise). I already had the preconceived notions based on a past history of low quality games before it finished downloading. The only characters I saw that were portrayed as individuals were the gun/homemade explosive toting, socially/ physically abused main characters. Not one of the other student’s or faculty members is presented with their birth, or, personally accepted nick name. I don’t like saying how other people think but, it led me to believe that is quite possibly the way the socially out casted main characters perceived their fellow students. For example, instead of their real name, except for two or three other’s I encountered, were represented by the well-known student stereotypes. You know, like the “preppy boys/girls”, “cheerleaders”, “good girls”, etc. Fortunately, for my analysis, the stereotyping didn’t stop there, their appearances and personal item’s brought this game to a new level. Every science and math teacher wore what I’ll call the “fresh out of college, ready to change the world, vest over a long sleeve sweater and kaki’s outfit”. The “goody girl’s” have their dresses and aprons, possibly symbolizing their desire to be clean or unaffected by our dirty/bad society. The “prom queen” dressed up like Peach from Super Mario Bro’s, still wearing her tiara, reliving “that moment” every day of her life, while being “daddy’s little princess”. In fact, each faculty member reminded me of a teacher I had when I was younger. Ok, enough about their clothing, now to some of their personal but not-so-personal possessions. Every single “jock type” had a hamburger? I don’t know the significance of the hamburger, maybe they were “in” at the time. And every “nerdy girl” was in possession of an anti-depressant called “luvux”, which is clearly a play on the words “love us”. Next, some typical in school settings you’d normally see “those” types of people. The gymnasium, inhabited (in my experience) by strictly the “jocks”, “cheerleaders”, and “preppies”, all of which were nowhere to be seen in the library! How typical right? And in the girls bathroom, you’ll never guess what I saw… you guessed it, a group of young “preppy”, ”popular”, and ”pretty girls”, in an impervious huddle around the bathroom mirrors. A similar yet, opposite scenario was going down in the boy’s room, the “jock” and “preppy” boy’s had a little “churchy” backed into the corner while they wailed on him. Well, you couldn’t actually see them hitting him, due to its possibly intentional lack of animation, or lack of resources... who knows? I already mentioned this is a middle/upper class school right? Did I mention I only saw three “black students” in the entire student body? And unsettlingly enough, I gained a substantially larger amount of experience points killing them, than I did the other students? Are they possibly inferring they are experienced in unarmed combat? It was only after committing suicide, perhaps gaining an outside perspective, did I realize that I was in fact the most stereotyped character in the game! I died with a copy of DOOM, and a Marilyn Manson CD, two of which were large foundations for basing stereotypes in the mid 90’s–early 20th century. Actually, to be honest, I was kind of getting an inclination from the progressively semiotic soundtrack. Before I killed anyone I was listening to Nirvana, after slaying the entire student body I thought I was sucked into an 8bit version of Tom Waits’ latest hits. After unnecessarily long, and what I thought to be the credits/ slideshow, I ended up in hell. Once I saw characters from DOOM, which surprisingly enough, actually looked worse than the games original’s, I stopped playing. This game really does a marvelous job at representing a vast amount of information, story, and character backstory, mainly through forms of visual representation, symbolism, and cultural references. Do I think making the game was unethical? No. Do I think it was an unfortunate event? Yes. However, this was the first time that I genuinely felt like I had done something wrong when I was done playing…
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