alientoaster's GameLog

Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) - Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:05:35

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:05:35 CDT

My final session with Columbine wasn't very good. I continued the killing started in my last session with it, but I soon tried to stop completely. I experienced some cut-scenes and events. Solely as a game, it valued protecting the weak and revenge. After deciding to stop killing people, I walked into the second floor bathroom. I found four guys beating up some nerdy-looking kid, and I knew what would happen. After fighting the dudes, the kid actually thanked my characters instead of freaking the shit out. Based on some of the cut-scenes, the shooters felt especially rejected in their everyday lives. After these cut scenes where they remember why they are shooting people in the first place, the characters get leveled-up to represent the strengthening of their resolve because of such incidents. I would not say the game defends their feelings. I was on stage crew in high school, and my first thought was that the game was trying to show how normal they were during the Frankenstein cut-scene. Then the guy talked about how he hated the people that would be at the cast party after. I think it was trying to show that the shooters were in seemingly normal high school situations, but they felt as if their situations were worse than everyone else's. Another thing I noticed in this session is that after killing certain people, you would get food items. "The hamburger is all yours." This, to me, mocked their cause. What was the point of killing people? Well, they got hamburgers. Except for the "combat experience", the dropped items were the only tangible reason for fighting people. Had the game rewarded you more heavily - with money or weapons, perhaps - it would have encouraged killing and been an unethical approach to the game. I was done killing people on purpose as I found no point in it. I ran through the library and found the doors where the police were apparently shooting the characters. When asked if my character wanted to end it, I said no as I wanted to explore the school more. When running around, I found it hard to avoid the panicking NPCs. There was no option to not kill them. That is how the shooters probably felt – there was no option but to kill everyone. I had had enough. I wanted to end the game, and that is probably exactly what the two shooters were thinking that day. Though the game did not make the acts at Columbine any easier to take, it offered an interesting perspective on the events that day. I do not believe it presented anything gratuitously or tried to make light of the situation. The perspective offered was open enough that the player could choose his or her own interpretation of the incident or choose not to be a player at all.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) - Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:05:49

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:05:49 CDT

Like my first half hour, my second was not very fun. This time, I did not learn much. I planted some bombs and got my guys strapped. The bombs failed, and it was time to kill people. They let the first guy go, which (if accurate) must have made that guy feel incredibly guilty about surviving. That "mercy" may have been random just like the following violence. Every kill was a generic student. No one had names - they could have been anyone. The game seemed to be saying that this is how the killers saw their school and the rest of the world. There weren't individuals, just a mass of victims. I had to consider the morality of the game design. Was it immoral to put the player in the position of the killers in this real-life tragedy? I don't think so. Most importantly, it did not try to create sympathy or excitement for these two guys. If it had, the message would have been terribly skewed. I think it remains mostly objective in that the game is just trying to tell the story of this incident. As was argued for the movie Gunner Palace in The Film is Not Yet Rated, I didn't find that the violence was gratuitous but a representation of real events. Just as history books tell the story of many horrible deaths, Super Columbine Massacre tells about this school shooting. My reaction when the killing started was mixed. I immediately engaged in mostly one-sided fights with the kids running around the parking lot. I had no idea why. Would the experience points help me later on? Was the game going to get harder, or would my characters just have extremely high stats and kill people more easily? Despite this, I had the urge to play the game as it was designed. I wanted to go into every room and "defeat" every student. Is that how the killers saw that day? Were their views of the world so skewed that each kill was just a "win" in some sort of game? Again, the game is encouraging critical thought about the shootings, and for that, I believe it is well within moral limits.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) - Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:07:06

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:07:06 CDT

I had heard about this game when it was still being made. I didn't read up on it much since I just assumed it to be a joke game for shock-value. Up until this class, I had no idea if it was still around and less so that it was being taken seriously enough to look at the game critically as we are doing in this assignment. Being in middle school at the time, I was too young to really care about the shooting. I knew what happened, but I did not think about it any further. My brother was in high school, so, like any good mother, my mom was scared and over-cautious to the point where she did not even want us having black coats. When starting Super Columbine Massacre, I was able to learn details that I hadn't heard before (mostly due to not paying attention). I knew they were psychologically messed up. I didn't know they wanted to join the military or had any college aspirations. I had never thought about how they had the connections to buy the guns used. At least from walking around the guy's house, I think the game does a decent job of educating the player on at least some of the factors involved. The lives set up around the characters seem within the range of normal - being on some sort of medication, applying for military service, playing computer games. Even a fascination with blowing things up can be seen as a "normal" deviation for teenage boys. I only walked around this time until first getting to the school. What amazed me up to that point was how other people reacted to these two. We can say now that all the signs of psychotic behavior were there, but at the time, everyone treated them like any other high school students. The guy's mom wakes him up in the morning. He talks to the other guy's mom pretty normally on the phone. In the hall of the school, you would "lose" if the security camera saw you or you touched an NPC. There were no negative consequences except getting forced back outside to try again. The hall monitor treated the guy like he was a little nutty but still on a friendly level. "You guys sure are dressed funny!" With all the "hazards", it is easy to wonder how these two pulled off such a plot. We wonder now why nobody saw the signs and reported them. It is easy to us to think this in the game, but as the character, we have knowledge that the NPCs don't. As the first major school shooting, at least in recent times, nobody knew what to expect. Nobody even thought that such an act was a possibility. So far, the game has seemed pretty moral. I have not been forced to do anything immoral for the sake of the game just yet, but even after, the game is doing its job. It has caused me to think about the incident more critically than I have before. It is not teaching me how "easy" or "fun" a school shooting might be or how to plan on; rather, it is attempting to present the situation as it was and provoke thought on how they actually got away with it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (XBX) - Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:26:16

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:26:16 CDT

Dear Diary, I loaded an old game today so I could try some missions and see the characters again. Some want to protect their own version of the law when the police are powerless (my game was saved during a riot) - they wanted to reclaim their TURF from the BALLAS. While gangs and their activities aren't moral to us, in San Andreas, they are. Though he is in a gang, CJ still protests when the corrupt cops want him to do their immoral dirty work, and he wants to preserve his sister's innocence when she starts dating a guy from the low-rider gang. Like I wrote last time, there aren't really deep consequences to CJ's gang ativities. Controlling a territory only means other gang members won't spawn there. The police are cartoonishly ineffective. In fact, the entire game is very cartoonish and two-dimensional, at best. The game's morality is as simplified as the characters. With a version of relativism, just how some eat their dead and others burn the bodies, CJ's world is based on a completely different set of streamlined values. I've compared this to GTA IV's "realistic" aspects before. In GTA IV, everything is portrayed as realistic: The characters are people, the driving is difficult, and the player's actions have more severe consequences. In San Andreas, morals are skewed, because everything is a caricature. CJ is not a person but a character. His gang members are not people with lives; they are props and guns. Rockstar is not claiming this to be an accurate representation of anyone. The characters are just that. I don't believe it is a racist game. Yes, CJ is black. But the previous two game had white main characters. If San Andreas starred a white man, would there be complaints about the lack of diversity in the series? Did GTA III attack white people somehow? If it did, are white people somehow "fair game"? There is a nerdy white guy who works at a hobby shop and may live with his mom. This is a caricature, not a representation of any one or any group. CJ was invented because he best fit the parody in which he lives. In fact, I think if a white character had been made to fit the same situation, it would have been offensive to both white people and the people who actually do live CJ's life every day. Love, D (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:29:16.)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (XBX) - Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:06:58

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:06:58 CDT

Like the previous time, I spent my "half hour or more" goofing around rather than completing missions. I started by taking the sports car from my garage. I'd like to say it was "mine", but the only way to get vehicles in the game is to steal them. There is no way to go to a dealer and buy a car - not that it would last long, and not that your money is legitimate either. The game is very simplified and, outside the story, very utilitarian. CJ does make some moral decisions or at least raises protest when he feels a mission is wrong. However, in normal play, he does not have many wholesome options. The player can not help an old woman cross the street or donate canned goods to some bums; he can shoot them, blow them up, run them over, or just leave them alone. In part of the simplification of the world, there are far fewer consequences. Stealing a car out of sight is fine, and it actually doesn't matter to anyone because it will just respawn later. The same is true for people and police - if you kill them, they are anonymous and unlimited in numbers. If you do nothing to them, they cease to exist when you leave the area. From a utilitarian perspective, the end justifies the means. Stealing a car helps the player/ CJ, and it leaves the world virtually unharmed. Having that car enables him to make money, get somewhere fast, or complete a mission. If CJ didn't steal it, the NPC would continue driving to nowhere, getting nothing done. The citizens of San Andreas have one-dimensional personalities and might have a few lines of audio, but they really don't have lives (even virtually in the game). Letting them live would not help anything. If somehow by following them around for a day, you could watch their life - their family, their job, their hobbies - then killing a pedestrian might have create "negative happiness" in the game. Fortunately for the player, CJ is the only one with a life of any sort. Even his cohorts are only a means to an end - if they die on a mission, the player fails the mission. Outside of missions, the other characters no longer exist.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (XBX) - Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:19:36

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:19:36 CDT

I recruit two rocket launcher-wielding paramedics and tell them to stay close. My SPAS finds a target, and I fire off a few shells before climbing into the driver's seat of my flying ambulance. As we take off, I hit the nitrous and tell my crew, "We're getting out of Los Santos." I've already finished the game a couple times, and I don't feel like collecting oysters or horseshoes. It was time to screw around in the great state of San Andreas using the tools Rockstar included. I activated a bunch of cheats to make the experience much more interesting for myself. If they are "cheats", how do I justify cheating? In a single-player game with no such thing as "achievements" or awards, the only one I would be cheating is myself. Cheating makes the missions less satisfying, so I choose not to use cheats during them. My cheating does not change the experience for anyone else. In addition to making cars fly and letting anyone join my gang, I turned on “pedestrian riot.” When the riotous pedestrians interfered with my fun, my gang took them out. When the police shot at me, I responded with whatever weapons I had on-hand. I aimed for the head when I could, but most of the time it was unnecessary. Does that mean I am sadistic? Do I scoff at the Chicago Police Department? Not at all. I do not think I made any moral decisions in my play because it was just that – play. This is a game in which the only human player you can interact with would be your co-op partner. To treat the virtual police and virtual pedestrians as if they were humans would be ridiculous. I shot at the police rather than turning myself in because that is how the game is played. I shot the pedestrians because they tried to kill my character and steal his vehicle. When I stopped playing the game today, I did not suddenly think it was OK to kill police officers or that ambulances can usually fly. I like to believe that I am a rational human being. The idea of this "sandbox" game is that I can have all the fun I want in the box, and all the sand is contained. I used it today as a toy or a tool for fun. Rockstar included a lot of fun features, and with some imagination, the player can do whatever he or she wants. Like I showed in my "introduction", I wanted to play the role of a badass, so, using the game's tools, I became one for a little bit. Outside of missions, San Andreas lets you do a lot of fun things that would be considered moral in the real world (like flying an ambulance). In such a situation, I was never forced to kill. I could have accepted my arrest from the police. And of course, no one is ever forced to play the game - that is why it is a game. The power button was always in reach for me, but I chose to indulge in this virtual fun. Even though it is an assignment, someone in this class could easily choose to drive around or climb "Mount Chilliad" for thirty minutes if they can not separate the fake events in the game from reality. (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:42:24.)