Jasper Sharp : ‘Playing Columbine’ and the possibilities of videogaming

14
Sep

‘Playing Columbine’ and the possibilities of videogaming

Playing Columbine

The Raindance lineup has now been fully announced, and the schedule should be up on the website in the next day or so, leaving me some time to go over some of my high points from what I’ve seen so far. I’m going to kick off with Playing Columbine, a documentary by Danny Ledonne that I caught at Montreal’s Fantasia this year. I don’t think its played any other major festivals yet, but I know Raindance will be its UK debut. The film looks at the controversy surrounding Ledonne’s own online game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, based on the infamous 1999 high school shootings, which provoked a media uproar in the US when the press first cottoned on to it. Is there any more to the game than a sick cash-in of a terrible tragedy, especially given the role video games were alleged to have played in creating such killers? Ledonne himself certainly thinks so, and uses his documentary to explore the current state of the video gaming and its so far neglected potential.

Chuckie Egg

I’m not much up on the current state of the gaming industry. I did spend a fair amount of my teenage years trying to master ZX Spectrum games such as Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg. I even wrote and released a couple of my own at one point, selling them by mail order through my company Celerysoft, and was flabbergasted to discover a few years back that someone had even bothered to archive my first release, Space Detective online (although they miscredited me as James Sharp, and yes, before anyone points out the obvious, it is a bit crap, but I was only 15 at the time). Technology moved on at such a pace that I rapidly couldn’t afford a new computer, and I was not to return to have anything to do with the gaming world until some 10 years later, when I wound up working for a short stint on Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic.

This remained something of an isolated blip in my IT career, most of which was spent working on databases in such riveting fields as the metal and telephone directory industries, but I could see by this time that computer games had certainly come a long way since my involvement with them, as the whole world was waking up to around this time, with the first Tomb Raider title making more money than that year’s multiple Oscar winner The English Patient. Games were being developed with a narrative complexity that could far outstrip any film offering, and the graphics were catching up too. I immediately hurried out to investigate further, and bought a game called Half Life. It was aptly titled too, as for the next six months, outside of working hours, I barely left my flat. I literally had half a life, at least until I finished the game, when I was left curiously deflated and with a feeling that perhaps my time might have been better occupied in other ways.

Ancient Domains of Mystery

I’m not going to get snotty about computer games, as I do actually really enjoy them, a little too much perhaps. The fact is I have a rather addictive personality and little enough time as it is to get the things I need to do done. When I do have a free moment, I’d rather spend it away from staring at a screen. I did relapse a couple of years ago, with a fairly well-known online RPG called Runescape, but in recent years, my main bit of gaming extravagance is taking out my friends in the Attack! game on Facebook. Until after watching Playing Columbine, that is, after which another Fantasia viewer confessed a similar ambivalence to the gaming world as me shortly before insisting I check out something called Ancient Domains of Mystery, and I ended up back in the same rut all over again. What I will say though, is that ADOM, a Dungeons and Dragons-styled RPG with decidedly low-fi ASCII graphics, reawakened a slightly nostalgic conviction in me that, as with cinema, the content is far more important than presentation.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

In this respect, Playing Columbine seemed like a documentary tailor-made for people like me, curious about the game industry but still trying to retain a critical distance. Its director, Ledonne, despite having created such a notorious title, is not a gaming geek, and in fact is now involved in wildlife documentaries. His basic thrust is this – that nowadays PC and games console hardware have evolved to such a level that there’s no limitations in what you can do in the field, yet if you’re comparing the development of the gaming industry with that of cinema, we’re nowhere around even the Birth of a Nation mark. Whereas cinema soon realised the leap from prose to poetry, major games manufacturers are still making the same type of product – sports simulations, 3d shoot-em-ups, racing games, RPGs etc – as they always have, just improving the graphics and the sound effects and making them bigger and better. There is still nothing in the way of an equivalent of an established “arthouse” genre for computer games. However more absorbing they get, they’re predominantly still stuck in the mode of diversions or distractions, and their potential for education or reflecting on the wider issues of the world have not really been explored. This is not the first time such concerns have been raised. I remember back in the 1980s, a games designer called Mel Croucher, responsible for titles such as Pimania (1982), the early multi-media title Deus Ex Machina (1984) and iD (1986) voicing similar frustrations. The bottom line though is the games industry is still very much an industry, and with its huge overheads, it cannot yet afford to be as creative as it might.

Cloud

The other point Ledonne makes, seemingly crucial when considering his own game, is that while computer games may not encourage violence, they often don’t ask you to do anything other than consume it passively. For all its technical limitations, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! did make you aware that the little sprites you were zapping on the screen were in fact representative of something else, and thus if anything, it made you more not less empathetic with the victims of the shootings. What is really revelatory though is that there is a small indie sub-industry emerging, making films not necessarily for money, but with artistic ambitions, aimed at making you think a bit. There’s a whole wad of them covered in this film – an Italian game about paedophile priests chasing choirboys, young lads in Darfur running around in search of food and clean water, and a rather more poetic-looking title called Cloud, which I’ll have to give a go sometime when I have a moment to spare.

My end impression is that there’s a whole lot more to gaming discourse than I was really aware of, and it points towards some really interesting directions that the field may develop in. Just as animation shouldn’t be constrained to emulating reality, video games too have the potential not only to explore different themes or make one aware of what’s going on in various other parts of the world, but to break away totally from their roots to explore new forms of their own. When or how this will happen remains to be seen, but certainly it is clear from the perspective of those of us who work in film, we ignore this new medium at our peril.

I’ll end with a link to a great little diversion, which I heard about on the Today program on Radio 4 this morning, the online game Sock and Awe, where everyone gets a chance to play their favourite Iraqi journalist.

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Posted at 16:57 on 14 September 2009

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7 replies to this post

William Allum 15 September 2009 16:32 1

Just read your piece Jasper, very interesting. Was that documentary any good then, my impression of Danny Ledonne was always that he made that game for the shock value.

Also there are a couple of games you might want to check out, specifically ‘Half Life 2 (expanding a great deal on narrative driven FPS, and still one of the best games out there… Read More)’ and ‘Bio Shock’. Both first person shooters, but each focusing heavily on narrative. If there was ever a case to be made for games to be comparable to films, it would be these two. Plus ‘Bio Shock’ has a lot of focus on twisted morality’s and peoples ideologies corrupted. Think ‘Ayn Rand’ gone wrong.

Also thought it was interesting what you said about art house films, and not having the same institution in games. Could this be down to the commitment you have to allow games, and how they must hold you attention for hours…days…or even weeks. Films in comparison are a lot shorter, direct and liner. Games have to have a certain core repetition throughout, otherwise they become something entirely different.
Jasper Sharp 15 September 2009 21:32 2

Thanks William. I’m not sure of Ledonne’s motives for making the game, but in the documentary he comes across as articulate and thoughtful. If the intention of the game was to shock, then the documentary, which is very good, certainly opens up discussions about the role video games could play in society.
I liked Half Life a lot, precisely because it did have a narrative, although one thing that disappointed me, if I remember, was that it was a linear one, in that there was only one path to take through the game, and once you’d cleared a sector, you couldn’t go back to it. But having a narrative or a plot doesn’t necessarily mean that a game has a meaning. In cinema a plot is essentially a way of keeping a viewer engaged for the duration of the running time, and as you say, in games it’s no different – they need to keep the gamers’ attention. But are there games out there that transcend the need for a narrative, or that have something to say beyond this narrative? I throw this out there, because I am not familiar enough with this world to draw any conclusions.
One of the things that the documentary does show is that there is something akin to a genre of “art house” or guerrilla games, ones that have intentions that go beyond entertainment. These are small projects often by individual programmers/designers, but it doesn’t seem that the major games producers are interested in exploring these avenues, at least yet. I think it will happen though, as really when you think about it this entire medium is still very young. Maybe it won’t be too long before we get something that breaks with the traditions of rational narrative and cinerealistic presentation in a same manner as, for example, a Stan Brakhage film does. What the end results might look like is anyone’s guess, but I guess what Ledonne’s film shows is that there are intriguing possibilities that are only just beginning to be explored.
Dean Bowman 30 September 2009 11:56 3

Hi jasper. I found your piece on video games very interesting as i am a gamer myself and am starting to try to
break into games journalism. I agree that there is loads of potential for the medium, but i believe it has come a little closer to art already than you suggest. In particular games like Ico and Okami are aesthetic and lyrical masterpieces. Okami takes it’s visual style from Japanese ink painting and uses a game mechanic (you can paint on the screen and interact directly with the world) that is formally harmonius with the theme. You’d find it very interesting as the game takes all it’s narrative cues from Shintoism and Buddhist mythology.

Games are also capable of tremendous philosophical depth. William mentioned Bioshock, which is a great game, and for my money is the greatest treatise on existence and free will since Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness, and it could only work as a game because it engages with the basic relationship between the player and the avatar (the gamer’s in game manifestation) and the issue of control, choice and morality, which are at the very heart of gaming. For instance games like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Fall Out 3 and Fable each have different narrative outcames based on your moral choices within the game. I believe gaming is more qualified to explore issues of self and empathy than any other medium – it just hasn’t quite got there yet.

Many games are also starting to push the concept of Interactive Storytelling (like the forthcoming Heavy Rain on PS3), which will see the medium pulling away from the massive influence film currently has on it. Indeed you could compare games now, struggling to emerge from the shadow of cinema and craft their own stories, as very similar to the relationship early film had with theatre. I’ve read a couple of interesting articles that explore the
themes you’ve touched on in Edge Magazine and Games TM, which are the Sight and Sound of games journalism (except without the pompousness). One was discussing whether games could successfully engage with social and political issues and interviewed a politician who believed they could. The other was provocatively entitled ‘Death of the Author’ and
saw three games designers/writers arguing whether games are moving away from scripts and towards user generated narratives (for instance as constructed by gaming communities in World of Warcraft or individual players in games like Left 4 Dead).

Finally i think one area that many games have engaged with in terms of social issues is the subject of environmental crisis. Games like Okami and Prince of Persia see you liberating a dead world from the forces of pollution. Meanwhile Final Fantasy 7′s narrative is an environmental allegory, where the evil corporation Shinra are draining the earth of its magical energy, it’s very life force, for profit and your character is a alligned to an environmental group named Avalanche. In fact i’d go as far as saying that Square Enix (the developers) are the Studio Ghibli of the gaming landscape. This trend in gaming is a strong alternative to the dominant, mainstream trend of death dealing destruction in popular realistic war games like Call of Duty (the 5th installment of which is set to break all multimedia sales records when it is released next month – in fact it’s release has frightened almost every other publisher to put back their releases until early next year in the face of this juggernaut!)
William Allum 30 September 2009 16:33 4

It’s interesting that Dean should mention ‘Okami’, as that was one of the games I was thinking of when it comes to art in games. I also think that ‘Fallout 3′ is a good example of games now mixing up genres, taking the tried and tested FPS (which some may argue is somewhat of a stale genre) and combining it with the complexities and depth of the RPG. Creating something new and fresh.

Jasper as you said the whole medium is still very young when you compare it to film, but I wonder if film had, and still does (for a long time to come)have an advantage over games. If you think about it the basic technologies behind film have not changed drastically since the day it was created, sure improvements have been made and the medium has evolved. However since synchronised sound the basic idea of film hasn’t changed, for example the 35mm film print, the frame rate, etcetera. While film is pushed and effected by technologies, its nothing compared to games. Games are drastically effected, think about all the old games that are now never played. I think this is an especially big problem with 3D games, which start to show their age after just a couple of years.
While retro gaming may have a special place in peoples harts, there’s only so may games that manage it. For example a couple of years ago I tried to play my old ‘N64′, and a little game of ‘Golden Eye’. This is a game I loved when I was younger, and I remember at the time being amazed by the graphics. But now the game is almost unplayable, the controls are fiddly and unresponsive and the graphics…well not quite up to scratch any more.
So in comparison, I can watch a film made 50 years or more ago quite happily…but a game made around 10 years ago, I struggle.
So I wonder if games will ever reach the same level as films, when their technologies change so rapidly, and thus so do peoples standards and perceptions.
Not that films are free of this, 3D, 4D, CGI and all the various gimmicks and ways of doing certain things that have arisen. But the core format of what a film is doesn’t change.
At the same time the gaming industry is proving its self to be a very profitable industry, and one that has started to rival Hollywood.
Jasper 02 October 2009 12:53 5

Good discussion guys. Like I said, I’m not the worlds greatest gamer. In fact, I know next to nothing about the subject.
I know what you’re saying Will, about the technical advances of gamers vis-a-vis cinema. Its true. Actually, that’s why I singled out the game ADOM in my post, which is about as low-fi as you can get, but still really quite addictive, and Chuckie Egg too, in a far simpler sort of way, I think still warrants a good play, but as for the 3D FPS genre you’re mentioning, I can see it was a problem.
I actually saw Playing Columbine at the festival again last night, and I really recommend you take a look if you ever get the chance. I think the main point is that the film is making – and no one is ever put under any delusions that the Columbine game in question is a particularly good or addictive one – is that we are preconditioned to think of computer games as being entertainment, but what the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! title is more like is the type of gaming equivalent of the cinema of abjection or the cinema of alienation of Gaspar Noe’s Seule Contre Tous. As one of its players said, in the preliminary stages of the game arming himself at the murderers house, he came close to understanding the loneliness of the killers, and most people seemed to think that you could learn more about the minutiae of the actual events than you ever good in the sensational media coverage. The game was denounced as capitalising on the massacre, and computer games in general were seen as contributing to it, because we EXPECT games to be fun and entertaining, but really they can be just as valid a form or communicating ideas and emotions as any other medium, especially as now must people under 40 have grown up with them as part of their lives.
I don’t think the film itself was necessarily criticising the mainstream games industry or its players, but just highlighting that games will perform a very different function in society in the future.
Anyway, sorry if these ideas seem half-formed and poorly articulated, but I am shattered at the moment, and I can’t see things getting much better over the coming week or so.
Jasper 14 October 2009 11:21 6

Just for the record, all these kinds of areas that we’ve been discussing and which are covered in Playing Columbine have also fallen under the attention recently of the excellent Charlie Brooker, who puts it all far more succinctly and with an inimitable acidic wit that I could barely hope to match. If you’re interested, Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe was broadcast on BBC4 on Tue, 29 Sep 2009, and if you’re quick (and living in the UK!) you can still catch it on BBC iPlayer here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n1j8q/Charlie_Brookers_Gameswipe/
William Allum 18 October 2009 21:00 7

Hey Jasper been meaning to reply to your last post for a while now, but been too busy at the moment. I shall hopefully respond soon. But just wanted to add that I watched games wipe, and am a bit of a Charlie Brooker fan. However I would say I disagree slightly with the way he treated games, he seemed to give the picture that they were a guilty pleasure (at least for him). Where as I think games are much more mainstream, and something that most people would quite happily admit to playing. I would also say that although obviously its his show, it seemed quite narrow minded, and focused heavily on selected genres and skimmed past others.

That’s not to say I did not enjoy the show, and I agreed with some of the things he said. But I was a little worried that to some people on the outside, it might give a slightly inaccurate picture of games and gamers.

But I have heard that the show did pretty well, so I hope he does more that are a little more focused and in-depth. Maybe that’s the main problem I had, trying to fit too much into one show.

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