Children playing with grenades

As a relatively young form of media, video games have been saddled with the impression that they are, for the most part, the information-age equivalent of toys. Those who aren't gamers tend to view the medium as one solely for children, and as such, they assume that the subject matter covered by games has to fit that particular demographic.

But what happens when a game attempts something more? For a long time, games that attempted to tackle controversial topics were put under intense scrutiny, and, more often then not, these games were severely censored. Blood became sweat, dogs were turned into giant rats, and Hitler himself became Master D. But as the audience has matured, arguably, so has the medium. Games now span a wide variety of topics and genres, many of which attempt to explore real world issues. From school shootings to private military companies, games are now engaging many of the same issues as their cousins in literature, film, and music.

In this article, we'll explore some games that tackle more complex issues, and we'll find that the results are decidedly mixed

Playing a tragedy



The most controversial games tend to come from within the indie developer community, where you don't have to worry about funding or even about turning a profit. Here you can find all manner of subject matter, from a virtual torture simulator, to a game in which players step into the role of a terrorist in an attempt to assassinate the president.

But the most infamous indie game has to be Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Created by film student Danny Ledonne and released in 2005, the game chronicles the last day in the lives of the shooters responsible for the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999.

The game was not the first project to look at the Columbine tragedy. Michael Moore's 2002 documentary "Bowling For Columbine" won numerous awards, while the novel "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland used the event as inspiration for a fictional school shooting in the suburbs of Vancouver, which served as the catalyst for an exploration of the effects of tragedy spanning decades.

While both of these texts explored the subject matter—garnering their own fair share of controversy along the way—SCMRPG! featured one aspect that they couldn't possibly emulate: interactivity. The game puts players in the role of the actual killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they attempt their spree of violence, and the disturbing part is how well fleshed out the characters become. Using the boys' own writings and home videos, the game attempts to faithfully recreate the tragic day with factually correct dialog and timing. The media tried to play the shooters off as inhuman monsters after the shooting, but the game proves one thing better than anything else: they were human.

"The interactivity of a video game certainly has an effect on the message—perhaps even more so, it is a significant method of delivery for that message," Ledonne told Ars. "To passively watch a film about school shootings, for example, allows the viewer a kind of calculated, voyeuristic distance from the acts of violence. To play a game about school shootings, however, thrusts the player into a position of moral accountability and authorial control. The effect is as different as watching a drag race from the sidewalk and drag racing."

Essentially, SCMRPG! is a psychological examination of Harris and Klebold. It attempts to put the player into their mindset, exploring how and why they came to do what they did. The subject matter itself questions what a game is meant to be. Though people normally play video games for sheer enjoyment, there is none to be found in SCMRPG! Instead, I found myself actively dreading entering the game world, unwilling to perform the actions necessary to progress.

The game's presentation contrasts the grim themes it covers. Developed using RPG Maker 2000—a game creation program that gives users the ability to create 16 bit style role-playing games—SCMRPG! bears a strong resemblance to early SNES RPG's like Earthbound or Final Fantasy III. This minimalist art direction is complemented with pixelated images of the killers themselves, as well as actual photographs from the day in question.

But the question remains, why a video game? Why not choose to create a film or write a novel about the subject instead. "Given that the shooting at Columbine was blamed on popular culture like video games, combined with my own high school experiences in Colorado during and after Columbine, the subject seemed to be a provocative expression of interactive narrative," Ledonne explained. "I wanted the game to be a combination of social satire, serious inquiry, and a sort of video game metacriticism."

What the game did was create a hail storm of controversy, with mainstream and enthusiast news outlets alike both demonizing and praising it. But despite the heated debates that surrounded it, SCMRPG! opened up the doors for future mainstream titles to explore similar subject matter.

What could have been crass exploitation became art, and it is still one of the most vibrant looks at our culture from the world of gaming.