MARCH 28 » 4:00p
MARCH 30 » 5:30p
NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE with DAVID KOCIEMBA
2008, USA, 94 min.
Director: Danny Ledonne
Cast: Albert Art, Peter Baxter, Brian Flemming, David Kociemba (in attendance), Jack Thompson
On April 20, 1999, the country was rocked by a horrific school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In the years to follow, people began to sort out the events of that day through the media. Then in 2005, one Colorado man created an amateur videogame exploring the actions and possible motives of the two shooters. Offered as a free online computer game, it was downloaded over half a million times, became immensely controversial, and brought a pressing question to the public discussion: we can read Columbine, we can watch Columbine, but can we play Columbine? Moreover, should we?
Made on a shoestring budget with entry-level middleware, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! provoked more debate and discussion than one could imagine a 16-bit role-playing game ever would. In the documentary Playing Columbine, the journey of the game is traced back to its inception, through the 2006 shooting at Dawson College in which the game was singled out by the media as a “murder simulator” that “trained” the shooter, and finally the game’s removal from the list of finalists at the Slamdance 2007 Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, prompting half the entries and a sponsor to pull out of the festival in protest. Beyond the controversial game itself, the film explores how controversial media is covered in the press, the school shooting phenomenon, and the future of games as an expressive medium.
While created to reflect upon the shooting at Columbine and provide critical commentary on the media’s incitement of “moral panic” over videogames in the aftermath of the tragedy, SCMRPG itself inadvertently became yet another layer in the debate it was attempting to engage in. Playing Columbine brings together game industry leaders, authors, filmmakers, elected officials, school shooting survivors, gamers, and more to examine the issues surrounding the future of videogames as an art form and how one game has touched upon the larger development of an emergent form of expression.
PLAYING WITH
Born to Be Alive
Alexander Felsing & Tobias Sparrman
12 min.
What’s that saying about a buffalo sneezing on the other side of the world, inciting a chain reaction with worldwide cataclysmic effects? Yeah, this is sort of like that.
