By: Brian Crecente

Back in May I spoke with Danny Ledonne about his game Super Columbine Massacre RPG and why he made it. In light of last week's shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, I decided to revist the issue with Ledonne.

Q. When and how did you first learn of the possible connection between your
game and the shooting at Dawson College?

A. Thursday, September 14th, 2006. The phone kept ringing. I didn't have
to be at work until 11am and had every intention of sleeping in. I thought,
"why there be this many calls back to back at this hour...?" Soon enough, I
check the answering machine to find half a dozen messages from reporters
wanting interviews. I knew something had happened and I knew it was with
the Columbine game. Ten minutes online was all it took to figure out the
rest.

Q. What was your initial reaction?

A. My very first reaction, frankly, was to head to my toilet bowl and throw
up. I knew what was in the works and I knew the next week would be spent
keeping my head above water while the press tried to bury me with
guilt-laden questions and implications of complicity in murder. I also knew
that this was no time to fold or get weak-kneed. I made a game. I believed
in it. Now it was time to defend it. No one would do that except me.

I sifted through old emails and posts on the SCMRPG forum, looking for
anyone that might've come my way from Kimveer. I thought, "did I know this
guy?" "Could I have stopped any of this?" "Was there a fan who left
warning signs that I ignored amidst my daily routine?" Thankfully, the
answer was "no;" Kimveer had never contacted me at all. Period.

Q. In retrospect, would you still create the game knowing what you know now?

A. Knowing that the game would become an underground cult obsession, knowing
that someone would eventually ferret out my identity, knowing that I would
get death threats and receive requests for autographs, and knowing that one
mentally disturbed man would cite my game as one he liked to play before
randomly shooting at college students... there's no way to honestly answer
that question. I would LIKE to say, "yes, there's no question." But of
course that's impossible to gauge.

I didn't know I was making something that became part of a movement to give
video games an agenda, a social conscience. I didn't think more than a few
dozen of my online friends would play it. I think the game needed to be
made. Despite my lack of technical skill with video game design, it turns
out the person that made it was me. Maybe that sounds deterministic but the
concept of a deep, dedicated game about Columbine was waiting to happen;
that shooting happened at a very formative age for an entire generation of
gamers and I'm sure it marked us all in one way or another.

It's hard to imagine the last two years of my life without the development,
release, and reactions of SCMRPG. It's almost like my double-life... filled
with names I don't have faces for and a cast of tremendously thoughtful,
talented, curious, or angry people. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't
have bothered to remain anonymous for over a year; in the end I never wanted
the game to be about who made it but rather what it is.

Q. What do you say to those out there who point to the shooting as a reason
why your game should not have been made?

A. This is a question with very deep implications that are worth dissecting,
I think. If one is interested in making something for the public to
view—be it a painting, a book, an album, a film, or a video game, should
the POSSIBLE harm that may come out of this work be grounds for its
suppression from society? This is, in a sense, pre-crime. If you believe
in what you're doing and you want to express yourself, the expression should
be primary and any interpretations that come after must always remain of
secondary importance to the creation of the work itself.

On another level, the entire correlation between the Dawson College shooting
and my game is unfounded. Though it was far from shooter Kimveer Gill's
favorite game, it was among the list of games he liked to play. I can only
assume, after 150,000+ downloads of the game, that it is also a game that
other people like to play (ones who won't be going postal). What else did
Kimveer like? Black clothes? Goth music? Pizza?

"Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" hardly contains the graphic violence someone
wishing to destroy the world would be looking for. It requires a lot of
reading, some puzzle solving, and menu-based combat that is so far removed
from any real act of physical violence that you might as well be playing
Smash Brothers Melee for your fix. The game is devoid of bomb-making
recipes or any skill-building in sighting in a firearm. If Gill "got"
anything out of SCMRPG, it was merely that there were once two boys as angry
and bent on destruction as he was. This of course, would be just as easily
deduced by reading a few documents online (of which he certainly did as
well).

If anything, the Dawson College shooting is proof positive that games like
SCMRPG SHOULD be made; until video games are no longer among the "usual
suspects" for homicidal rampages, the public needs to more carefully
consider why interactive electronic media is somehow the manufacturer of
Manchurian Candidates.

Q. What were you trying to achieve with your game?

A. "Achievement" is difficult to speak to in the sense that I didn't expect
my game to find a mass public audience at all and the CREATION of the game
was foremost in my mind rather than any RECEPTION it might have. This
aside, I wanted to put the game online to give people a unique way of
looking at the worst school shooting in US history. I wanted to give people
something to talk about—more over to take a subject we thought we knew and
challenge how well we know it. I wanted to engage people in the idea that a
video game can be more than a way to pass the time—that in fact it could
challenge the player's sense of morality and leave them with a chilling,
accurate depiction of a real-life event (one that was of great significance
to me).

Q. Do you think that was achieved?

A. SCMRPG has far exceeded any and all expectations I had for it... except
one... which is your next question.

Q. Do you think that perhaps the message in your game is too buried or
intellectual for everyone to find, does it worry you that perhaps some might
misinterpret what you were trying to do with the game?

A. I think there are elements of the game that are completely lost to most
people. This is in part because the subject matter doesn't flag down our
most intellectual sensibilities and also because, of course, video games
don't usually contain philosophers, poetry, or deeper meditations on
society. The base assumption is that this is a game where the stated
objective is to kill as many innocent kids as possible. Most people never
make it through the game and certainly don't readily consider the game as a
sociological critique or a deconstruction of the form (that is, "the video
game").

I think people that have come looking for a graphic exploitation of the
shooting—one that celebrates violence for its own sake and saturates the
screen with blood and torment—are always disappointed. I have gotten much
disparaging email about having not made a first person shooter, having no
way to "win" except to reflect upon the event with the press conference at
the end, and in general taking away all the sexy action and supplanting it
with dialogue and maudlin Smashing Pumpkins midi.

In short, most people misinterpret what I was trying to do with the game...
thankfully some of them are willing to really listen to what I have to say.
This was a game that was created in response to the scapegoatism video games
face today and as such it is the "perfect target" for already zealous
critics of video gaming. In the end, SCMRPG is something of chimera that
becomes whatever the player wants it to be: a horrible exploitation, a
thorough research project, a crappy little 16-bit game, or a point of
fixation for someone who wants to kill people.

Q. Do you think good things have come out of the creation of the game?

A. Absolutely. I am contacted all the time by people thanking me for
telling the story that most people won't touch—and it a way most people
would deem unthinkable. Moreover, many young people are now talking openly
about something they used to keep bottled up inside. Looking over the lives
of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, it was precisely that lack of contact with
the rest of humanity that permitted them to fall so far off the deep end of
nihilism.

Through the forum and personal communication, I have gotten angry young men
to think through the consequences of "another Columbine" and can say with
confidence that I've made a positive difference in the lives of young people
who don't really have anyone... the ones who are pushed into lockers, called
"faggot," ridiculed and ostracized. I can tell them I've been through it,
that life isn't always that way, and if they can find something they love
and excel at it, they'll be miles beyond their tormentors in just a few
short years.

The positive correspondence also comes in the form of women who spent their
teenage years suffering with depression and suicide, sometimes deeply
sedated by SRIs like Luvox, Zoloft, and Prozac (the first of which, as
SCMRPG players know, Eric Harris took and abruptly stopped before the
shooting). The fact is that for some people Columbine reads as an
"alternative history" to the daily agony they face in their teenage years.
I feel like I can help them to see past that and find ways to process their
pain without leaving a trail of blood and television crews.

Q. Did you ever have any contact with 25-year-old Kimveer Gill?

A. None. I know a friend online who had contact with him briefly. That's
really the extent of it.

Q. Have you had any contact with the people affected by the Dawson shooting?
Who contacted you and why?

A. I have been in contact with one survivor in particular who wrote me out
of a kind of sobering curiosity. He wanted to understand why I made the
game and felt as though it was in part responsible for the shooting. After
we spoke further, he began to understand the content of my character and the
game took on a slightly different context for him. I told him about CHS
survivors I have befriended and, more than anything, listened to him and
extended my empathy for what he's going through.

Q. What was that conversation like?

A. Conversations like that are never easy but nonetheless very important.
Part of "owning" my creation means being open and available to talk with
people about it and to meet them on common ground. It's amazing to me,
though: when people are truly willing to listen to one another, there's
almost nothing that can't be overcome. Talking with people on opposing
points of view, and slowly finding how much we really are alike after all,
is one of the most humanizing and transformative experiences of my life. I
think we have a lot to learn from our abilities to reconcile and accept one
another. There surely needs to be more of this in the world today.

Q. Have you considered making any other video games?

A. (smiles) Grand Theft Election: Miami-Dade.

I'm no video game programmer; films are still my foremost passion and I
think cinematically when I want to tell a story (much of SCMRPG felt like
"directing" scenes with dialogue and action sequences... the flashbacks in
particular).

That being said, I work on lots of smaller games with youth in my community
center (using RPG Maker and similar programs) but if anything Columbine was
the one subject I HAD to make a game about. It was something inside me that
needed to be confronted. I may not have another game like that in me... but
then again I'm a pretty non-linear thinker and I'm always interested in how
electronic media of any kind can affect us.

Honestly I think video games where such a part of my childhood that I'll
always view them as a means through which to see the world. In some ways
they are prohibitive to understanding something but in others can yield so
much interactivity that their power is undeniable. I think gaming is still
in its teenage years and as such there's much to explore in terms of what a
game is and how we can play it. I'm totally addicted to Dance Dance
Revolution, for example, and make my own songs and steps all the time with
Step Mania. I'm almost good enough for Heavy Mode now.

Q. Would you make a video game about what happened at Dawson College? Why or
Why not?

I'm not an ambulance chaser who makes games. I think there are very
interesting stories out there—some of them can lend themselves to gaming.
Just recently I tried out Persuasive Games' Airport Security and that was
completely arresting in an unexpected way (as was the Sim McDonalds game).

I'm not sure there's as much of a story at Dawson College as there was at
Columbine. Maybe I'm wrong. Someone spitefully suggested making a game
where players work as the SWAT Team to kill kids in black trench coats. I
told him to do it; I would link his site to mine if I liked it. I think
gaming could someday be as personal as the blog or the YouTube phenomena;
everyone with a computer and a Net connection can make a game to express
their worldview. It needn't be a top-down medium of producers and consumers
of games. Frankly I'd prefer it not be.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add about this?

A. "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" is, from the title on, a satire. It is a
satire of how the media came to view the shooting but ALSO a satire on the
conventions of video gaming itself. I wanted to deconstruct what a video
game could be about while still using many of the conventions available in
gaming. This is difficult for some to understand insomuch as the event
itself was tragic and painful for so many people but I believe true satire
can be aimed at even the most uncomfortable of topics (even nuclear war, per
'Dr. Strangelove.') In the case of SCMRPG, a GAME seemed to be the
appropriate response to so much vilification of gaming.

One of the seminal moments in popular video gaming was the encounter between
Mario and the first Goomba in World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers for the NES.
There were really three possible options open to the player: 1) jump OVER
the Goomba and continue, 2) jump ONTO the Goomba and receive 100 points, or
3) walk INTO the Goomba and lose one of Mario's three lives. From this
crude simplification of how sprites in video games would interact came an
entire industry based largely on hit detection and other physically-driven
mechanisms for game play. Mario could not give the Gooba a high five
(Goombas don't have hands), could not ask for directions (who needs them in
a 2-D world?), and didn't so much as respect the Goomba's natural habitat in
the Mushroom Kingdom (what with all the vandalism of blocks). Mario could
not even enlist any help for creating his path of destruction until Yoshi
the dinosaur came along six years later...

The article written on SCMRPG for Wikipedia really understands much of the
effort and thinking behind the game. It's encouraging to see that yes, some
people really do understand that the game is critical not just of the
Columbine shooting and how it was handled in the press but also of the
operating constraints and conventions of the medium of video games itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Columbine_Massacre_RPG%21

Most of all, if nothing else I want SCMRPG to convey this: MAKE SOMETHING!
If you have something to say about the world, don't wait around for someone
to create that thing for you, DO IT YOURSELF. No matter who you are, you
have something to share and there's absolutely no reason media conglomerates
should have a monopoly on the creation of culture. In the digital age, we
have been empowered to reshape the horizon of understanding ourselves. So
set aside your MySpace blog, turn off the TV, and put down the controller
for your X-Box. Make something... and don't be afraid that your idea might
not be accepted; the truth is there is probably already a world of people
waiting for you to create it—whatever "it" might be.