Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

The 2005 Role Playing Game 'Super Columbine Massacre RPG!' brings to light a very fascinating aspect of the subversive elements of VA, the establishment of meta-narratives, and entire systems derrivative of real world events the unfolding of which are directly defined by a user's direct engagement with the VA of a disembodied entity. The initial impulse set in motion in this came being the perenially popular first person shooter game 'Doom'. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were such obsessive players of the game, that legitimate questions about the games influence on them were raised. Some speculated that if they had not been exposed to the game, they would not have carried out the violent act that they perpetrated. And indeed, it has remained an issue that has remained at the core of vidoe game ethics since. Whether or not 'Doom' was responsible for the violent act they commited is not at issue in this article. But it is the level at which they were engaged with as users with the game itself. During the game's heyday in the late 1990's, there was a special internet forum for fans of the game where you could go online and download levels created by other players and play them yourself. The user was given access to the source code and Harris and Klebold actually designed a level for 'Doom' drawn directly from the Columbine High School's blueprints. This gesture could be taken in one of two ways. The more innocent one being a sort of sick joke (which would have been appropriate if they had not actually carried out the shooting), and the second more plausible one, that they designed the level to help train themselves and prepare physically, psychologically, and emotionally for the act they later perpetrated, using the game in the exact way that military recruits are taught to use it, as an emmulator of a real world environment in which correlative actions are to be made. They appear to have been successful in their self training, since the Columbine Massacre remains unparralleled by shootings that have occured since. These facts alone are enough to make substantive claims about the relational aesthetics of FPS's VA aesthetics, but the issue gets a taken farther in light of the development of 'Super Columbine Massacre RPG!' [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Columbine_Massacre_RPG!]. The game became an overnight sensation, but it is not designed in the manner in which one would expect. It is not designed as a first person shooter like 'Doom' or an adventure game like 'Grand Theft Auto' which would be the more logical format for them to take, but as a role playing game more related to Final Fantasy, the reason for this being mainly because it was the product of a single person, not a game development company either major or independent intending to exploit and sensationalize the event. Disembodied aspect of the game makes it clear that it's very creation was an artistic product in which the design of the game and the emulation of it's architecture was intended to be a cathartic act of . The fact that Ledonne designed a game emulating the columbine massacre not as an intense and detailed representation as Harris and Klebold did, but as a quick and dirty RPG indicate very differnt motives with recreating the same virtual environment six years on. So what does all this say about the actual high school itself? There is no doubt that if game emulations of the High School had not been made, the psychological landscape would be a very different one. It is the creation and dissemination of the structures virtual counter parts that prevent the event from being relegated to the past, and instead ensure that it exists contemporaneously being carried out over and over again, simultaneously, ad nauseum, with no end in sight.