Inside the Sick Mind of a School Shooter Mod

[fisk0]

Wow... The mod itself I don't mind, but holy crap the guy in that interview is messed up.

He talks about "the fun of killing innocent people" and the main appeal of GTA being killing innocent civilians before the cops show up, someone needs to tell him that that's not normal o-o

Not normal? I'd think the majority of the people who play the GTA games do it for similar reasons. I don't think many are that interested in the plot or mission progression to follow that to it's conclusion.
The GTA games have in my mind always been about going on a rampage through the city streets for 15-20 minutes, then getting bored and shutting the game down, to return to do the same thing a couple of days later. While Rockstar are undoubtedly good writers, they consistently fail at making the plot feel integrated into their games, at least the GTA series, I have not played RDR.

 

[Adzma]

The thing I find most amusing is that I'm sure 90% of the responses in this thread are exactly what the guy wants people to say.

I for one find the idea quiet amusing. You can't claim something like a WWII shooter or Modern Warfare shooter is fine, but a school simulator is different.

The latter has kids? So what? Adults dying is no different than kids dying. Somone somewhere still ends up with a hole in their family.

 

[Shannon Matchett]

Is there an option to pre-order?

 

[Popido]

He doesn't want his game to be any different. He wants to make another "wind from the past" as you put it. Just, you know, with kids in a high school.

"Wind from the past" was how that game was explained and marketed to me. I dont know what you are trying to explain to me by that sleazy remark, but not all fps are the same.

However, you have made me curious. What would you consider artistic in gaming? Where games like Limbo, Today I Die, Braid and others not artistic to you? Were they just *yawn* another boring attempt at making an "edgy" game?

For my understanding, Today I Die is by no means well known for what you call remarkable. Calling it an advancement for the gaming is outrageous! While it itself is a decent piece of an art, going anywhere further then that just sounds hipstering.

What I seek in great art is self-expression! And if what we have today in our devices is truly self-expression! Then son, we live in dull times.

 

[Bakuryukun]

This is a very immature game, made by a very immature developer, I wonder if all the attention he's getting makes him feel smart? His answers certainly sound pretentious enough to give me that impression. Thanks buddy, for doing your part to prove to the masses that all videogames and gamers are a bunch of jaded, stupid, slack jawed idiots, and that developers are only making silly toys for man children to play for the sake of attention based off of shock-value.

The game doesn't even look that good, it's purely relying on it's edgy status to set itself apart.

 

[Darkauthor81]

If games are an artistic medium, like every single pretentious ass on this forum seems to claim, then we shouldn't be ashamed to make this.

Wooo love some good old fashioned troll bait. Let the flame war begin!

 

[ckam]

Wow, way to go. Way to set us back five years ago. This just pisses me off.

 

[lacktheknack]

Something like this speaks directly to the bullied teenager in all of us. Know what this game is? It's cathartic. Without mincing words, I fucking hated high school. I had no friends, and was picked on for fun by just about everybody because, being bigger than most and quiet, I make a good target. Hell, there was a month back in grade 12 where a group of people would follow me around at lunch and throw garbage at me. I never fought back, though. I just bottled shit up and turned it into pure hate and misanthropy. Even now, several years later, I keep up a shell and am always on the defensive. I keep people away because I quite honestly hate them now.
Why, may you ask, am I giving you lot my life story? It's on topic, not just because they both involve high schools. I have to say, playing a game like that would be cathartic. If I played this back in high school, it'd give me some sort of satisfaction. I couldn't strike back against my tormentors in real life, so I'd gun them down in the virtual world. It hurts nobody, no harm is done but to pixels.
To all of you saying "this is terrible, this is the worst thing ever, you need to die for making this!" think back to yourself at high school and how the people in it made you feel. If everyone was your best friend, then congratulations, you've succeeded in doing something that no other human in history has done. To the rest of you, however, remember how those people (you know exactly who I mean, EVERYONE has them) made you feel, and tell me taking your digital revenge wouldn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

...No. It wouldn't. It would only make me madder. Because then they'd still be there.

How am I supposed to sympathize with you if you sat there, did nothing about it, and wished deeply for their horrendous death? At least I DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

To begin, I don't appreciate your attacking me for simply stating my opinion. YOu have done nothing here, made no valid argument, you've simply attempted to defame me and say that I'm wrong for feeling a certain way. What, pray tell, do you suggest I do? Go to the office? Seriously, when was the last time you were in a high school? The administration doesn't give a flying fuck about you. I can tell you exactly what they'd say, because the first thing I did WAS go to the office. "Oh, avoid the people who give you trouble". That's the entirety of their solution. The administration would not lift a finger to help you, they couldn't be bothered to piss on you if you were on fire. Hell, when someone actually set me on fire in grade 9, they simply said that if I didn't have any proof of who it was, they couldn't do anything. So should I fight them, then? Sure, get myself expelled and probably hurt because there's a good deal more of them than me. Talk to them? Seriously? It doesn't work that way. Regardless, I never asked for your sympathy, I simply gave personal context to help me make a valid argument.

On to your other point, that it would make you madder because they're still there. Well, yippee for you, that's just too damn bad. Guess what, though? If you DIDN'T play the game, then they'd still be there, just the same as if you had played, only if I did play, it would act as a sort of stress relief. That's the entire point I've tried to make, that it works cathartically, like a stress ball with a trigger.

I find it interesting how you accuse me of attacking you (which I didn't), then go on an aggressive rant.

Anyways, I graduated last year out of a school where the staff successfully defused no fewer then four bullies groups in three years. I even was involved mere weeks ago in a defamation via Facebook case where fifteen people got a warning, one got a two day suspension, and another got a five-day suspension. So no, the administration was awesome.

Still, did you get your parents involved?

Did you consider switching schools?

Did you consider psychological warfare?

Were you friendly to everyone else?

Did you stay in good status with the teachers?

Did you consider hiding in a closet and reading, since you claim to have had no friends?

Did you react to them?

Did you withdraw into an easily prodded shell?

Seriously, if you did the last two and almost none of the others, then no wonder high-school sucked.

In that case, you were luckier than most. Both the high schools I went to, the administration refused to do anything.
I don't intend to show any aggression here, and I understand that it's hard to tell tone over the internet, so I can understand how you'd think that.

I DID switch schools, after someone set me on fire.
I treated those people who would treat me with respect well
Please define psychological warfare
I was in good with the teachers
I tried my hardest to ignore them
I think I may have done the last, but I'm not sure.

The main reason I had no friends was that I came into the school later, after the cliques had already formed, and that I knew some of the people from when I was younger (grade 4, 5) when I was going through some tough times, and they spread the word that I was "weird" or whatever.

Fair enough... looks you just got the short end of the stick the whole time. Nasty.

For the record, if you've decided to be a loner, psychological warfare is handy. Basically, it consists of bizarre, even insane reactions to negative stimuli. For example, if someone punches you from behind, you turn around, grab his head, yank it towards you and SCREAM AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE INTO HIS EYE. Then walk off. Or you could curl into a ball on the floor and summon Cthulhu. The key here is to never do the same thing twice. Three days of that is enough for everyone to leave you well enough alone, then you can couple that with the "hide in the broom closet with a book" method to make a perfectly survivable high school experience, if not the most social one.

It worked for me, anyways. Then I made some friends and everything got better.

It's too late for you either way, though... But surely you'd recognize why I think simulating your own school shooting isn't the best alternative. At all. I normally wouldn't even recommend psychological warfare except in the worst of circumstances (like yours), but I'd still recommend that over cathartic school-shooting fiction.

 

[Seneschal]

Splendid! Good to see some people actually trying to push the limits of what can be shown and what can be seen. Take it as an horror if you will. Risks are what this art form needs if it wishes to be taken seriously.

On serious note. There are better mods that dont just look like Garry's Mod.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but I actually... kind of agree with this. My 2nd favourite movie is Gus Van Sant's "Elephant", a truly unnerving story about a school shooting. While tagged as a drama, I consider it a horror movie because of the effect it had on me - it was literally horrific. And I watch a lot of actual horrors, but I usually just get a lot of fun out of them.

And I thought this would also be the case... until I read the Mr Tito's interview with the "developer". The guy is a shallow myopic idiot.

 

[Sephychu]

There is something viscerally entertaining to going nuts in a sandbox game, but killing innocents is never the point of any of these games(with a few exceptions). Even in GTA, killing innocents is not the theme of the experience and doing so is always punished by the game. The same holds true for Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty, and Mercenaries. it is part of the experience, because these games deal with organized crime, war, and the old west. but again it is part of a much bigger experience not THE experience.
The response that should be taken by the gaming community is to boycott anything this studio does. They have no respect for the medium, it's community or the general public.

Can I just take you up on this point? Several people have made it. Don't take the following personally, I mean it to everybody.

Why is the wholesale slaughter of your fellows okay if they've done bad things? Nay, you've been told they've done bad things. Why does innocence even come into it at all?
You kill a man or woman, you take away somebody's son or daughter, somebody's brother or sister, somebody's best friend, someone's father or mother. You take a life.
Why is that fine and dandy if they're bad people?

Killing people is one of the only objective wrongs in this world, and nobody has any right whatsoever to do it, even in revenge. That makes you just as sad an excuse for a human being as anybody who has killed too.

So why then, is this in any way bad? By playing it, you aren't killing anybody, you're putting yourself in that mindset, for fun. If you wanted to go out and do it for fun, you would. Instead, one plays a game about it.
Some people don't join the army, they play Call of Duty, or Bulletstorm, or whatever the hell they like. Games in which you kill people are nothing new. They're archaic.

This game has every right to be made, played and enjoyed, just like films about this kind of thing, just like paintings of this kind of thing, just like books about this kind of thing. If you don't like it, fine. 'The medium' as it is called should be allowed to depict anything it wants any way it wants.

Oh, and to all you people quoting Extra Credits, I got the impression from their video on 'Six Days in Fallujah' that they regarded games that dealt with touchy subject matter as good things, not bad things. Just some food for thought.

 

[Gameguy315]

Well, just watched the trailer, and I gotta say, that game looks fucking boring!
Let's just take a time out from our moral dilemna and critique the game a little.
So, he starts the game and kills off the entire school in a little under a minute and a half. Mabye it's one of those smaller schools, I dunno. But then, the police/combine show up, which throws the angle of "shooting targets that can't fight back" out the window. Well, not entirely, actually. The police can fight back, but they have sticks; not much of a chance for them, eh? Mabye I'm just being stupid, but I'm pretty sure police respond to school shootings with guns. There goes the realism factor. My immersion is officially lost. As if it wasn't lost already with the near infinite supply of ammo this school seems to possess. Seriously, they need that because...? Well, eventually the police get smart and start to shoot back, although it doesn't help that they're as dumb as rocks. How hard would it have been to simply flank the guy from both the door and window at the same time? I guess it's too much work to make A.I. use tactics. One thing I did notice was that this high school was full of adults who didn't seem to give a shit about whether they were shot or not. They would run/jog a little, but if I were them, I would be bookin' it for the nearest exit! Not to mention I didn't see a single teenager to murder. Mabye it was a Parent/Teacher night where the kids didn't have to come? Oh well. Hopefully, they'll let me reschedule. It'd be really depressing if I couldn't come back because of a stupid scheduling error.

Anyway, the point is, it's an internet game. There are bunches of internet games that deal with murdering innocent people, children even. Will this be blown out of proportion in new media like it has on The Escapist? Well, considering it's a mod of an already M-Rated game and that is based on a website that most parental blockers would not allow kids to go on, I can definately say it's a 50/50 chance. But personally, I wouldn't bet on it.

 

[Bakuryukun]

I like to think of this as a response to the media's belief that all games are murder simulators...
Well, here's a murder simulator, and it probably wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the demonization of violent video games...

Except that by the developers own admission it isn't, this game wasn't made with any agenda in mind, it was simply made to be "cooooool and edgy, man" even if it was, it hardly seems like an intelligent way to go about making a point about the topic.

 

[Xan Krieger]

I've been following this mod for a long time and I support it. It's not the first school shooting game and it won't be the last.
http://www.columbinegame.com/

 

[lacktheknack]

IIf games are an artistic medium, like every single pretentious ass on this forum seems to claim, then we shouldn't be ashamed to make this.

Actually, if you bothered to read the article, this is the product of someone claiming that games have NO artistic value whatsoever. Meaning, this is what happens when games are NOT considered art, according to the developer.

If that's the case, I'll take my pretentious jackassery any day of the week, thank you very much.

 

[fisk0]

This is a very immature game, made by a very immature developer, I wonder if all the attention he's getting makes him feel smart? His answers certainly sound pretentious enough to give me that impression. Thanks buddy, for doing your part to prove to the masses that all videogames and gamers are a bunch of jaded, stupid, slack jawed idiots, and that developers are only making silly toys for man children to play for the sake of attention based off of shock-value.

The game doesn't even look that good, it's purely relying on it's edgy status to set itself apart.

As if the Xbox live community, Bulletstorm, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, GTA, APB, Soldier of Fortune, Splatterhouse, Mafia II, the playboy games, the japanese rape games, and the majority of every other game in existence hasn't already conclusively proven that fact? I really don't see this doing anything that different except twisting the situation around a little. And that's not even by much.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

hmm.
I can't watch it because my computer is being a dick, but meh it does sound pretty bad. They might as well make a paedophilia game while theyre at it. Or Rapequest, a new mmo...

/puke

I find most of the stigma around things like that certain cal of duty level and the idiocy with the MOH havent a faction called taliban kinda stupid. But this crosses a line.

 

[Bakuryukun]

Splendid! Good to see some people actually trying to push the limits of what can be shown and what can be seen. Take it as an horror if you will. Risks are what this art form needs if it wishes to be taken seriously.

On serious note. There are better mods that dont just look like Garry's Mod.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but I actually... kind of agree with this. My 2nd favourite movie is Gus Van Sant's "Elephant", a truly unnerving story about a school shooting. While tagged as a drama, I consider it a horror movie because of the effect it had on me - it was literally horrific. And I watch a lot of actual horrors, but I usually just get a lot of fun out of them.

And I thought this would also be the case... until I read the Mr Tito's interview with the "developer". The guy is a shallow myopic idiot.

This game fails as a Horror game, because your the one with the power, no sense of dread or anything there's just no tension at all. it also fails as an action game, considering at the beginning of the game your just firing at random civilians who don't fight back, so there's also no tension there either, even if SWAT teams and the like do come, if it's purely a reaction to shooting the civilians then the game is pretty much a one trick pony, as it's flow can be boiled down to a straight line, which while I appriciate is somewhat arcade game-like, the initial civilian part is going to break the flow of the game horribly so it even fails as an arcade style game.

The game from both from a gameplay and setting design just don't sound that good imo. It's relying on one trump card, that being it's shock-value, and that's not enough to make a game seem interesting to me.

 

[K_Dub]

You know what, he has every right to go on and make this game. Free speech and all. Hell, he even has the right to sound like a presumptuous asshole who's somehow fighting the system.

But this is exactly the kind of person that we don't need in the gaming industry right now! He wants violent games banned to protect the children? BULLSHIT! That's the responsibility of parents! He believes that games are no more than '"bang-bang shoot 'em ups" and "murder simulators?"' BULLSHIT! Games are a legitimate art form that allow people to feel emotion and delve more deeply into stories that other mediums of entertainment simply cannot duplicate!

I tell ya what, this guy has some brass balls to release a game that deals with school shootings. And in that respect, I do support him and his studio (though I don't plan on going anywhere near the game). His attitude about the whole situation has been so uncaring and nonchalant though, when he should be taking this very seriously, from the subject matter of the game (ESPECIALLY the subject matter) to the backlash from gamers and non-gamers alike!

This is the exact kind of person that has no business in the gaming industry, and I personally hope that this whole plight leads to his eventual departure from the gaming industry for good.

 

[Pointer]

I disagree with the reason why this mod is being made. The man is profiling school shooters as gamers. I really doubt there is an audience for this type of mod. Beyond that it is disrespectful to those who lost people in shootings. Those who were victims are victimized because they are victims (see the root of that verb is VICTIM). While it is truly unfortunate to see that the shooters, who are in their own ways victims of society, demonized and ostracized this mod will do little for the player to sympathize with that mind set. You 'd have to be in the mindset in order to actually get enjoyment out of this mod, and I really doubt it will have the preventative quality that the developer is looking for.

And since I want to attack this with as little ethos as I can, what is the point of another good shooter unless you bring something new to the table? Sure you can kill sitting ducks but Grand Theft Auto and games similar to it already provide this kind of murder spree. And in those games you can kill yourself already. You are giving the gamers a game with stale mechanics and retreaded gameplay. If the game isn't "fun" then its simply pointless.

And as many probably already have said its fodder for the Supreme Court Case against video game distribution. The developer's point in saying that those who want violent video games having a negative impact is true. But that person seeking violence has already been impacted by somebody or something else before they decided to simulate violence. If anything these types of games probably stops kids from doing things like killing animals because they can. And if you want to get into statistics the crime rate has decreased since the release of those same violent video games. If anything you are going against the point you cited that you made the game for.

Beyond that I have to disagree with you. I can't see the advantages outweighing the disadvantages.