You are making a game based around a School Shooting. How would you design it?

[flarty]

Its already been done, it was called Pico (or something like that) and was based on the columbine high school shootings. It was one of the biggest games on newgrounds.com back in the day. It also shared a massive resemblance to MGS.

Has this already been said?

Edit: PLAY IT HERE: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/310349

Edit: Now i feel old knowing i played it about 15 years ago

 

[Gigano]

Well, realistically, lacking any sort of skill to invent/produce anything of the sort, I'd probably just ape this [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103509-Mega-Man-Team-Making-Vaguely-Sexual-High-School-Rail-Shooter] or this [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108065-Inside-the-Sick-Mind-of-a-School-Shooter-Mod] and call it a day.

Ideally it'd be something that explored what events and psychological degradation lead up to the terrible crime. I quite like the idea put forth by some here of using preceding visual novel sections to explore this, as it's both cost-effective and allows to show thoughts using text that'd otherwise be very hard to bring across. Though the difference to a shooter section might be too great to tie them together.

 

[Calibanbutcher]

You get to see both sides:
You get to play the shooter, carefully planning his violent crime, having to gain access to weapons and equipment and based on what you manage to aquire, you have to plan your approach in order to kill as many students as possible.
You have to retrieve information, such as the security of the school, if there is a fire alarm you could use to your advantage, in order to whip up a paniced crowd, if there is a silent alarm that will attract the police, the ETA for the police after the alarm has been used, if you can silence said alarm, etc pp.
After the plan is made, it is up to you to stick to it meticulously, so as to maximize the damage.
The end will be up to you as well.
A possibility would be to simply kill yourself, or have yourself killed by cops.
You can also have yourself arrested but will be forced to sit through the trial to witness the agony and grief you caused.
Or, if you have managed to disguise yourself, you could try to get away with it, planning a cunning exit strategy that will allow you to get off scott free and undetected.

Phase 2 of the game:
After you massacred the innocent students, the game saves your approach and data and you get to play as one of the students who has to face the massacre. You will be utterly powerless as you watch your friends dying and maybe you will even die yourself, you will never know until it's too late.
The only thing that is certain is, that you will not be able to fight back.
Or will you?

 

[Quadocky]

I still don't get why so many gamers seem like vultures in relation to replicating horrible events like this in the form of video games. Hell they don't even have the decency to wait a few years, they just get right to making them as soon as the event happens.

Not only does it do a huge disservice to the medium given that most of these 'works' are of joke-like quality, it only makes gamers themselves out to be heartless, cruel, and cowardly. Its has all the artistic relevance of a spoiled child writing their name in feces on a bathroom wall.

And why is it done? Purely for the sake of attention and controversy. Not for 'art' not for cultural relevance. Its purely selfish and disgusting spectacle that contributes nothing.

 

[Ryotknife]

To make things worse, I highly doubt that the shootings were entirely the fault of the shooter and those at fault such as bullies and stuff are probably either dead, or definitely not going to own up to their responsibility and tell the truth... this makes a legit story very difficult.

Whenever anyone escalates a conflict, they are entirely at fault for the escalation. When you respond to bullying with mass murder, you are 100% to blame.

well in that particular scenario, yes the person is at fault. But oftentimes in real life, escalation is the only card that you have to save your own life, in particular if you are outnumbered/outgunned.

 

[Slayer_2]

If nothing else, the fact that the average shooter fan doesn't speak Arabic/Pashto and knows very little about the culture of the average citizens of these countries presents a barrier to seeing/understanding/experiencing their suffering in a way that Columbine would not have. There's an in-group/out-group distinction in the two settings that makes them distasteful for different reasons.

You must be American. Just because they're not American civilians or don't speak your language doesn't make their deaths less horrible. Or maybe it does to some Americans, although I'm sure you don't think that. It's a game, horrible things happen in games, usually. Often games recreate or mimic real life events.

Nearly a million die in Rwanda, a fraction of the American population knows about it, a handful of people are killed in a school shooting, the whole world hears about it and the shooter is glorified by the media, because everyone knows American lives are far more valuable.

Now that I'm done my rant, how would I do it? Well one of two ways. If I intended to pacify (or at least try to not enrage too much) the bloated and stupid American media, I'd make it revolve around you as a teacher trying to protect your kids. However, gameplay wise this would probably suck, and the story and emotional elements would be quite devoid as well. That or make you a first responder (police officer, probably) who has to try to find the shooter before he kills too many victims and stop him. Then you have to try to save as many of the wounded as you can, determining who gets priority medical care, and who has to be proclaimed dead on the scene. Either way, you're one of the Good Guys(TM).

Something a bit more controversial and interesting. Take a sane person (the gamer) and convince them to do insane things. It would take some thinking, but make his victims threaten him in his mind, and therefore threaten the player. Make every message from the media glorify people who "fight back" (go on rampages), and tell the average Joe he's useless, a nobody. Give them a reason, however fictional and imaginary it may be to shoot at the aggressors. At the end, reveal that it was partly in his head, and you are to blame, sort of taking one from Spec Ops book. The into would be him collecting guns and preparing, then the middle of the game would be getting to the shooting, then the climax and finale are the moment he realizes his insanity for a brief second and has the option to kill himself or surrender.

Captcha: "do you shop at Canadian Tire?" not anymore.

 

[Random Numbers]

If I may add my two cents, I wouldn't go with any of the suggestions. I'd be a revenge story like in GTA IV, you'd play as a crippled survivor trying to track down the shooter several years later. It'd be an RPG mystery game where you'd go around the world following the clues and searching this guy while helping the locals by winning at quirky mini-games and... actually you what let's just say it's the game play of Far Cry 3 mixed with the detective work of LA Noire, and instead of a pirate kidnapper, it was some kid who got sick of being bullied and left out and killed a bunch of people at your school. The opening cutscene would be him going on the rampage before shooting your arm off, and you waking up in bed. You then decide that enough is enough, all the therapy and drugs in world haven't helped you one bit, you're going to confront your demons and kill the shooter. So you leave behind your wife and kids and go see your old childhood friend at the FBI who points you to South America where you begin your search. But in order to get leads on the guy you have to first help out the police take care of some gangs so you get out your trusty hunting shotgun that you brought along for just such an occasion. The story continues as you go from city to city in the expansive game world doing dirty deeds for people while battling with your own messed up mental trauma, including a part where you go have a nightmare that you're being attacked by monsters and single highhandedly slay an entire enemy militia camp. I'd also like a part where you try to have sex with a hooker but instead get really violent with her because of your PTSD, like that scene in Berserk, though that was more sexual trauma but I think I could still make it work. It would end with either you killing him with same gun loaded with the left over bullets (that he hadn't fired) from the day from the shooting, or you forgiving him and becoming good friends after you see that he's become a cripple and a complete wreck and he's completely remorseful.

 

[Warachia]

Survival horror without question, you just don't play as the shooters, you play as the victims, you also make the shooters have personalities, let us know why they were driven to doing this in both their words and actions, make us feel sorry that this was the outcome they chose, that way people might feel remorse when they get caught/die.

It's pretty easy to figure out how death works too, when you die, you take control of a different victim, but give each victim a personality, have them be distinctive, make us feel sorry for them if they do get killed, show how their friends react, before, during, and after this event, if you run out of victims, you take control of the shooters.

 

[MetalGenocide]

I'd make it like American McGee's Alice. Somewhat....

In the beginning, you play a school child, watching it as it grows up. The environment, npc people: other school kids, teachers, parents, shit on his/her life all the time. Parents are abusive or don't care, kids prank/bully/torture/shun the character in a series of mini games, such as running down a corridor while recess, trying to avoid being beaten up/publicly humiliated. And you always have the "choice" of reporting to the teachers/principal.
At best apathetic, and at worst joining in on the torture, while threatening with beat-downs/penalties in grade/being expelled.
Then the kid goes into escapism, through video games. Trying to fight interpretations of his/her life in his head, as they were monsters. That helps, and sanity is maintained.
Real life episode, imagination episode. One after another.

Basically, this is the whole build-up were you are made to understand, just what one person can go through.
And the shooting is optional. You can choose not to do it, for a "happy ending".
There would be multiple bad endings. One where the players get drunk/drugged enters the wrong room, and shoots small kids. Other will be running around the school, shooting the intended targets.
The multiple endings will have a retrospective montage on the horrible life of the kid, while some journalist or politician talks in the background, that the real problem was video games/drugs/gun control.

Take some real life, a bit of gamification, and create an title that's about how life experience can be.
And if some people supporting gun control non-sense/more funding for "the war on drugs" or some other unrelated thing,
feel stupid, depressed, sad and disillusioned after playing. Well...mission accomplished.

 

[waj9876]

The only way it could work is if you never play as the shooter.

A good way it could work is if you, say, play as one of the students trapped in the building with the shooter. And the game can go down two routes. The "Hero" route, where you attempt to either talk the shooter down, or fight back using improvised weapons. Or the "Coward" route, where you attempt to leave, on your own. Leaving your friends and classmates to their fate.

 

[miketehmage]

Wow. If I were a game dev I'd avoid a game like this like the plague. Wouldn't want my name anywhere near that shit.

We're still trying to convince people that video games are *not* the cause of school shootings.

Releasing a game about a school shooting probably won't further the cause. Because even if you have the best of intentions, and even if you are trying to highlight through the game that shooting children is bad, people are stupid, and will see it as "HURR DURR LOOK AT HOW FUN KILLING SCHOOL CHILDREN IS"

So no, I am not making a game based around a school shooting.


However, I think the best way to do it is a stealth/survival game where you play as a student.

I can't really see any way for it to be acceptable for you to be playing as the shooter. It probably wouldn't be fun either, shooting unarmed children isn't exactly difficult is it?

 

[Therumancer]

I was reading about a game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG the other day, based on the shootings at Columbine high school.

The moral outrage the game inspired didn't surprise me. What did intrigue me was the way the game was made; by one guy, using RPG maker and sprites stolen from Doom. And this got me thinking: what if this game could have been made on a bigger budget, without the restrictions of morality? What sort of game would it be? Would it be received better or worse by the public?
Would it be more or less fun to play? Could such a game, rather than creating further anguish in the wake of the tragedy, help us to come to terms with it in the same way a film or documentary might do?

So, for the purposes of this thread, all moral concerns are suspended and everything is permitted. Any creative ideas you have are welcome; gameplay, story, aesthetics, whatever. I have a few ideas of my own, but I would like to see what you come up with first. Videogames have as much right to tackle difficult subjects as any other medium, we just need to try making them.

It's important to note that "Super Columbine Massacre RPG" was intended as a sort of art project, it really wasn't a game so much as it was a recreation of the events done with a fairly scripted RPG, that raised a lot of questions about the claims by showing things point by point.

If I was going to make a "school massacre" game, I'd probably go with "crime simulator". To be honest even since I was in Criminal Justice, learning about things like the old VICAP (VIolent Criminal Apprehension Program) system, I always thought it would be fun to make a game for armchair criminals where you could commit crimes, seriel murders, etc... and play against Law Enforcement's abillity to track and predict responses to see how long you could get away with it. That and as a fan of 80s horror movies I always thought that instead of playing a regular criminal, it might be fun to play a sandbox crime game where your a rampaging supernatural psychopath like Freddy Or Jason, in a style similar to one of the Grand Theft Auto games.

At any rate, I'd probably look towards some of the "bully revenge" movies like "X-game" (Japanese Horror) or any of one of the "wronged classmate killing everyone" movies for inspiration. Create a scenario where your protaganist is wronged, badly, by a bunch of students, the authorities do not function like they should, and you go after revenge. I'd probably take inspiration for this from something like say "Hitman" or "Assasin's Creed" or even the more recent "Lucious" in providing an open world where you as the character need to kill all of the people involved, as well as administrators who ignored your plea for help. Simply walking into the school and shooting would of course be one simple solution, but in order to make it gamable I'd probably set it up to reward the player for being able to arrange sadistic, and perhaps ironic, ends for the various perpetrators, with the best score and "good" ending being if the player can actually kill everyone, benefit from it, and escape undetected.

The thing is people have actually created school shooting mods and such for various games (I think The Escapist did articles on at least one once, but maybe I'm thinking of the wrong site), it's kind of boring IMO. There is only so much entertainment to be derived from shooting down defenseless targets, and really the level of detachment present in such games doesn't really capture the same thing.

From my perspective to make something like this work, you need to present a plausible scenario, which means the person doing the shooting needs to be presented as being wronged. People don't go seeking revenge (or perhaps from their perspective... justice) for no paticular reason. 99% of the coverage of school shooting incidents focuses on the victims, the surviving families, and simply askes "oh why did this evil person do this", even if they know the reasons for it, they don't want to give it much press and perhaps cause sympathy with the killer. The problem with that is that it will never, ever, give you any kind of understanding that way.

In the end to properly portray these situations you need to make it clear that perhaps the killer did go too far, but also show the provocation, AND the failure of the system intended to bring justice to such situations. I again mention the Japanese movie "X-game" (on Netflix, not a great movie, but one that handled the subject matter), the killer(s) were a bunch of psychos, but the victims were hardly sympathetic themselves, and the authorities (teacher) present failed to control a situation they knew was going on. The same can be applied to legions of other movies which aren't quite as accessible, but simply put the wronged classmate is a quintessential villain for "Teen screams" slasher movies.

At any rate I think my take on things, which will probably never be made unless I win hundreds of millions in a lottery or something, is the only way you would be able to cover the subject matter in a balanced way to actually answer questions (of a sort), as well as being entertaining.

 

[AlbertoDeSanta]

Many people have already said it, but as if the "Protagonist" is an insane man who believes he is killing members of a universally hated group. In the end, it turns out he was hallucinating and they were school children.

 

[Therumancer]

Wow. If I were a game dev I'd avoid a game like this like the plague. Wouldn't want my name anywhere near that shit.

We're still trying to convince people that video games are *not* the cause of school shootings.

Releasing a game about a school shooting probably won't further the cause. Because even if you have the best of intentions, and even if you are trying to highlight through the game that shooting children is bad, people are stupid, and will see it as "HURR DURR LOOK AT HOW FUN KILLING SCHOOL CHILDREN IS"

So no, I am not making a game based around a school shooting.


However, I think the best way to do it is a stealth/survival game where you play as a student.

I can't really see any way for it to be acceptable for you to be playing as the shooter. It probably wouldn't be fun either, shooting unarmed children isn't exactly difficult is it?

I wrote a more detailed post on the subject, but I wanted to say that I think game developers (or more accuratly publishers) generally lack guts which is why they won't do anything like this. Games long ago ceased to push the enevelope as much as they could, and I think have suffered for it. To be honest movie makers have been covering this basic subject matter for decades.... that is the issue of a wronged student, taking vengeance on classmates. This can involve everything from Japanes movies like "X-game" (which I just mentioned), to Prom Night, to Valentine, to Carrie and hundreds of others. Indeed horror movies typically being a sort of morality play where the victims inevitably get what they deserve, the killer usually only falling at the hands of an innocent who had nothing to do with what happened, in many cases the killer doesn't even nessicarly fall, just eventually finds peace after vengeance is satisfied.

To an extent I think the big problem is one of motive. People don't just decide "gee, I want to kill a bunch of people today" there are always reasons. Your typical school shooter is someone who was wronged horribly, and also saw the system fail in dealing with the problems like it was supposed to. People keep asking the whole "why" question and crying for the victims and their families, when the truth is nobody really wants to face "why" and the simple fact that while the response was usually far more intense than the situation warrented, the safeguards put in place that were intended to act for those victims failed for one reason or another. If you simply demonize the shooter, you refuse to acknowlege the entire problem, and just make it likely to happen again, blame has to be placed on all sides. That means actually naming names with the authorities, and flat out saying that a lot of the victims were probably jerks (or little snots) who were not totally undeserving of bad things happening to them. Perhaps shooting them was going too far, but at the same time no middle ground solution was presented since the system. You need to basically be willing to call the victims scumbags as much as the shooter. Movies have kind of made this point in cases where similar situations have been presented, video games can do the same thing.

In many cases understand that what we see in school shootings are those same obnoxious stereotypes we know exist and hate on in movies, facing vengeance IRL instead of just in fantasy, oftentimes for the exact same reasons why it happens in the movies... a failure of the real life infrastructure. In real life it takes two sides to create something like this.

 

[Slayer_2]

A school shooting is a tragic event that runs against the "norm" of American society. Many Americans are used to hearing stories of tragedies in poorer countries, especially in Africa. It's unfortunate, and I'm definitely not saying it's right, but that's how it is.

Looks like mass shootings are quickly becoming "the norm" in America, if your media is to be believed. Doesn't make them any better.

 

[Jadak]

Wow. The fact that you went and thought all this out is really very disturbing. But I guess it's not all that uncommon for a certain subset of gamers to be completely anti-social.

Has nothing to do with being anti-social, I merely don't have any irrational hangups preventing me from even considering a concept because it would be "wrong".

Am I going to make it? Not likely. Would I play it if someone else made it? Hell, probably. It's a game and I don't arbitrarily see shooting virtual children as worse than shooting virtual adults, as is common and accepted in many games.

This thread presented a question, I answered it. Get over it.

 

[The_Echo]

First and foremost, I'd like to say that I don't find this concept immoral or in poor taste or repugnant to any degree. Based on a real school shooting, yeah, it's a bit of a dick move. But not very different from the several games using a backdrop of the war in the Middle East. I think that any medium should be able to cover any topic.

The first idea that comes to mind is an arcade/score attack sort of thing. You've got the school with a set layout, waves of students/teachers and occasionally-spawning upgrades. There could be "special targets" (bullies, mean teachers, shit that sets these kinds of people off) which maybe add a temporary multiplier or end the stage/wave. Each subsequent wave produces more police officers, and eventually they are the only targets. The longer you last, the bigger threat you are considered, so they become tougher and use bigger weapons. Game lasts as long as you can. Also, I imagine it to be very difficult.

Some people are saying a survival-horror game, where the player takes on the role of a person hiding from the shooter. I think that's kind of a great idea, though given that schools aren't terribly large (most of the time), the game wouldn't last very long and probably be a bit of a shallow experience.

What about a game where you play the shooter's parent(s) or friends? Maybe sort of like a visual novel. It could follow the life of the would-be shooter from childhood until the day he/she does the deed. Or... do they? Multiple endings based on your decisions throughout his/her life as parents and/or friends. You know, I kind of like this idea. I think this should be done.

I'd make it a sort of "against the clock" FPS.

Wow. The fact that you went and thought all this out is really very disturbing. But I guess it's not all that uncommon for a certain subset of gamers to be completely anti-social.

I'm sorry, but I think that's incredibly out-of-line and insulting.

Discussing taboo subject matter is not anti-social behavior. To think that it is seems closed-minded to me.