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

[TsharpInfinity]

I would make every character the player interacts with prior to the shooting an unlikable, bullying jackass who goes out of their way to make the player feel like crap. The "victims" should be more like caricatures of high school bullies than actual children in order to justify their slaughter. Otherwise, it wouldn't work.

Another scenario would be that you play as a student fighting off a school shooter using improvised weapons in close quarters in a survival horror environment.

 

[Captain Anon]

i would say "fuck this i'm out of here" because i'm not that fucking heartless and stupid

 

[peruvianskys]

I'd make it a LA Noire thing. The school staff have recently found a piece of paper discarded that details a plan for a shooting, and you've been called in to handle the matter discretely by talking to the students, trying to find out who among them is the potential gunner and making sure they get the treatment they need.

This is the only approach I can ever consider even possibly working, and I think it's a super great idea. I would play that in a heartbeat.

 

[Easton Dark]

I'd make it a survival horror kind of game where you're a student and you're trying to make it through the school to either find a weapon capable of killing the attacker and then working up the nerve to do it, or make it out without attracting the shooter's attention and going for help, and doing it as fast as possible so as few people die as possible.

To people saying no, I hope war and crime games hold as much meaning to you, or you've got egg on your face. Oh now that it's children you're heartless for killing them, pff.

 

[kasperbbs]

I wouldn't, but if i did i would probably give the player a limited amount of ammo and scored him on how many people he managed to kill before the cops showed up. Mostly because i'm lazy, anything else would require more effort and interest in the subject.

 

[Brainwreck]

I'd wash my face, look in the bathroom mirror and say 'no'.

 

[Tinkotin]

Christ you guys are boring. "I wouldn't." Jeez. If you did it right, and didn't turn it into a disrespecting pile of garbage and paid respects, then you could get away with it. As for how I'd do it, I'd make it an "artsy" game. A heavily narrative based game, basically more about displaying the horrors of what went down.

 

[Spectral Dragon]

I guess the only thing I'd consider would be as a negotiator - they've taken someone hostage, having the teacher and a class at gunpoint, and it's your job to make him stand down. First going over their profile, so you know what you have to work with, and then just trying to remain calm with a time limit, and no room to fuck up. Then, no matter what the outcome, you have to oversee what kind of punishment/mental help he needs.

 

[thejackyl]

1. Survival Horror in the same vein as Clock Tower, where you have to evade/hide from the baddie to escape. If it wouldn't be greenlit by the studio head, or producers than change the "School Shooting" premise to "Monsters attacking with projectile weapons". Your main goal would be saving yourself, and your secondary goal is saving as many people as you can.

2. Tactics games, where you play as a SWAT team or such responding to a hostage situation at a school. (So far the shooter's just corralling everyone into a classroom and firing "warning shots".) Your goal is to get in, take them out with as little collateral damage as possible. Best situation: Suspect is apprehended alive, and no hostages are harmed.

3. Pull a Spec Ops: The Line, but handle it differently. You believe you're going into the school to stop monsters or something, and you go through cleaning out the place of different monsters. Some who walk towards you, some run quickly, some run away, some hide and jump out. It's later revealed that the monsters were ACTUALLY innocent people, and that you are really at fault. And unlike Spec Ops, you aren't a good person who unknowingly did bad, it wasn't in self defense, and you ultimately had no reason to kill everyone.

Yes that third one is a bit horrible in retrospect, but I think it would have a bigger impact than Spec Ops, especially if it was marketed as if it was a game like Painkiller or something. (Kind of like how Spec Ops from its appearance looks like another "Bro Shooter"

 

[Jadak]

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

To start with, it'd be about what you'd expect, you show up and you start shooting folk with some default weapons. Your goal is to meet a certain percentage of deaths amongst students, with tired bonuses for faculty.

Now, as time goes by, you would be presented with increasing challenges. At first, just the occasional student that decides to attack you rather than run and hide, followed shortly by the rare teacher trying to be heroic.

Shortly after, surviving students and faculty will start to coordinate, and you'll have to deal with ambushes and group counter attacks as everyone decides they'd rather fight than die. Depending on the level, security guards may start coordinating against your here as well (later missions - harder schools, more security measures)

After a little while longer, while your victims become more desperate and aggressive, law enforcement will arrive and just for the sake of game coolness this would eventually be followed by SWAT teams and military forces, kind of like GTA's wanted levels.

And that's the bulk of the basic gameplay, but on the larger scale, you also need to get out again. You need to meet your goals and whatever bonuses you can manage and then pull off an escape, which will allow you progress to the mission as well as awarding you money to spend on items & weapons with which to use in your next attack. In later missions, you'll be going in with explosives and such if you choose, allowing for massive destruction.

Now, this won't be a linear mission sort of thing, but rather a pick your attack location from a main map game. So at the start of the game, all locations have a base difficulty, which may be high or low, but there is also a National Alert system, which rises the more you attack making all schools more secure. So, if you manage to escape from an attack without meeting the kill rate objectives, you don't get bonuses but the Alert level still raises.

And as a final note, the area around the school would be wide open, allowing you to do things like seal off doors and the like before you go in.

 

[Chester Rabbit]

Okay my first response was "I wouldn't" but let me put another spin on this.
Were I to ever make a game that could even be called a school shooting game, the only reason it would be loosely fitted with this name is because of its set up and plot. I would go about it like your average B horror movie. Teens waiting around in their high school to get a ride to a ski resort get snowed in the school cerial killer stalks them and happens to use a gun.(at certain times)
So I guess Far Cry 3 meets Clock Tower.
I would make it a survival horror where your only real option is to run, hide and barricade. Also there would be another gameplay segment where you would be playing flash back segments as each character tries to figure out who this could be and why they are doing it. The choices you make in all these segments determine who the killer is in the end. And also if you play your cards right through the game everyone could make it out alive or you could even just have a miserable ending and you all die.

 

[ninjaRiv]

Well, it'd have a twist beginning; mental health care would be free and the antagonists would get the help they need, meaning the game would end right there. I'd probably make no money.

 

[teh_Canape]

I'd do it Night Trap style
you're some sort of guard guy seeing everything through cameras following the shooters and attempting to spring traps before they get to do anything

 

[blazearmoru]

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.

The public has a mob mentality and it would be ill received.
The game would not be fun to play, but it would be a learning experience for the player much like Spec Ops The Line.
The game needs to have either the perspective of the shooter or students, and given that I hear no shooter was ever caught alive due to suicide I doubt anyone can make a legit story based on the shooter's perspective (not that they couldn't convincing make a fake perspective... assholes)
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.

I would assume the best way for such a story to even be near legit would be someone who was near the snapping point of going on a killing spree making the story from his/her point of view, expressing each and every thought and emotion in response to the people and events around them leading up to the moment. I think a really good game inspired by a shooting would not be the shooting but the events leading up to the shooting. Yes the conclusion is important but it is the road leading up to the conclusion that was responsible. The conclusion was merely a consequence, and as a gamer you learn very early on that your actions have consequences.

Why this dark psychological drama approach? Because this is not a fun subject but a mandatory one. The game would end with the main character in front of the school, clocking his gun. The story after need not be retold, but it is the events leading up to it that people need to understand. Blaming is nice, shifting of responsibility is nice, just as the result of everyone dying for the exact same reason because no one wants to deal with it is nice. Motherfuckers need to deal with this shit.

 

[Xanadu84]

Very, very carefully.

We can't just toss context to the wind with this. Games has historically been heavily skewed towards the empowerment fantasy, and though games don't cause violence, viewing Columbine's shooting through the lens of an empowerment fantasy can VERY easily amount to something horribly insensitive. That's not political correctness in the negative sense that term is usually used, its an acknowledgement that in context, this would be an INCREDIBLY difficult undertaking. You would need to make a game that engages the player in a different way, or in a way that subverts traditional the traditional aesthetics. Your probably looking at a horror game, a subversive action game along the lines of Spec Ops, or an abstract, "Art game". And you will probably have to look at an aspect of the shooting, not the shooting as a whole.

I can see a short, survival horror game where you play as a potential victim. Old school, powerless, Amnesia style horror. But I think it would feel sort of empty without a deeper point to make, and without a deeper point to make, the specter of a power fantasy may rear its ugly head and ruin what the game might say. So I see it as a series of, "Puzzles", where you take on the role of various students and teachers at the school, but in addition to solving a challenge, you have to figure out what your goal can be. One, "Level" may involve escaping, while in another, avoiding death may be impossible. In another, perhaps you chose between surviving or saving someone else, and saving someone unlocks that persons level, which again, could end in inevitable death. There would be an amount of randomness, so you never know if there was a possibility to do something better, and ultimately, it will always be a tragedy. All consequences would be qualitative, so there is no points or tallys, just a series of events which the players themselves make a judgement on. It may make the game more frusterating, but the mechanics would support the concept of hope even in the face of hopelessness. Even if you are doomed, you still have to try, because it is worth trying, and both the tragedy of facing those choices and the perseverance to try to overcome that tragedy. Also, it would need to be permadeath with no saving, and the game would have to be rather short to compensate for the frustration. That would communicate the loss of control that victims would experience to the audience

A game from the shooters perspective is EXTREMELY dicey. It's very hard not to glamorize. Adding a layer of fantasy, then ripping away the fantasy and leaving the player profoundly uncomfortable (The Spec Ops route) could work, but it would take brass balls to stand behind your work and explain why what you are doing is subversive, and not praise. And you would have to go all in to make the player feel uncomfortable. Frankly, you could finish the game, and the game could come across as a glorification of violence, and the exact opposite of what you wanted. I gotta say that anyone who tried this is braver then I am.

Another option, and I'm even more fuzzy on how to do THIS, would be to glamorize the shooting, but make clear that the glamour is seen from the perspective of the media portrayal. One way I imagine this is to make the game in 2 distinct visual and play styles. In one, everything is done like an action movie, but from the bad guys perspective. Mow down people throwing objects at you 90's arcade shooter style, get a high score and the like, basically the most sickening portrayal of the shooting as a power fantasy you can imagine. The other if just people slowly leaving the room that you can shoot at whim, washed out colors, no music, tinny sound, horrible crying and screaming and no challenge whatsoever. Only have the glorified action sequence when you can see a news camera from out of a window. At the end, make a badass-looking scene where the shooter puts the gun to his head, and just before he pulls the trigger, go back to the realistic, depressing style, a brief moment of shock as the trigger is pulled, and show just a dead body and a fade to black.

Id try to come up with ideas for a more abstract, art game way to represent the shooting but honestly, I was saving that for exploring the shooters actual motivations, but...this exercise was way to depressing, and doing that would be the most depressing of all.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

Hypothetically speaking, I'd probably go the Clock Tower route, as well. You're a victim, and you have to find a hiding place. You need to survive, and help others survive, until the shooter is stopped by police.

Barring that, there are two options:
1) A tactical shooter in which the objective is to find and secure the moving targets as fast as possible will minimal casualties. The criminals will shoot anyone they come across. Once you subdue the criminals, either by arresting them, knocking them out or killing them, you have to search the school for every victim to tell them it's safe to leave. After that, you're given the number of people hurt or killed and how long you took to save them.
2) A shooter in which you play as the shooter, but it's not obvious that you're shooting up a school at first. The shooter is highly delusional and tries to rationalize his actions, portraying the innocent people in the building as monsters or enemies that need to be disposed of, and that's what the player sees. Some foes will be submissive and frightened, others will try to resist and others will try to shoot you. Once you are subdues or killed, the player gets to truly see what happened, and portray it in a horrible light. The game would attempt to make a point about all of the senseless violence and glorification of war in video gaming today.

... Actually, despite the backlash it would receive, I think that the last one would be pretty good, if done correctly. I mean, it's not glorifying the school shooting; in fact, it plays on how it's despicable, then it would make a statement about our society's own glorification of violence, Spec Ops: The Line-style. The only issue is that it would be picked on by the media, who would completely miss the point of it, and then flamed by everyone and their mothers.

 

[Yopaz]

I would make sure that it wouldn't show any connection to anything real in order to avoid the moral issues. I don't want to insult those affected by turning it into something that can be entertaining, I can be thought of as disrespectful and blunt, but I have limits.

I would make the game a tense survival horror game where you are playing as one of the potential victims. Hiding from the killer(s), being mostly unable to fight back, but leave that as a last resort option. Let you control a group of people trying to keep as many of them alive, issue orders, change characters, keep them spread out to avoid notice or keep them organized together for strength.

I know this isn't a good idea, but honestly I don't think making a game out of a school shooting is a good angel to start from.

 

[nohorsetown]

You're a special agent/detective, either in a real-world sense or perhaps with added space-magic / divine appointment. There's gonna be a school shooting unless you stop it. Stopping it is weird and complicated.

If that's too simple, or a bit too tangential to what you're asking for, here's a (rather stupid) extrapolation: make the main character one of the school shooters (there are multiple shooters in this scenario), who either was killed by a security guard or committed suicide early in the shooting. You're taken to some kind of afterlife, where you have a change of heart, and you must become the aforementioned magical/divine agent. To redeem yourself, you must manipulate time and space, and learn how to be a more compassionate/sane person. Ultimately, you have to prevent the shooting or mitigate the damage by stopping your fellow shooters (and/or yourself). In the best ending, the shooting never takes place, but your character would probably still die - he's gotta pay a price. In a worse ending, you could save the lives of some people, but others would still die and the root problems wouldn't be solved.

I dunno, tho . . . the whole thing feels pretty trashy, and I think I'd rather just not make a game based around a school shooting.