"The Last Temptation of Christ." "Do the Right Thing." "Kids." "Irreversible." These are some of the most controversial and polarizing films of the last two decades. And all of them played at prestigious film festivals like Cannes, Venice or Sundance before their subsequent theatrical releases. Film festival organizers are generally free speech absolutists; the Cannes Film Festival, for example, was created in response to the meddling of the fascist governments in Italy and Germany in the selection of films for the 1938 Venice Film Festival. So it came as something of a shock last night to read an exclusive Kotaku report that the Slamdance Film Festival had pulled Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the finalist pool for its Guerilla Gamemaker Competition.
Super Columbine Massacre RPG creator Danny Ledonne told Kotaku that the manager of the games competition informed him that some of the festival's backers had withdrawn their financial support of Slamdance because of the game's inclusion, and that in order for the festival to survive, Ledonne's game would have to be pulled. While we sympathize with the pressures that Slamdance executives are under, it's almost impossible to imagine that a festival bold enough to show movies like "Neo Ned" (a fictional romance between a neo-Nazi and a black woman who believes that she's Adolf Hitler reincarnated), or "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" (a documentary about a Auschwitz survivor's decision to forgive her former oppressors) would have knuckled under so easily if the object of its backers' ire was not a game, but rather a film like Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" or Gus Van Sant's "Elephant."
Slamdance's cowardice, then, is of a piece with the controversies that greeted the "Hot Coffee" mod in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as well as the company's more recent title, Bully. Simply put, the average person believes that videogames are solely intended for kids; that the content of all games is suitable for kids; and if it isn't, it darned well should be, even if it has an M-rating. This creates a double-edged sword for game creators and publishers. Because videogames have the revenues of Hollywood's box office but a cultural (in)visibility that's much more similar to that of comic books, creators can work freely, in relative obscurity compared to artists in other fields, while still earning a good deal of money. That is, until a game is perceived to have crossed a line or pushed a hot button, at which point, all hell breaks loose.
This is a recipe for the continued infantilizing of a young medium whose potential, for all of the compelling works already released, still remains largely untapped. We haven't played Super Columbine Massacre RPG, but from what we've read, it strikes us as a fairly serious and well-intentioned attempt to grapple with the shootings and suicides through an interactive medium. And while we certainly recognize that many will see SCMRPG as ghoulish, offensive and trivializing of a horrific event, we reject the premise that it is inherently so--any more than Art Spiegelman's "Maus" or Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"--and any attempts to paint Ledonne's game as inherently so should be firmly and loudly repudiated. For those of us who care about the future of videogames, this is a time to stand up and be counted.
