Inside the Sick Mind of a School Shooter Mod

[Junemastaj]

T

 

[witness51]

... And agreeing with those who stand directly opposed to what you believe in is counter-productive.

It's not about whether or not you agree with it. It's about supporting freedom of speech/expression/etc in all cases, not just those we like. It's not that much of a stretch to think that eventually you'd find yourself in a situation where you're doing something someone else finds equally offensive and asinine. Then you'd be crying a rather different tune. It's fairly simple, either everything is permissible, or nothing is. Any middle ground is nothing more than hypocrisy.

Personally, I find the whole premise repugnant, and I'm certainly never going to touch it. It's a stupid game built on a worse concept, but that should not interfere with the guy's ability to create or distribute it.

You'll have to remember that I said nothing about limiting his speech or the production of his game. I simply stated that that, to agree with him is to disagree with games and gaming as a whole, betraying "us". This man is simply degrating everything that I love. I agree with what you're saying, or rather trying to say, but just because I allow this kind of thing doesn't mean I have to like it.
Anyway, it is 2:00 in the morning and I have better things to do than argue on the internet

 

[xDarc]

So THIS is where the "games are not art" road leads? Consider me a pretentious games-are-art fag then. (Note: Yes, I have actually been called this. I'm now officially proud of it.)

But the dev had a point, they really aren't art- it's all the same trash these days hiding behind less controversial subject material.

Things like this need to happen. Society needs to get to a point where either everything is ok, or nothing is ok. Meaning people finally stop blaming things like crazy kids and/or bad parents on death metal and violent video games.

The need to defend gaming will never go away otherwise. Not until something makes us take a good hard look at it, instead of just using it as a bullshit political football.

 

[uguito-93]

The maps are not based on the any real locations. The only resemblance to real life shooters are the weapons they use.

and does change the fact that its effectively a school shooter simulator? you can try to defend the fact that its all fiction but the first thing that most people will think when they hear about this is Columbine.

Could the same not be said about a WWII game? Or even a modern game like the new Medal of Honor? What about the new Call of Juarez game where you run around modern day Mexico shooting up the place in a drug war?

Theres nowhere in here I'm directly defending the game, I'm simply challenging people to come up with a more effective argument than "Omg horrible twisted how could someone be this sick."

The difference is that WWII happened over 70 years ago where as the highschool shootings have happened over the last 10 years therefore more people feel stronger towards it because it is still relevant to them, also most WWII games paint the protagonists as heroic figures facing a power that the entire world agrees was pure evil. In the new MoH, while it is still a morally sensitive issue, ALL the enemies are trying to gun you down. To my knowledge none of them are unarmed bystanders helplessly running away while you shoot them down. The new call of juarez just looks to me like a franchise trying to jump on the controversy bandwagon to boost sales and should have stayed in an old west setting.

My main arguments against the mod are that it is treating the resent deaths of innocent people as material to make a game that is hugely disrespectful of its subject matter and harmful to the industry.

 

[Dogstile]

I love how you assume I think i'm being a hero by defending his right not be told that he can't mod a game in his own free time.

- which is about shooting up a school based upon real school shootings that happened.

Kinda forgot a few key words there, didn't you?

Yeah, so?

I fail to realise how this affects the victims of the shootings. I fail to realise how this affects anyone except knee jerk reactionists.

At the moment, this would include you, just so you know. Take a step back and think "Does this actually hurt anyone" then tell me i'm wrong again. Because I doubt anyone directly affected by this will be shown it unless someone links them.

Knee jerk reactionalists aren't a thing. Especially seeing how reactionalist isn't a word.

Who's affected by this? Think about this website. Go look at a thread about school bullying. See the amount of people who say if they could get back at their tormentors.

Their affected.

This is no doubt gonna hit the news, they are gonna get the blame. I'm sorry, but I very much dislike insensitive people. It is one thing not to care. Another to disregard humanity entirely.

I know its not a word, but I can't think of the actual one so reactionist is what i'm saying dammit! It gets the point across either way.

And looking at those thread, how many people do you see who said they would actually kill them? How many people argue that its a fantasy they love to play out in their head but can never do in real life?

I'm not disregarding humanity, I just have a higher view of it than you. People are no more affected by games than they are tv, art, books, etc and this website has posted numerous study's proving that.

 

[kingmob]

Pawnstick's mod, while being disgusting in its own right, will do nothing but give ammunition to anti-game activists, joining the ranks of Postal 2 and Manhunt as examples of gaming's moral depravity. Instead of pushing the game industry forward into new and fantastic ways of telling stories, School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 is a huge step back into gaming's flawed adolescence.

Frankly, if you worry about that, then you are not arguing correctly anyway. If you can not accept this game, but are fine with GTA, you are a hypocrite. I'm not saying you should enjoy it, I'm saying it should cause you no distress whatsoever.

Also, gaming isn't a whole and a single game should never be regarded as part of this supposed whole. Worrying that opponents might do just that is counter-productive. You are not in control of what is made, especially not in the mod community. Again, if you worry your arguments are worsened by these games, your arguments are most likely flawed.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

I disagree with everything he is saying and stands for, but I support his right to express himself.

Even though he makes me sick. His views about what games are does nothing but hurt the way people look at gamers, and in addition to being damaging, such opinions are outright wrong. I think I'm sick of people that try to be "edgy" when it's obviously just for its own sake. Either have a point and some kind of artistic vision, or get away from the paintbrush, son.

 

[ZombieGenesis]

Way to go, fucknuts. You've confirmed that there DOES need to be limitations on creativity in this medium. You've successfully ruined everything good artists fight for.

 

[Alexnader]

snip

snip

First of all thank you for disagreeing and being civil something I personally failed at.

Secondly I have to admit I had never thought of it from that point of view and from that point of view you are correct. However I do think that the game has some use, as he mentioned in the interview this has the chance to relieve stress and potentially prevent these events from happening. It may also hammer home the point to some people that school shootings are horrible and if you think someone is going to commit one you should report them.

However your original point still stands that his intent is to make slaughter of children fun which I agree is awful. But it does have a chance to do some good (and I agree it does look like arse).

Thanks, I would agree that these acts do have a cathartic effect. I have gone on a 20 minute rampage in AC2 killing everything in sight because I failed a particular mission like 5 times in a row for stupid reasons. Of course without that therapy I still wouldn't have hauled off and killed anyone but it may have stopped me from punching a wall so I guess if something tipped a crazy guy off the edge he may well just waste a bunch of digital people rather than real ones. However he'd have to have terrible taste.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

Signed up because of this thread.

To all of the people saying how sick and twisted it is: Ever play Grand Theft Auto? You can shoot innocent people, cops, and have sex with hookers. How about Modern Warfare 2? You run into an airport with a heavy machine gun and shoot innocent Russian citizens. Hell, there are pools of blood everywhere and you can execute people as they attempt to crawl away. Kane & Lynch? Rob banks, kill hostages, cops, etc etc.

- Snip -

Didn't you know? You can't criticize the heavy-weights like Rockstar or Activision! Apparently, when a game has so much support from their fans and have a multi-million dollars PR team the game suddenly has a "higher" purpose and are untouchable! People don't like it when we hate on their favourite games! On the other hand, it's much easier to viciously attack modder and independent teams because they lack support regardless of how relevant the message in the game they develop is!

Oh come on. You're not seriously comparing a school shooting simulation to GTA, MW2 and Kane and Lynch, are you? Alright, let's debunk that nonsense now:

GTA: Unless you're talking about serious, brown GTA4, GTA has always been fairly cartoony and arcade-focused. The characters in the game very obviously aren't "innocent" civilians. In Vice City civilians will steal your car, beat you up, shoot you and insult you. They are designed to be massive jerks so you want to punch them, run over them, etc. Often they are members of gangs. I'm not saying there are no similarities, but GTA is hardly a innocent people murder simulator. There's so much more to the game than just killing. Not so with this mod.

Kane and Lynch: See, the big thing about Kane and Lynch (the original) is a little something called artistic vision. From the sound of things, this mod is about killing innocents and eventually yourself. Whatever. Kane and Lynch sets out to tell an unflinching story of true crime and believable, irredeemable characters. It recreates in detail scenes from excellent crime movies like Heat and Collateral. If Kane and Lynch was nothing but killing innocents (very tiny part of the game which is totally optional for you to actually do), then yeah, I would have a problem with it. But it isn't. The violence doesn't exist in a vacuum the way it does in this mod. Context can make all the difference.

As for MW2, whatever. I'm not going to defend it because I haven't played it. I hear they made some attempts to contextualize the situation, though.

I still admit this guy has the right to express himself, and I support that, but at the same time I wish he would grow up and realize there is controversy worth fighting for, and stupid adolescent nonsense. This is the latter.

 

[Ghengis John]

This is why you cannot flatly defend all video games as art. Because some f them are just so darned indefensible. Just like movies, it's some not all.

 

[beddo]

Who is the intended audience of this mod?

[...]Ideally, gamers who accept that video games shouldn't be particularly deep or insightful[...]

Clearly this 'developer', pawnstick has no idea about what games can be.


This group has made a game for the sole intention of creating controversy and showing games in their worst light. The problem is that these developers, like those who berate gaming fail to separate the medium from its content.

Literature can be just as vile and vulgar as games can be, thus far it has been shown to be much more so. Then again it can be so powerful as to dislodge entire governments, change cultures and beliefs or form the basis of an entire country, just look at the US Constitution or Darwin's Origin of Species.

As game development becomes more accessible we will see an increase in both the great and the vile application. It just so happens that creating vile content is a much quicker, cheaper and easier way to get attention than creating positive, culture shifting content.

 

[Levethian]

What do we know about his 'preventative' argument - that providing aggravated students with a game like this might help satisfy their urge instead of actually performing them?

Similar arguments could be made for pornography and their prevention of sex attacks.

I don't imagine this argument holds up under psychological critique & analysis, but what do we think about it?

 

[hooksashands]

"Don't forget to check out my other mod, College Rapist 2012: Full Penetration"

 

[shadowmagus]

As someone on the first page commented, call me a games-are-art fag, but I think we as gamers are better then this. I am not going to argue that he does not have the right to make this mod, if this is what his studio wants to create, fine. I will argue though, that as a developer (and I would hope, a gamer) he and his development team would only see the bad influence this would have on games as a whole. Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean you should, or that it's in good taste.

 

[Trolldor]

He should make this mod specfically because people are railing against it.

Society needs to learn how to approach these things, and that is not through mass outrage and demands for special rules or laws to accomodate their sensibilities.

The mod won't contribute to violence or promote school shootings. Anybody who thinks they themselves would not be swayed to mimic based on the game alone should not presume the same of anybody else.

Are 'we' as a community better than this?
No, we aren't. We play GTA to run over pedestrians as he rightly points out.
Someone, somewhere, figured out that you could kill prostitutes and get your money back.
We play Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and even pretentious yet ultimately unfulfilling games like Myst. We spend hours on apps and gimmicky little things like Angry Birds and Farmville (fuck your elitism, they're games and people invest more time in to them than you have in your mediocre library as a whole). We are, as a whole, in to dull bland mindless grinds. Repetition. Just like in films and with books, the market for a rich and complex tale is vastly outweighed by the market for cheap laughs and crude violence.

We need people to make things like this, specifically so society can learn how to grow-up, be adults and ignore them.
I don't know how people can invest so much time in to being outraged.

 

[adderseal]

Do the people who use the Fallout 3 mod to allow the killings of the Little Lamplight inhabitants think School Shooter is sickening? I'm just curious.

 

[GotMalkAvian]

1. Pawnstick is a major tool. "Ejoocashunal games suk lolol!" He's obviously trying to make a name for himself as a programmer and has chosen the Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton/Jersey Shore tactic of just being a tool without doing anything artistically redeeming.

2. Video games now have their own equivalent of straight to DVD horror movies or the American Pie series.

3. Judging by the overwhelmingly negative responses to this story, I'm pretty sure that the community will weed morons like this out on our own. This isn't the first time that someone has made a game this controversial (ever try the JFK assassination simulator?), and they're always just a flash in the pan.

4. Call me jaded, but how exactly is a school shooting worse than anything else in video games? We regularly play games that deal with drug use and abuse, slavery, gratuitous sadistic violence, theft, (mass) murder, and genocide, yet this is somehow the line that we can't cross? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[CatmanStu]

This is what you get if you take the intelligence and humour out of South Park. Something that is only insulting in so much as it's a Neanderthal pandering to a narrow minded idea of what gamers want.

At best - idealism wrapped up in poor concept and design;
At worst - a poor product being "advertised" with the lowest form of cynical propaganda.

I wonder if this person works for the EA marketing dept.

 

[GotMalkAvian]

We play Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and even pretentious yet ultimately unfulfilling games like Myst.

Wait... So, CoD and WoW are somehow fulfilling, yet a puzzle-solving game with a storyline isn't? Okay, sure.