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Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting is an interview with Danny Ledonne about Super Columbine Massacre RPG and the Kimveer Gill incident. Thanks to Robert’s comment on my previous entry for pointing to this.

I’m of two minds reading this interview. On the one hand Danny Ledonne seems sincere and thoughtful, on the other hand, he doesn’t really explain why he had to create a game about Columbine just because it was such an important event. Probably like most of us he had mixed intentions (and didn’t think to hard about them in the moment) and now is trying to justify what he did retrospectively. Ultimately, of course, all he did was create a game, not shoot anyone, so lets not confuse levels of responsibility. That said, it seems that everyone who wants to justify their creations resorts to claims about deeper messages that are overlooked.

On Friday I attended the first Canadian Game Studies Association meeting at York University. It was organized by Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell.

In the morning I heard two great papers, Martin Picard spoke on “Machinima: the New ‘Machinations’ Behind Video Games.” One question raised was how machinima is different from animation and what does it have to do with games. The second paper by Derek Noon, “Sneaking Mission: Technoculture and Metal Gear Solid” was a short documentary on Metal Gear Solid prepared for a media studies class at Western. The documentary showed how MGS played with the fourth wall, addressing the player (as player) and raising questions about what was real or not in the game.

In the afternoon there was a workshop on “Cooperating With AI” organized by Bernard Perron, Bart Simon, Carl Therrien, and Dominic Arsenault. Simon started the workshop talking about how the others we play against are designed to lose and to make us feel superior. Often they are not really controlled by what a computer scientist would call AI – they are often scripted to seem intelligent enough. Perron and others showed short video clips of game play and collaboration between the player and buddies. Perron pointed out how, if the design works, you really form an attachment to the buddy AI that collaborates with you.