Imagine a game that starts up, you're walking with a big group of people getting on a dark train. All you can see is just snow covered countryside through the slits in the train. People are scared, children are crying, and everyone on board has these bright yellow stars on their coats. The train stops, a guy speaking German aiming a machine gun at the group motions for you to exit. All of this is in first person by the way, that sort of free roam Half Life first person where if you want to walk off you can, but here if you do that you're shot in the back. This scenario continues until you see people stripped and marched into showers, where gas comes out and just kills everybody around you and as you fall to the ground grasping upwards, you're supposed to feel this immense shock at "holy shit, this happened."

If you're an asshole, you might laugh at a scene like this in a game. Otherwise, you'll be completely broken spirited by this, as if a nuke had gone off and killed your squad of dudes right in front of you or you, just like in real life, perpetrate crimes against humanity in an airport killing civilians on a massive scale? The world is a scary place, so why can't as an extension of this our evolution of action movies contain scary situations like this? Even for just historical purposes or to give us some sort of emotional connection or better understanding of horrific events.

I'm surprised Call of Duty hasn't tried a scene like that. As World War 2 guns blazing as those games were, why the fuck didn't they ever have you find concentration camps? Oh that was too ugly and horrifying to talk about in a video game? But I can kill Hitler with a rocket launcher, that's ok? What if it was a more recent dictator like Moammar Gadhafi or Saddam? Is that ok?

The scene is your in the dessert, just tending to your heroin fields as a farmer. You're told to walk to the street and buy something, apples, milk, or I know, medicine for your sick child. So you walk down a road towards town, and as you walk through the crowded street a plane flies by dispensing a colorless & odorless gas and you watch as a few hundred people just fall down. Havok physics would make this as floppy bodied as possible, which would be comical sure, but hey, this actually happened in my life time. Halabaja isn't talked about all that often, but it fucking happened. As if that isn't bad enough, the story could even get worse.

I bring all this up, because I watched a documentary about a game I played a few years ago, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Have you heard of that game? It isn't really a "game," but an RPG maker project a guy made and put on a website. The difference between an actual game and a thing some guy made is lost on any mass media coverage of video games.



It wasn't a very good RPG Maker game anyway, I should know, I made my own game Bonerquest using the same program another joker did. Both our games were in bad taste, but Columbine actually has some victims still alive. People knew those people that were killed. Any crime spiderwebs out in ways no one ever notices, especially something like that that everybody my age, 24, should be well aware of. Schools suddenly became dangerous places we could be shot to death at, but that isn't the point. The point is, it was a rather comical idea that actually presented the material with some thought behind it. I didn't like that they included Marylin Manson CDs as a thing the two kids liked, they hated him. They were fans of KMFDM and Rammstien, like me.

That's the scary thing about Columbine, they were just a couple dudes into monster movies, heavy metal, and video games. They were us.

I'm not surprised people freaked out over it. The doc I watched was pretty poorly made, with lots of talking heads and it actually presents Kotaku as a valid news source which is hilarious. Presenting Fox News as actual news is rough, but Kotaku? You might as well present our a random your the man now dog as evidence of some online conspiracy theory, which actually happened in a thread I can't find now a guy was laughing because his page made it on the History channel.

The scary part of the documentary is bringing up a Canadian school shooting, where it just so happened that this guy on his vampire freaks profile listed his favorite games as including Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Without even seeing news coverage, as I quit the documentary around that point due to a power outage, I could hear the news stories. "Killer practices with video game!" People are so stupid. The game features the two kids killing each other and going to hell an fighting demons from DOOM. It was typical internet humor, but the dude who made it included enough material to make it actually a valid exploration of the Columbine killers. He shows flashbacks of them doing school plays together and spending quiet moments together, the type of thing exploitation movies like Elephant did.



A game like that is a joke. It isn't even really a game. Newgrounds, a popular flash game website has all kinds of offensive games. Any schools hooting or terrifying world event worth making jokes about has a game there. It happens. We can laugh at these things as being outrageous, we can get offended and bothered by them for existing, but can we stop people from making things like this? No. People love tragedy. We fixate on it like nothing else. There are things that happened to me and you that we will never forget. Events that are seared into our memories as time capsule of horror that we'll never escape. But hey, games are way to explore these expressions the same as movies or books.

How many adaptations of Anne Frank's diary have their been? How many of those took a humorous angle to the story where she becomes a frankenstien monster and kills Hitler? Would you watch a movie where that happened? Would you play the video game and be Anne Frankenstien smashing through concentration camps and zapping nazis wit electricity powers? I would. I'd find that hilarious and cathartic. We're all after catharsis, that escape feeling. Playing the scenes of Columbine where the two kids go to hell and fight DOOM monsters is funny, but I wonder, could that actually inspire a kid to go try that?

If I start arguing like that, I have to bring up religion. How many people are killed because of religion? How many wars are fought in the name of things from thousands of years ago? And how many genocides?

The scene in a game I picture, is an easy one to describe. The year is nineteen ninety nine, you own an arcade that just moved locations and is thriving somehow in that time period. You're a fun guy whose got a lot of friends. As you live your life, someone gives you a blow up doll that you hang up on your living room wall as a goof. Your friends come over all get a laugh out of it. As you continue managing your business, weird things keep happening to you. Your brake line in your car was slit one day and you don't know why. Some threatening phone messages are left on your answering machine, these will be inadmissible in court for some reason as well, remember that. Then one late night, you get stabbed to death in an alley way. As a ghost, you get to witness your murderer get a slap on the wrist with a manslaughter charge, despite stabbing you relentlessly to death.

Just a knife.


This actually happened. I can remember standing on my porch with my mother on the phone, I was about to walk down tot he bus stop. It was January. I can still hear her crying when I close my eyes and her wailing about it. The realization that my cousin, whom I looked up to like a big brother was dead, murdered, it hit like a sack of bricks to the face. I'll never be over it. Especially since the guy who killed him, totally free. He's alive and well totally gets to enjoy his life, free to go beating off and playing Call of Duty all night. I know in my soul that this is it, that existence is some sort of cosmic accident, but I really want to believe in religious ideas. This goes beyond video games or anything else, this is me and you reader, we're having an experience right now the two of us.

I know that everything is a joke. I try to laugh at everything. If we can't laugh at tragedy how will we ever get over it? The whole, "too soon" followed by a laugh always makes people feel better about laughing at things. Remember the whole tsunami from last year, the one that may very well have caused a nuclear meltdown? How many jokes did you make about it? I know I made a couple. Gilbert Godfrey made some that got him in trouble. I really do feel terrible about what happened there, but if we can't laugh what can we do. Dale was in that shit at Cheapy D's house, which brings it home in a way that is just terrifying. I don't know either of them personally, but I'm sure I've interacted with them online more than once. I've just become aware of a Japanese company that localizes video games through their podcast, 8-4, and to hear how slippery civilization actually is can be crippling. Then there are stories like this that come out that I just can't find anything funny at all in, because it isn't funny. It is about as bad as genocide in my mind. How do you fix irradiated baby milk?

The line between grotesque and kitsch is a fine one, and I walk that line with my humor. I'm a dark guy. I'll bring up death and murder all the time. Who among us hasn't made a Dahmer joke at some point? Who hasn't laughed at other peoples misery? The whole country seems to think Mike Tyson is hilarious now, despite his troubles. I'm a big Mike fan from when I was a kid, and knowing the horror he's gone through makes his comedy career so much better. He's going to be smelling like a rose in the publics eye forever now. I know the ultimate, Michael Jackson. He very well may have fucked kids. How can we not make fun of him and his fake nose and his weird noises and grabbing his dick in that one video twenty years ago? I can't not laugh at that.

But too tsunami is a thing. We can't laugh at something the day of. Weeks or years later, then we can laugh about it and everything is great.



The video game starts with you on an airplane. Your phone rings. You seen our hand come up with it as you look around at the plane full of people getting meals and just being people on a sky bus. Your wife tells you she loves you, that your unborn child loves you. Then a couple of dudes with box cutters jump up and take over the plane. She's just flipped on MTV and told you how Ja Rule is speaking about two planes hitting in New York. Your voice whispers into the phone that you'll have to do something about this, that you have to stop this. In first person style, you approach and jump a guy, bashing his head into the floor. Let's give it Shenmue quick timer style gameplay, since thats a popular thing to put in a video game. You take the knife that guy had and throw it into another guys eyeball. Unfortunately, that was the guy flying the plane and now you sit in the pilots seat, desperately trying to flip switches as you see Pennslyvania form beneath the view screen.

Why that video game hasn't been made, I don't know.

That was one of those things. It was a normal Tuesday, I was playing cards with a kid named Rodney in High School. My Math teacher rushes in, tells our teacher to turn on his radio. Nine eleven was happening with a dude who sounded like Raymond Burr describing it. The experience felt like I was in Godzilla, listening to him describe this event to me. I heard as the second plane hit, live on air. It was a real life horror movie. My only thought was to compare it to Godzilla. The class bell rings, I go to my Match class. A guy who would die in a car wreck two years later comes in brazenly yelling, "lets kill some fucking towel heads!" It never occurred to the man on the radio that this was an attack, but this guy, I think his name was Jerry but he went by J.R. was yelling about it. I was scared, but I kept trying to make jokes and be calm. About twenty minutes later, school got let out early. I walked home and sat on my front porch, as I didn't have a key to get in. I sat and thought about what just happened. I had no jokes. I had no material at all. I was floored.

But then, ten years later, I bring it up in a user blog for you guys to read. A video game where you sit in a classroom playing black jack and suddenly nine eleven happens on the radio could be a thing right? Would that be too much? Including the dumb asshole who wants to compare it to Godzilla attacking, is that too much? Maybe the scene in my version of the Pennsylvania thing where you Jack Baur a knife into a mans eyeball is too much? I was pretty graphic there, I never saw that movie they made or remember all the details exactly, so I turned it into an action movie where you shoulder roll around and kill bad guys. I editorialized it, but should we as people do that? The way our memories work and how we change or add details that weren't there. I'd like to think if I was there, I'd jump over the seat and knock a guy out. Marky Mark got in trouble for saying what every bodies thinking, "what would you do, in that situation?" A video game would let us play out that very situation, saving the day like we all wished we could.

We can laugh about JFK's murder, because people my age are so far removed from it, but if I was fifty five I probably wouldn't have found JFK reloaded a fascinating game. You attempt to prove the warren commission correct, or in actuality, see what wacky results happen when you shoot a world with super floppy bodies in this one scenario over and over and over. I was unsuccessful at proving the commission right, but I could totally shoot Jackie's hat off and land it on JFK.




As a direct result of everything that happened that day, a couple guys I was close with now has confirmed kills from his time in the Middle East. People I know, killed other men. It wasn't a bad thing either, we should celebrate them as heroes, shouldn't we? Any other situation other than war, murder isn't something celebrated at all. I don't think it should be for war either. The story I heard about somebody I was close to, was that while standing in the middle of a town a guy ran up with a grenade screaming and my cousin, whom I'd played army men and G.I. Joes with as a kid, picked up his rifle and stabbed this man with a bayonet. Soon as he got back to the states, he moved away from his parents and everyone that knew him, like we'd be ashamed to find that out. I'm proud of him. He saved his team of guys who hadn't noticed this screaming asshole rushing them, but what was the story of that guy he eighty sixed? How do you not have dreams about doing that after it happens?



I feel awful about the world, but if we can't make jokes or try to learn from past experiences what can we do? We've all heard about army virtual reality simulators, Full Spectrum Warrior was based off of one of those programs. I'm curious to see where that goes in the future. Simulated warfare scenarios are totally a real thing, and what effect does that have on people playing them? I wonder if my cousin being an owner of the Atari Jaguar and actually owning a copy of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game that I played at his house ever enters his mind? My other friend with confirmed kills flipped out completely from the war. Last I saw him, he was farther gone than anybody I'd ever seen, but when I brought up video games he was able to talk about playing them in his down time. A soldier I talked to online explained to me the importance of playing Call of Duty and Gears of War in his downtime, that it somehow took the edge of of real war. I was shaken to my very core by that.

I'm still expecting holodeck like gaming to be a thing sooner than later. Strange Days had that idea of living other peoples memories, but simulating their last moments in a video game context would let you change things. I've always said if my cousin had been a gun owner and not a pacifist, he would be alive and I'd be hanging out with him right now telling pussy stories and laughing about aids, but he's dead. He was a good man who was never into violence. I for one am a gun owner. I don't like the thought that somebody could just stab me to death and I've not got protection. Something my father said about guns, "never aim one at somebody unless you really want to kill them." That always stuck with me, and I've never aimed a gun at anybody.

It bothers me that video games are blamed for violence. There are some really gross games that exist out there made by racists and extremist groups for propaganda purposes, their very existence make me stick.

That's it.

I love you guys.