Bogost Challenges Industry to Produce Sensitive Tasteful V-Tech Game

Gamasutra’s Ian Bogost has a rather thoughtful if disturbing article on the Virginia Tech massacre and the game that it inspired. Bogost, a university professor,  explores the reasons behind making such a game. He discusses Ryan Lambourn’s V-Tech Rampage  – which has been described as insensitive and in poor taste. Many have compared it to the game spawned from the Columbine incident LeDonne’s Super Columbine Massacre RPG (SCMRPG). Bogost claims that the games are only superficially alike.

While SCMRPG portrayed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s lives in researched detail, depicting the events of the Columbine massacre as the tragic outcome of two complex and misunderstood lives, V-Tech Rampage focuses on the acts of killing over the killer’s motives. While SCMRPG defamiliarizes murder by rendering it in RPG form, V-Tech Rampage encourages fast-fingered triggering.

He goes on to describe LeDonne as having “thoughtfully and convincingly connected his game with the personal effects Columbine on his life.” V-Tech Rampage provides a different insight into Lambourne character leaving one to wonder whether the disturbing quotes from the victims before they are snuffed are his idea off tasteless jokes or a cry for help from an unstable and possibly deeply troubled individual.

The root of the problem is that these video games are an attempt to interpret and deal with horrific events. Bogost accuses the big names in video games of avoiding hot button issues like these that need to addressed.

So I hereby issue a challenge to the videogame industry: to create a videogame about the Virginia Tech tragedy. One worthy of reflection. One that captures the event’s despair as well as much as its brutality. One that the public can respect even if it makes them uncomfortable.

He believes that a game could respectfully approach the factors that make up this tragedy. Hard questions could be explored, such as if the faculty could have recognized a student on the edge and what intervention could have been done within the structure of University politics. Whether Cho’s parents affected his choice by their actions or inaction. Could a security lockdown have actually helped the situation and how would you go about placing security for a large, open environment such as a university.

To answer these questions and more, Bogost issues a challenge to the game industry to “care about this tragic event enough to want to try to make sense of it, as best we are able, in our own medium.”