Danny Ledonne - Playing Columbine: A Retrospective Discussion

After watching the screening of Danny Ledonne’s film Playing Columbine, I was interested in attending his lecture to hear what he had to say about it and his game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I’m not some advocate of non-violent games nor do I promote violence in games, I’m merely looking into what this whole deal is about. Personally, in regards to shootings and the kids involved, all blame should rest on the parents for raising a screwed up kid – but that’s just my opinion, and it is of course just one of millions voiced by people out there in the world. There are people who may agree with me, many who do not, and still more who don’t even care what I think. This is the nature of controversy and the reason why Danny made his film and why he gives these talks; to inform people of the reason behind creating his game.

Speaking of the game –I’ve never even played it. Even after meeting Danny at GDC this past year and learning about it I never freed up any time to check it out. Not because I don’t want to, not because I think it’s sick, I just simply never got around to it. So seeing his movie was a step in that direction, as one of its main purposes is to inform people who have heard about the game, who have heard about what it’s based on and who have formulated their own opinions without ever even playing it. After explaining the goal of his movie, Danny talked about the one question that journalists ask him the most often, which is why he would ever create a game about Columbine.

Living in Colorado, Danny was in high school when the Columbine attack took place. As with everyone else in the nation, it had a profound effect on him, more so in some cases because of his proximity to it. Back then, just before the turn of the century, the Internet wasn’t the great blogsphere that it is today and Danny quickly found that he didn’t have much of a voice for his views on the attack. Originally, his plan was to create a film on the subject, but then he discovered RPG Maker.

RPG Maker was what introduced Danny to the realm of game development, and as he played around with it and discovered its strong narrative qualities, he came upon the realization that he could use this to tell a story. From here he asked himself “what kind of story would I want to tell?” Thinking back to his idea of a video on Columbine, he realized that here was a free alternative to producing a film, which is costly. The additional interactive qualities of RPG Maker led him to realize he could put the player inside the minds of Harris and Klebold, which wasn’t easy at first since information about what they did and what they said and how they did it was scarce for years. So over time he collected information that led to the game Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, released in 2005.

The initial reaction to the release of the game was meager. In the time it took for things to hit the fan, Danny moved on and went back to video production, doing a project on homeless people for a local shelter and blind bird watchers in South Texas who could identify birds by sound alone. Diversifying his media background, he wasn’t relying or even anticipating the game to propel him into the public spotlight the way it did. He got a few emails saying “this is disgusting” and a few emails saying “this is interesting” and that was it, and that was all he thought it would be.

Soon however that started to change, as more and more people began to hear about the game and play it, the emails quickly became worse and worse. Things soon built to a point where Danny began to seriously question the decision to leave the game online saying he realized that “I stand to gain nothing, but I stand to lose a lot”. Litigation fears, pressure on his boss at the time to let him go – these were just some of the things that were accumulating against him and making him wonder if, despite his reason for creating this game, the price was just too high. Despite advice from people saying the game did send a message and shouldn’t be taken offline, it wasn’t until he received the email from Roger Kovacs (a friend of one of the Columbine victims) saying he should remove the game and apologize for its creation that he decided “I have reasons for making this – there was a cause, however pretentious it might be in some people’s eyes, for doing this and if I really believed in that, then I needed to stand on my own two feet and say why.”

This decision led him to finally reveal his identity, after giving numerous interviews anonymously. His hope was that the media, finally uncovering his true identity, would run with the story for a short time and move on, which didn’t happen as his going public only gave new fuel to dissenters. While anonymous, people would call him a “coward” and having “no backbone to support your design decisions”. After going public, he was suddenly a “media whore” and someone who “just wanted attention from everyone” so he learned early on that there was just no way to win with some people.

Danny knew that “you don’t make a video game like this, and then just say ‘no comment’” and that in the end he had brought this down upon himself. As the media attention began to peak, Ryan Lambourn created a game based on the Virginia Tech rampage called V-Tech Rampage. Demanding donations in order for him to take the game down and post an apology, and telling the media to “go fuck themselves”, Danny realized that he had a chance to leverage his own media attention and polarize his stance against Lambourn’s in taking time to talk to the media and talk with people about his game and why it was made.

Soon after he began talking with the media and the public, Danny realized the core value of the game he created, which was that “at least for some people, it’s an entry point to talk about a difficult or uncomfortable subject matter and it does so with the framework of videogames in mind.” He also believes that as game creation becomes easier, as more tools like RPG Maker allow people to express themselves, we’re going to see a lot more games that convey a serious message.

Danny is continuing to work on his film, which he started this August and doesn’t plan to finish until January or February of next year. You can learn more about the game and its controversy on the website dedicated to it still maintained by Danny. The film also has a website dedicated to it. If you’re interested in learning more about this controversy, those are two great places to start.

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