A Brave Failure

This game aspires to be art, and art is fundamentally an act of communication. Therefore, my primary interest in playing it was to experience what it had to communicate. To my disappointment, I quickly found that the little communication contained in this piece is sparingly interspersed between long periods of gameplay.

And this gameplay is nothing to write home about. It's a simplistic dungeon crawler, aimless and devoid of challenge. It doesn't require skill, it doesn't require thought, and, most pertinently for a game that aspires to be art, it doesn't involve emotion. Whatever emotions it manages to stir stem from the fact that you are reenacting the slaughter of innocent children. This did cause me to experience revulsion and nausea at first. Those were my reactions when I first played Syndicate and accidentally killed innocent bystanders. But when I got used to it in Syndicate, I found the gameplay entertaining, if nothing else. When I got used to it in this game, I honestly couldn't think of a reason why it was made a game and not a movie.

Almost everything that is good about this game is in the categories of setting, representation and characterization - all areas where linear media excel, and interactive media lag behind. It's not an amazing feat to invoke horror when you're depicting a horrific event of which your audience has direct memories. Still, there is craft evident in the designer's musical and graphical choices, and especially in the text, images and situations that make up the cutscenes. No such craft is evident in the design of the game mechanics. In fact, I was so frustrated by the meaninglessness of the gameplay that I stopped playing halfway through the game. Although by that point I had given up on it as an interactive experience, I was still interested to see and hear what SCMRPG had to communicate, so I watched a play-through of it on Google Video.

And this game attempts to communicate quite a lot: An invitation to look at the world through the fantasies of the two killers. A zooming in on those portions of their anger and hate which were justified, being the result of deep, troubling issues within our society. A lucid look at these issues which was beyond the two killers' intellectual abilities. What issues? That we are hypocrites, that we are cruel, that we are mindless drones. That we have declared war on those two killers by disowning them, by attempting to efface their individuality and smother their self-esteem, and that they had fought back the only way they knew.

On the one hand, this is hardly a trivializing or exploitative treatment of the subject matter - the accusations to that effect, and the actions which they have instigated, are two inches short of bigotry. On the other hand, it appears to me to be as simplistic as those other interpretations of the Columbine Massacre which the game itself showers with scorn. "The System" is the easiest of targets, being unable to speak for itself, and hated by all because it affords complete freedom to none. This game under-emphasizes the fact that the "system-less" life its protagonists desire has been lived through by countless generations. Nowhere does it mention that this life amounted to one Columbine Massacre after another, and that our system, for all its hideous flaws, is our only protection against that kind of life.

We might claim that this game has been successful as an act of communication, simply because it has stirred so much discussion. Then again, as Costik rightly asserts, the main reason for the commotion was that it is a game that tackles a serious subject, regardless of how successfully it does so. But even if it is a successful act of communication, it is certainly not a successful game, because none of its communication is done through gameplay. If a film critic were able to transcend the controversy and give this game a fair try, he'd probably say: "that's an interesting satirical cartoon you got there, but why are there so many long, irrelevant breaks in the story, and why do I have to keep pressing keys in order to watch it?" If this is really the flagship of art-oriented gaming, we are in deep artistic trouble. But we already knew that.

A final thought: This game, like most others, and like many films, is extremely violent. We seem to assume that such violence is acceptable when it is part of a work of art, but "bad taste" when it is merely entertainment. I submit that, with few exceptions, extreme violence in a work of art is ineffective except as fan service, and this is as true of SCMRPG as it is of the lyrics in Bach's St. Matthew Passion. I believe there are more than a few people whose interest in this game is motivated chiefly by the opportunity it offers them to act out their murderous fantasies under the guise of a tasteful artistic experience.