http://kotaku.com/171966/columbine-survivor-talks-about-columbine-rpg

“I think that ultimately a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression,” says Brian Crecente, a victim who was paralyzed from the chest down after being shot by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! offers a retelling of the Columbine Massacre by using what Bogost calls an ‘operational reality’.  The videogame recreates the Columbine shooting in a 16-bit world, holding onto the historical record as tightly as possible (including even the dialogue about God in the library), and forces its players to take the role and perspective of the gunmen.  As controversial as it initially sounds, however, the videogame offers a lot of insight on the Columbine shootings.  It allows its players to not only learn more about the event, but also about why it happened and why Eric and Dylan felt the way they did—a perspective that is hard to sympathize in other mediums.

Brian Crecente agrees, Brian talks about how the game can get people talking about the Columbine shooting again without ‘glamourizing’ the tragic event (questionable).  My favorite idea from Brian is, “You play as these cartoonish characters doing horrible things but the impact gets sort of lost after a while.  Until of course, you actually see what really happened.”  Brian talks about how the game introduces real life photographs after the gunmen killed themselves in the game; the player is taken out of a fictional realm and put into an exactly similar realistic realm—effectively showing the players what their cartoon characters have actually done in real life.  Brian lists many other interesting perspectives on the game that I did not expect from a Columbine victim, especially after seeing the responses from a similar game, JFK Reloaded.