Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography

Introduction and Methods

Here, I consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and the marginal video computer game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (which stands for Role Playing Game). How popular is GTA? Following the release of GTA 4, more than 114 million copies of the series had sold, generating more than US$3 billion in sales (Kushner, 2012). GTA 5, released in 2013, had sold 33 million units by May 2014, generating nearly US$2 billion in sales (Thier, 2014). How marginal is Super Columbine Massacre RPG!? The game was roundly criticized in newspaper articles and condemned by family members of the Columbine victims (Vargas, 2006). Its maker, who initially wanted to remain anonymous, also reported receiving regular death threats after the games’ release (Chaplin, 2007). The popularity of the game is difficult to track as Super Columbine Massacre RPG! has no sales figures—it is available as a free download from the website of its creator, Danny Ledonne (see www.columbinegame.com).

After this introduction, I will first discuss the GTA series, describing the origin of the game and its features. I then consider my reactions to the games and, using the work of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, I think about how individual game play involves my mental integration into a virtual environment promoting values such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. I overview Anita Sarkeesian’s critical analysis of such games designed to promote consciousness-raising over these games’ sexist elements, and then I consider how some game players threatened to kill Sarkeesian and to attack venues where she was to speak. Such extreme reactions to Sarkeesian’s criticism, then, belie the idea that such games are “just games.”

I next explain the game Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, an unusual game because it allows players to play a virtual (albeit simplistic) reenactment of the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999, as one of the killers. I discuss my own cognitive dissonance while playing this game, one designed to deconstruct and problematize the relationship between violent video games and culture, particularly focused on a real mass murder like the shootings at Columbine. I close the essay by considering how video games like GTA today might involve escapism, but that games like Super Columbine Massacre RPG! might promote critical thinking about and awareness of games in a Median sense, as abstract stages for considering how we want to be in the world.

By discussing the GTA series and Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and my reactions to them, I hope to write about deeper theoretical concerns beyond either mass media emphasis on stories concerning direct causal connections between such games and violent acts (particularly mass shootings by teenagers and young adults in the United States), or debates concerning the rights of a video game creator to develop and sell violent, “anti-social” video games. The extreme reactions to both games that I discuss here reveal such games as popular, potent forces in our culture, and as forces that deserve direct sociological theorizing and attempts at cultural sense making. I eschew a reductionist analysis of these games, instead of focusing on my own sense making of and reactions to these games through an autoethnographic approach.

Autoethnography is a method of sustained introspection about a culture based on the individual writer’s experience and perspective (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Autoethnography allows for a personal written interpretation of culture, promoting exploratory research and writing as a “political, socially-just and socially-conscious act” (Ellis et al., 2011). Debates have concerned the difference between autoethnographic articles and personal essays, whether autoethnographic accounts can be considered truthful or factual (Bochner, 2002), and whether such a practice or product (that some might think intellectually narcissistic and self-indulgent) is worth either doing or reading (Madison, 2006). Strengths of the method include the following: the potential individual creativity of the writing; that the method requires little to no external funding therefore allowing the ethnographer to explore marginal or underrepresented social topics; that the ethnographer might not need to propose the study to an institutional review board for approval (see Tolich, 2010, for this debate), perhaps facilitating a timely research and publication process; and that autoethnography can provide inspiration for other forms of social science study.

For fieldwork, I played GTA 3, 4, and 5 for over 100 hr each. I played Super Columbine Massacre RPG! for over 10 hr. Like a traditional ethnographer, I acted in a sense as a “participant observer” in these games, or as some might call them, these virtual worlds. The games have their rules but, particularly in the case of GTA, the games also promote and/or reinforce values, becoming “sites of ideological reproduction” (Gottschalk, 1995, p. 1). I here compare my own values and beliefs to those I think are promoted by and within game play, and how my social positioning and emotions are reinforced and/or affected through game play. Autoethnography here lets me consider how the games are not separate spheres from my life, but that my game play and life “beyond” game play are inextricably interconnected and mutually informing (Gottschalk, 2010). I also consider how the games correspond with undesirable cultural patterns in the United States, such as the promotion of sexism within games (Sarkeesian, 2013a, 2013b). I further consider feminist critiques of such games, followed by the development of Internet groups such as #Gamergate that have galvanized into anonymously intimidating those feminist critics (Goldberg, 2015). By considering my cognitive dissonance while playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, I consider such independently produced games as inspiring individual players to considering the type of world in which the player wants to live.

Finally, I want to stress my own humility in my study and approach. It is personal and exploratory. My method does not preclude other forms of study by other researchers and/or theorists but might inspire, add to, and/or augment other research. I, and other practitioners of autoethnography, appreciate there being room in the social sciences today for many different kinds of research and writing, including that which “acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist” (Ellis et al., 2011).

GTA: The Game and Its Origins

GTA is what gamers call an open world, or “sandbox,” game. Players control avatar-styled characters within photorealistic three-dimensional urban areas based on real cities but which are given pseudonyms (such as “San Andreas” for San Francisco, “Los Santos” for Los Angeles, “Vice City” for Miami, and “Liberty City” for New York). A player can freely move around the city in avatar form and do many things, including drive, fly, parachute, run, jump, collect weapons, assault others, steal, shoot guns, rob banks, kill police officers, engage prostitutes, act as a pimp, attack a rival gang, wait around, die, have sex, listen to music, and interact with other computer-generated characters. Players can also do activities, including play games within the game (such as race cars or boats against other computer-generated opponents, or play pool, or play tennis, or shoot at targets, or other activities).

Although many antisocial acts are possible in GTA, the game’s origins did not lie in criminal mayhem. GTA developers first worked on a game called Race “n” Chase where players, looking down on their avatars from a “God’s eye view” directly above, would drive cars and, as in everyday life, stop at traffic lights. Then, a new revolutionary version of the game was introduced:

With a few more taps of the arrow keys, you maneuvered the character toward a stubby green car with a shiny hood, then tapped the enter key. That’s when it happened. The door flew open, and the driver—some other little dude in blue pants–came flying out of the car and landed on the pavement in a contorted pile. He got jacked. As you held down the forward arrow, the car careened forward, supple to the flick of the side arrows–left, right—with a satisfying vroooom. You headed toward a flickering traffic light. Why stop? This was a game, right? A game wasn’t life. A game takes you over, or you take over it, pushing it in ways you can’t for real.

So you drove through the light, squealing around the corner. As you took the turn too wide, you saw a little pedestrian in a white long sleeve shirt and blue pants coming too close, but you couldn’t stop. Actually, you didn’t want to stop. So you just drove. Drove right into the ped—only to hear a satisfying splat, like a crushed grape with the wine-colored stain on the sidewalk, and the number “100” rising from the corpse. Score! . . . The moment that DMA [Design Company] let players run over pedestrians—and be rewarded with points, no less—changed everything. Instead of cops and robbers, the game became robbers and cops. The object was to run missions for bad guys, such as jacking cars, the more the better. The leap was radical. In the short history of games, players had almost always been the hero, not the antihero . . . nothing put you behind the wheel to wreak havoc like this. (Kushner, 2012, p. 30, emphasis in original)

Race “n” Chase was soon renamed GTA. Sam Houser, one of the original game developers, has been credited with supporting other developers in his group to push the limits of avatar activity in GTA to criminal extremes. As DMA writer Brian Baglow put it, “You’re a criminal, so if you do something bad, you get a reward!” (Kushner, 2012, p. 30).

Game developers laughed as their avatars would carjack someone, then hit pedestrians making an audible “thud” as they were struck. Such reactions by novice GTA players today, even when the reactions are sheepish, remind me of several participants in Milgram’s obedience study who initially laughed at the pain their “learners” appeared to be in after being “shocked” for an incorrect answer (Milgram, 1974). As Kushner noted, GTA developers and their company, Rockstar Games, began tapping into the apparent giddiness a large number of people must feel while indiscriminately hurting (virtual) others.

Another taken-for-granted element of the original Race “n” Chase was also soon altered. In Race “n” Chase, players needed to get out of cars to answer phones in phone booths, an act that then triggered a “mission” their character needed to complete. Herein lay a problem with many video games to that point—their players might eventually be unable to “move forward,” not possessing skills necessary to overcome a game element, and would then quit the game. GTA’s next major innovation, then, was augmenting this linear story line model, or the requirement that players follow a sequence of activities to win:

The thing was, some play testers didn’t want to do the missions at all. Given the bad boy nature of the game—cars to steal, pedestrians to crush—they had more fun recklessly joyriding around. Baglow, who oversaw the play testers, would politely tell them that it was time to stop driving and go answer a phone for a mission, but he could sense their disappointment over being restricted. . . . Penn [said] “It’s a virtual space . . . you’re allowed to do what the fuck you like!” . . . Why not, in other words, just let the players proceed along their own paths, at their own pace—answering the phone whenever they wanted to or simply speeding off and having fun? (Kushner, 2012, p. 33)

GTA therefore allows a “sandbox” play environment, or something like an “infinite game” (Carse, 2013), as well as a player being able to engage at any time in “story mode,” where the player voluntarily takes on a more “finite game” (Carse, 2013) within GTA, one with a clear goal, rules, and an end point (most of which are referred to as “missions”). GTA, though, does not require its players to complete all “missions”: If one is too difficult or involves something the player doesn’t enjoy doing, the player can quit it and do other things. Although a goal for some players is “100% completion” of all aspects of structured, task-related, and story mode game play, these are also not necessary to “play” GTA or thoroughly enjoy the game.

A third unique element in GTA’s development was its strong tie-in of the story mode missions to thematic and cinematographic elements of gangster films. Through cutscenes (cinema-like vignettes within the game), a player starting a mission would watch a brief television or film-styled drama sequence setting up the necessity of the mission. To develop these scenes, real-life actors were monitored through computerized motion capture to create increasingly hyper-realistic computer-generated imagery (CGI) characters—the characters have facial expressions that are recognizable and body motions that are more fluid than ever, with other actors’ voices added for dialogue. Additional cinematic tie-ins included one GTA plotline paralleling the film “Scarface” and an early TV advertisement for GTA drawing inspiration from Reservoir Dogs. The overall effect was, as one Rockstar team member stated, “to make the player feel like he’s in his own fucked-up Scorcese-directed cartoon” (Kushner, 2012, p. 2).

My Own Fucked-Up Cartoon

Normative deviance refers to a violation of norms and involves notions of what we should and should not do. In particular, sanctions are used to control deviant behaviors that break laws. As a sociologist, I love thinking about norms. What are they, and to what extent are they real (Durkheim’s external and coercive social facts) or in my mind? How was I socialized into believing in and adhering to norms, and who created (and recreates, or reinforces) the norms I abide by? Norms are abstractions, but their violation can have real consequences.

I like playing GTA in part because it reverses my long-entrenched everyday social orientation to avoid criminal acts. In GTA, criminal actions are encouraged. GTA takes several things we are all taught are crimes worthy of punishment, in particular theft, assault, and reckless driving, and either rewards the player for them or removes the strength of a real-world sanction (e.g., carjacking in GTA might mean you get caught and arrested by the police, but that merely results in a loss of some virtual money and weapons, and the game continues within a minute). Paradoxically, though, the game discourages criminal behavior through punishing the player whose crimes escalate and who cannot elude the police—in other words, punishing a player who isn’t very good at or doesn’t understand how to do well in the game.

Initially, GTA for me was simply wandering around the virtual city looking at things—many beginning players, I suspect, do that too. But as beautiful as that environment is, it ultimately got boring. The game’s ongoing appeal started, I believe, when I violated norms—when I ran a stoplight, hurt someone, and/or took something that wasn’t mine, such as a car or money. I could simply relish the yelps and cries the “people” in the game made while being pummeled or shot, just like the game’s original test players. I could feel the effect of the damage I did to cars or people through the physical “rumble” of my hand-held game controller. I could see the computer-generated “people” laying lifeless on the ground, generating pools of blood, never to move again (and ultimately, their bodies would disappear). In GTA, once I steal a car or severely injure or kill someone, the game is on. I am now wanted by the police. Those elements create tension, the rush of a fight or flight response in me, and I feel engaged. I then feel mastery if I can eliminate the enemy and/or can “get away.” Those fight or flight scenarios are available anytime I, or any player, want to initiate them in GTA. I like being able to create such a visceral feeling, anytime I want it.

For those familiar with the “I/Me dialogue” (Mead, 1934), GTA presents a strange situation. Instead of an I/me dialogue, I have an I/me/GTA dialogue. I ask, what do I want to do in GTA? What would I enjoy? But also, could the game play of GTA encourage me to think of the game goals themselves as a stand-in for the “generalized other” of its developers? And if so, who am I playing for? How does GTA both simultaneously promote traditional values (lawbreakers should be punished) and undermine them (stealing is rewarded)? I play the game, and the game plays me.

As I play the game, or act within its structure, I am also being acted on, through an immersion in a virtual environment promoting behavior that might further reinforce beliefs or might change my thinking and emotional reactions. In the wake of mass shootings such as Columbine and Sandy Hook, media reports considered possible cause-and-effect links between the shooters’ actions and their virtual game play (Jaslow, 2013; Kushner, 2012), asking, does violent game play promote violent action by players in the real world? However, recent scholarship by Anita Sarkeesian (Sarkeesian, 2013a; 2013b) considers a question that likely involves a far greater number of players of GTA who would never engage in a mass shooting: How might virtual world games like GTA promote and/or reinforce racist and misogynistic ideological frameworks? Sarkeesian is not arguing that the game creates a reality, but that the logic of games holds the potential to inform, validate, and/or create player’s values and worldview.

In 2012, Sarkeesian began developing an Internet video series called “Tropes vs. Women,” a series critical of sexism in video games. Through a critical content and thematic analysis of dozens of games from arcades and home video game consoles, Sarkeesian shows that the systematic diminishment of women has occurred in video games for decades, from subtle reinforcements of gender stereotypes to outright examples of misogyny and virtual violence. Unlike academic articles, her Internet videos reached a large audience. Soon after her video series appeared, she became the victim of computer hacking, character assaults, and threats. Sarkeesian has received ongoing, anonymous, death threats, and threats of mass shootings at her talks (Ahmed & Marco, 2014). Computer-savvy males have also targeted other women game developers and critics under the twitter hashtag #Gamergate, purporting that several women in video game circles are engaging in unethical journalistic practices, and that feminist critiques of games are ultimately a threat to the game industry.

These developments are concerning because (apparently) (real) men are bothered enough by Sarkeesian’s critique that they think they can (anonymously) threaten to kill her, just because she has publically noted that some popular games promote sexism and encourage virtual violence against women. The threats against Sarkeesian, though, are delivered anonymously and virtually, and so perhaps they might appear to players of GTA like the virtual violence against women in GTA, a form of inconsequential “virtual harm” from which the perpetrator gains pleasure. In a sense, such real-world behavior parallels how women in GTA are depicted as non-playable computer-generated characters, always presented as things to be acted upon. If women dare to speak critically about games, #Gamergate supporters hope to silence them.

The extreme reactions to Sarkeesian’s work lead me to wonder about the link between discourses in civil society, like those promoting equal rights and against harassment, and a massive marketplace for games promoting misogynist fantasies, among other antisocial ideas (including the stereotypical portrayals of gay and African American computer-generated characters in GTA). In other words, has the contemporary promotion of civil rights in everyday life in the United States created a market for secret play rooted in misogyny, for virtual spaces where, if men feel like they are losing power to women all around them, there should at least be one “untouchable” space where they can do whatever they want to whomever they want? As sexism in public is (perhaps) less tolerated than in the past, are men privately seeking refuge in the Goffman framing “key” of “make believe” in virtual game space? To quote Goffman, “The central kind of make-believe is playfulness, meaning here the relatively brief intrusion of unserious mimicry between one individual and others or surrogates of others” (p. 48, emphasis added).

But through #Gamergate, unserious play appears to correspond directly to serious consequences. As an anonymous email author to Sarkeesian (presumably a male gamer), threatened, “Feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and for the sake of all the others they’ve wronged” (Ahmed & Marco, 2014). Michelle Goldberg (2015) describes groups “gathering under banners such as the Men’s Rights Movement and Gamergate” as “a diffuse network of video-game enthusiasts furious at attempts to curb sexism in the industry.” Although feminists have long faced abuse, columnist Katha Pollitt now argues that “the men’s rights people, Gamergate, that’s new. There is the cadre of incredibly enraged men who have all found each other” (Pollitt cited in Goldberg, 2015).

These recent events have caused me to ask, how much of my own play and enjoyment of GTA is rooted in my resentment at having to be someone in public that I am not? Do I experience cognitive dissonance in occupying an everyday world promoting tolerance, equality, and law-abiding behavior, and then playing such a game? Would I enjoy being sexist, racist, or hurtful in other ways in real life? I like to think not, but my enjoyment of GTA now troubles me. Can I say I ignore, or avoid, or don’t take seriously, portions of the game that are racist, sexist, or homophobic? Or am I in mourning for the power men like my father had, for a social order where men dominated women, for a time when men dominated the public sphere as “breadwinners,” commanding respect? I get to play powerful characters with instrumental roles in GTA, and they’re all male. Is my game play as a task-oriented, get-things-done male a reaction to my fears of the increasing impotence of men generally in contemporary society? As women gain equality, perhaps games such as GTA are part of an ongoing backlash (Faludi, 1991), a fear of women getting the upper hand, making men irrelevant. Books such as Are Men Necessary? (Dowd, 2006), The End of Men and the Rise of Women (Rosin, 2012), and Are Men Obsolete? (Rosin, Dowd, Moran, & Paglia, 2014) have grown popular. Maybe, sadly (and not something easy to admit), GTA is the outlet for a powerful subject position I wish I held.

So what visions of society does GTA create, inform, and/or reproduce? Has GTA, for example, provided a safe outlet for misogynist men, or does it reaffirm misogynist ideology? The angry men of the Men’s Rights Movement and #Gamergate cannot possibly be representative of the millions (of men and women) who have played the GTA series. But I regularly wonder, is GTA the world that I want to occupy? As my play is private (not online with others, which is a more recent innovation with GTA 4 and 5), I am not accountable to anyone. But the play encourages violating many social norms, so I ask, a la Mead, “What would they think of me if I were to write an article about playing GTA?” Adults might not publically admit that they enjoy this kind of thing. Nevertheless, I play. While GTA presents a frame of a game in Erving Goffman’s (1986) sense, it’s also a contentious, fragile frame, because GTA game play represents extreme antisocial behavior against others (including minority group members) and now in increasingly lifelike forms. I am no longer playing my beloved childhood favorites such as Pong, Asteroids, or Defender, where the enemies or obstacles are abstract figures or from outer space. Is playing GTA (especially at my age) socially “excusable”?

What I enjoy, I fear, is the ability to do very bad things without repercussions and see the reactions of computer-generated characters as funny. It is escapism. There is a distance in the game through the character of an avatar that lets me explore my darker side, to imagine it through a computer-based simulation (Gottschalk, 2010). But why, for what purpose, and for whom? I embody a disconnect between my life and my play, my actions and my thoughts. What is the range of tolerance for this? Are such disconnects acceptable? Is the point these days to drive them underground or create a mass market for their virtual enactment? And/or additionally, are such disconnects, to greater or lesser extents, avoidable?

Extra Lives as a Columbine Killer

Violent, realistic video games such as GTA are popular. The news media regularly reports on violence, captured in the journalistic maxim “if it bleeds, it leads.” The spectacle of violence intrigues us, captures our attention, and is an extremely popular theme/occurrence in films, television, music, novels, and news accounts. We celebrate it. Its mystery and shock are titillating, all too human, and repressed. Violence through media accounts and products is made abstract, which might (might) promote its reoccurrence, promoting more media accounts and products. Violence can also be a solution. It can be pleasurable, especially as a cathartic response to violent injustice.

Violence, though, can also be considered antisocial. It must be corralled, controlled, regulated. It can destroy. The only source of legitimate violence today, argues Giddens (1990), is the state. Citizens cannot seek justice through violent retribution but must allow criminal justice bureaucracies to process cases. I, like you I suppose, feel aggressive, sometimes violent impulses, but I am not to act upon them. I am to either ignore them, work, or talk my way through them, or channel those impulses through writing, or hobbies, or sport. Or games.

In the wake of the Columbine shootings, a video game, called Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, was produced. This RPG, or Role Playing Game, was both roundly criticized and defended by others as insightful social commentary. Playing the game, I controlled the actions of the character Eric Harris who participates alongside the computer-generated character Dylan Klebold, both of which are the names of the real Columbine shooters. A Super Columbine Massacre RPG! player goes through what Harris and Klebold presumably went through that day—the necessary preparations, getting the weapons, leaving final messages for others, talking to each other about what was going to happen during the massacre and how it would feel. The game also gives nods to the social context around the time of the shooting—while a game character is in a basement of his house gathering supplies, for example, a simple electronic version of Nirvana’s mega-hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” plays in the background. A picture of rock star Marilyn Manson appears. The game appears as 16 bit or, as video games go, presenting simplified, outdated graphics, not unlike some of the early video games Harris and Klebold themselves undoubtedly played as children. Characters are shown from above, through a “God’s eye” view. Scenes and characters are often “blocky,” nowhere close to the photo- or cinema-realism I see in GTA 4 and 5.

By “reenacting” a real and specific incident where teenagers and teachers died, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! stands far apart from other video games. Columbine was not a land of make-believe like a medieval castle, or abstract like a battleground in World War II, as in the contemporary first-person shooter video game series Call of Duty. Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is based on an actual, horrific incident. It names names. A player plays in the character of one of the actual Columbine shooters who killed real people.

The game’s overlap with a real tragedy drew starkly different interpretations. It was considered for awards like the 2006 Slamdance festival, but some participants in the festival felt the game was grotesque for disregarding the real victims, and also obscene for promoting a player’s directing and “re-enacting” the tragedy (Wikipedia, 2014). Metaphorically, one plays through the character of a real killer, and merely by promoting the possibility of a player imaginatively acting like, never mind perhaps understanding the social context of and therefore identifying with, the shooters, the game was thought controversial, if not perverse.

While playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, I do the necessary preparations to kill my/Harris and Klebold’s classmates. I collect propane bombs, guns, knives, and lots of ammunition. I reminisce with Dylan about how badly people have treated me in high school. I watch as the game reenacts scenarios presumably based on the real lives of Harris and Klebold—a time when one of them was assaulted in a school locker room by jocks, another time when one of them hit on a girl, only to be rejected. While playing, I remember my own high school rejections and the hazing I endured. During high school, I was also afraid of the jocks in the locker room that brandished a wire bristle brush and threatened to “scrub” all of us freshmen while we showered. I was scared. Anxious. Full of self-doubt. Confused. Looking for a way to feel better. Angry at feeling so powerless.

Although at times I can relate to miserable experiences in high school, I find little joy in playing this game. Roughly a third of the way into Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, the characters Harris and Klebold take one last, long look at a panoramic view of the city beyond their school before embarking on their rampage. They start in the school parking lot, trying to set off bombs that don’t explode. I/we then begin shooting people, and occasionally we see someone we like or feel sympathy for, whereupon we tell them to “get out of here” or “leave.” When I encounter a character I don’t like, the situation “freezes,” allowing me to choose a weapon. The character I have encountered, now presented from a frontal view as a pixely, cartoon-esque video game character who is called a “jock” or “black kid” or “church girl,” appears against a realistic photograph of an actual background like a real parking lot and, later, against a school locker room, a cafeteria, a library, or other photographed background that, for all I know, could be real photos from the real Columbine. After I choose a weapon to kill the video game character and I use it, I hear sound effects, the character begins flashing, and the screen registers the amount of “damage” I have caused. If I kill the character, the screen reads “Another victory for the Trench Coat Mafia!” My character’s skill level goes up as I kill more people.

Here, the perversity and counterhegemonic meanings of the game become manifest. I am killing but not killing, present but absent, witnessing but not witnessing, responsible but not responsible. I am doing what Harris and Klebold were doing, but not at all. I am imagining myself doing a real act of murder while staring at a screen of pixels that represents this reality (?) as a digital caricature. It is (only) a game, but is it play?

I move inside the school. During the killing spree, the students I’ve killed are no longer cute, cartoony video game characters but are now red, messy blots on the floor I have to maneuver around. I kill janitors to get keys to rooms. I kill kids in classrooms, hallways, and eventually in the school cafeteria. In that cafeteria, I watch a scene presumably from Eric Harris’s past—he sits in the cafeteria, by himself, wishing someone would join him, then eventually becomes angry at his fellow classmates, vowing to enact revenge.

While playing I go back and forth between feeling disturbed by the game itself and determined to progress in the game, and sometimes seemingly both feelings at once. I also at times feel a more “suspended disbelief” mode, where I focus accomplishing a task at hand to ultimately finish the game. I am uncomfortable with the definitions of the situations the game seems to be offering me. I am encouraged to kill students and janitors and teachers, or kill “the enemy,” like players are supposed to do in so many video games (Gottschalk, 1995). It isn’t fun. I also feel like I am being encouraged to empathize with the real killers by seeing (and being placed in) the context of their lives, but through a video game promoting, of all things, the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959).

I see quotes from Nietzsche on the screen, and lyrics from songs by Marilyn Manson and Radiohead, that embrace nihilism and suggest the experience of being an outsider. The game suggests that such cultural products might have influenced Harris and Klebold’s mind-set and actions. Harris and Klebold’s individual actions certainly cannot be considered in isolation from the social and cultural context in which they lived—a culture embracing firearms, violent video games, and violent movies (there is an extensive quote from the Kurtz character in Apocalypse Now on the screen during game play). Song lyrics from the game speak of limited opportunities and loneliness and hate. The game also references bullying, implicitly critiquing a culture where a megaschool named Columbine housed more than 1,500 students, promoting anonymity and isolation among teenagers engaged in an intense developmental stage of identity formation.

In Bowling for Columbine (2002), director Michael Moore also tried to show the social context around the real school, pointing out that a Lockheed Martin plant, which manufactures rockets for government defense contracts, operates in the nearby neighborhood of Littleton, Colorado. Maybe the game is supposed to promote cognitive dissonance in me—that through my simulated actions, I will come to change my feelings about the real killers. Maybe simply playing the game is sick, as so many critics argued upon its release. Maybe, though, there is a difference between explanation, contextualization, and exculpation. Playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, perhaps like nothing else, shows that the abstract killing on a screen, even with game play involving primitive graphics (or, conversely, perhaps through primitive graphics), suggests that the fantastic, with sufficient willpower, can come to life (or death). Super Columbine Massacre RPG! arguably deconstructs and contextualizes violent video games, even primitive violent video games, through the process of play itself.

After bombs have been discharged in the cafeteria and I have killed many students and others in the video game, I am near a school entryway. I hear police sirens. Harris and Klebold discuss how this is the end, and they are satisfied with their actions. The pair then kill themselves. A montage of real photographs of Harris and Klebold follows—photos of them as children, photos of the carnage they caused and of the terror they wrought in the survivors, photos of their dead bodies lying by that entryway, and photos of crosses later erected in their names.

Then, the montage ends and, to my surprise, the game continues. Klebold, without Harris, is now in hell. I am running around in Klebold’s character, killing various demons. I run into John Lennon, who is singing “Imagine,” with its optimistic lyrics promoting peace. Klebold simply tells Lennon his song is a joke. I run into Mario, the video game character. I encounter Nietzsche, who Klebold treats like a rock star. He appears to be confused by, but generally supportive of, my actions. I eventually reunite with Harris. I then have to bring Nietzsche’s book to the most powerful force of evil in hell. The boys and I begin our most intense battle. Then, I/we kill the demon. Mission accomplished. We end the game with a press conference referencing the real press conference held after the Columbine High School massacre, one trying to discern links between the killer’s actions and things like media violence, religious fundamentalism, and gun control.

GTA V can be seen as more, and less, disturbing than Super Columbine Massacre RPG! GTA presents more photorealistic imagery and game play. In some ways, it is therefore more realistic. It also, though, is not rooted in an actual, concrete event of horrific violence. I was initially disturbed that GTA 5 was more photorealistic than previous editions, but I soon grew to like it. It makes me wonder how much further, how much richer, such simulations will be in the future. How much closer to real life can the franchise go and still be considered “fun”? Or even “a game”? People don’t seem to fret nearly as much that playing paintball or laser tag might lead to more mass shootings. It’s funny to me how I find happiness, or a relief from boredom, or something, in the act of imagining some of my most antisocial desires, but not others.

Playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG! did not give me joy. The game creates a situation where I am not only placed a role but, in this instance, am tacitly encouraged to empathize with mass shooters. The game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is very disturbing to most people because it’s rooted in the premise that the game is mocking, trivializing, and/or celebrating a situation where real people died. From another vantage point, however, the game can actually be seen as a reversal of the mental processes where a person immersed in a shooter game world can come to reenact that world with tragic real-life consequences. In other words, people sometimes think young men obsessively playing such violent video games results in consequences such as mass shootings. Again Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, though, reverses the situation—a real-world massacre is reduced to the abstract environment of a video game. It is as if time’s arrow has flown backward, as if we are seeing the incarnation, or the key to the Columbine massacre, through its origins, in this case the abstract thinking, logic, and rules promoting behavior needed to win a video game. Instead of Columbine being the result of a game, a game is the result of Columbine.

Conclusion

In this article, my autoethnographic method is especially useful for me to critically examine my play of two video games. I autoethnographically reflect on my ongoing sense of Self developed through, as well as on cultural reactions to, these games. This form of analysis can be useful for the author/researcher/scholar, even those who do not play such games, as a model for deep interpretive evaluation of cultural products. Cultural studies were originally rooted in the critical analysis of cultural products and their use, especially by popular audiences and individuals. Studies considered how those products could both reproduce dominant ideologies and be used in unexpected, counterhegemonic ways by consumers (see Fiske, 1987; Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1991; Hall & Jefferson, 2006; Hebdige, 1979; Hoggart, 1969; Williamson, 1994, for varied examples). Cultural studies can arguably boil down to analyzing the meaning people make of cultural products in their lives and in reproducing our social world. Autoethnography additionally allows for critical consideration at an individual level of how meaning making reflects social inequality, personal identity, and the promotion of values.

I began by looking at GTA. The game promotes virtual criminal activity, but I am more interested in how it might promote and/or support negative views of minority groups, and how feminist criticism of such games has led to a violent, virtual backlash. Although I oppose supporters of #Gamergate, I use the ideas of Mead and Goffman to consider my own game play, and whether play itself tacitly supports sexism/racism/homophobia. Just as there are those who enjoy first-person shooter games without becoming mass killers, I consider, through I/me dialogues, how I and other players make ongoing choices about the meanings derived from game play.

Regarding Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I found the game play immediately more disturbing, despite the graphics themselves being less realistic than those of GTA. The thought of playing a video game that reenacts a mass shooting of teenagers likely disgusts many, but as the game contextualizes the shooters’ lives and media influences and decisions, I think it promotes critical thinking without allowing exculpation. Although nobody wants to think they can fully empathize with mass killers, the game is an object lesson in which the sociological imagination is crucial today. The game is both a product of and a commentary on our culture.

George Herbert Mead said that the final stage of development for human beings was the “game stage,” or situations where we can recognize a “generalized other,” the generalized view, norms, values, and understandings of the various groups and communities around us. Game stage, indeed. Maybe we’ve reached a point where our games, some of the most popular of which are designed to approximate and appear more lifelike every day, are not simply situations designed to teach abstraction to be applied to the complexities of human social life, but instead become ways through which the complexity of human social life is reframed, places where new (or old) forms of sense making are encouraged or revealed or rewarded for some who find the abstractness and the unruliness of the world to be boring, or causing undesirable, unsustainable emotional states in their real lives. But newer games by independent producers, games like Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, hold potential to take players out of their comfort zone to reframe their culture and implicitly ask their players, “Is this what you want?”

The issues I discuss here could go all the way back to Plato’s cave, to the differences between, and conflations of, representations and the real. I am trying to make sense of my/our increasingly virtual and compartmentalized world. Here, I express a potentially dangerous dissociation for myself and perhaps others, but perhaps also a dissociation at times necessary for those of us living in this late advanced, capitalist, task-specialized, and still sexist, racist, homophobic, and contradictory social order.

Video games like GTA today might involve violent escapism, an escapism that allows misogynistic men to feel a sense of power, one emboldening them to enact virtual, anonymous threats. But games such as Super Columbine Massacre RPG! might promote critical thinking about and greater social awareness of games in a Median sense, or as frames in Goffman’s sense, for thinking through how we want to be in the world. Independently produced games, funded through sites such as Kickstarter, allow socially conscious game producers to still find an audience for their products despite not being as commercially profitable. If games can be created that promote antisocial values, other games can be developed to deconstruct elements of and critically examine our culture, holding up a “looking glass” (Cooley, 1902) for us to collectively observe how others envision and participate in the culture, and deciding if we like that. Sarkeesian suggests that the next step after critical assessment of games is awareness that games can be different, leading to the development of alternative games. If #Gamergate is doing anything, it is trying to silence creative game makers of all backgrounds from developing alternative forms of play that, like all art, help us see the world anew.

Living with contradictory pulls is hard, sometimes unbearably hard. But video games today have become social sense-making tools, spaces for defining and reproducing aspects of the world we might, or might not, want. In contemporary life, to quote Baudrillard (1984), “all that remains to be done is play with the pieces” (p. 24).