I saw Danny Ledonne’s documentary Playing Columbine at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles recently. Ledonne’s film documents and discusses the controversy surrounding the video game he created in 2005 called Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Ledonne had released the game anonymously on the internet, thinking that maybe 25 or so people would download and play it, and nothing would come of it.Reactions from people ranged from incensed to amused, and most journalists at the time condemned the game, many without even playing it.
The game generated more attention than he could have imagined, and when a friend of one of the Columbine High shooting victims did a little amateur detective work, Ledonne’s identity was exposed and the hate mail came pouring in. He submitted the game to the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker’s Competition in 2007, where it was accepted but then later pulled. As a result, most of the other gamemakers in competition pulled out, and the Interactive Media Division of USC pulled their sponsorship for the event as well. Ledonne was recording all of this at the time, and later decided to put it together in what became this documentary.
As both a video game journalist and a film journalist, at first I was trying to decide if this was just the case of someone creating something without much merit, and then backpedaling and trying to cover their facts, or was it the case of an artist trying to get a message across in a non-traditional medium, and then documenting the process? Ultimately, I enjoyed Playing Columbine not because of the treatment of the game, but because of the issues it created and the dialogue it attempts to open about violence in video games. However, I would have at least liked to see some reaction from the victims or perhaps parents or significant others that were involved.
The film is screening this weekend at the Denver Film Festival, and at the Sante Fe Film Festival immediately after that. I spoke with Danny recently, and you can read the complete interview with him after the break.
At what point when this started going on did you end up thinking, “I’m going to document this and turn it into a film”?
The first big fork in the road was when Roger Kovacs basically outed me and said, “I’m putting your name in public.” I knew my life would never be the same, but I didn’t really know how it would be different. I didn’t know if I would spend the better part of the next year in out of courtrooms. Or if I would have to relocate or if I would lose my job. All those sort of more horrendous things came to my mind.
And then all the little things, like, I wonder if I’ll ever be an anonymous person again. You look at the number of hits that my name retrieves in Google now as opposed to May of 2006, it’s obviously going to be different. But the decision to start document I think came instantly as soon as press starting coming in. I’ve always been kind of a packrat and an archivist anyway, so whenever these stories would be printed I would save all of them. Some of my friends said, “I hope you’re saving all this stuff.”
It’s funny, because I have friends who, and a lot of people from my town, who don’t really care why I’m famous. They’re just sort of enamored with the idea that someone they know is in the headlines. For me it was like, OK. Especially multimedia stuff, but also print journalism. Whenever I did radio or TV, I tried to get copies of that stuff. And I was just kind of saving it up and thinking about, how could I use this? How could all of this be turned into something productive or useful.
Because someone could look at all that and see it as a negative, really negative situation to be in. And turning that into something that I thought could help people understand what was going on, and to help me understand what was going on. And so I started collected all this stuff.
I didn’t know what to do with it until the game was pulled out of Slamdance. And that was about a month period between May of ‘06 and January of ‘07. A bigger issue now. A lot of people who haven’t seen this film sort of assume that the film is a series of people being offended by this video game.
But that wasn’t the kind of film I wanted to make. I wanted to make a film that explored these issues as they arose, as the game kind of had these challenges and had these sort of high and low points in the way the culture was assessing. That’s kind of what I wanted to follow.
I don’t consider myself a main character of the film. I think you look at how much I’m actually in the film, that’s kind of reflective of that. The main character is the game. And what we learn about video games and about school shootings and about free speech and about the media and controversy through this one primitive little artifact. That was kind of the idea.
I don’t know if someone asked or if you just said this, but you said you’d probably never make a game again; you have other aspirations. If you hadn’t made this game, do you think you still would have wanted to make a documentary about these issues in the gaming world, which is a real hot button these days?
That’s an interesting question. I was really passionate about these issues for most of my childhood. Most of my childhood like high school and college. Because I look at some of my own writing that I did in high school, some of my like video editorials for the high school news shows I did.
It was obvious to me that I was interested in criticizing the kinds of issues about how our culture blames things like video games and Marilyn Manson for complex social problems, which I was myself at the time going through.
So those were issues that were important to me. But I think if you look at the trajectory I was on when I left Emerson College in 2004, when I graduated, I was interested and still am interested in making natural history and environmental films. But here was this story that I had undeniable access to, and it was so personally relevant that I thought if I came across all this material, even if this wasn’t my game, I would still have to make this film. Because I don’t want to look back when I’m 40 and say, “That would have made a really interesting movie. Why didn’t you make it?”
So it was kind of that urgency to realize, OK, we’re all kind of swept up in history in some way or another. I was thinking of that. The most famous I’ll ever be is likely when I was 24 or 25. I could be wrong; I’m doing a lot of stuff with my life. But I thought if this is really sort of my crossroad with fate or with destiny or with whatever larger issues seem to be arising here, I need to embrace it.
So I was interested in them, but I wasn’t reading game politics every day. Like I said, I wasn’t aware of a lot of the games that I highlight in this film at the time that I was making the game. So I wasn’t really inside that movement. I hadn’t really played video games heavily since I left high school. I just had other things to do with my time by the time I went to college.
I was no longer a hardcore gamer. I didn’t know who Jack Thompson was until people emailed me saying, “Watch out for this guy names Jack Thompson, he might try to sue you. That’s kind of where I came from.
Did he try to sue you?
No. Jack Thompson never tried to sue me. The suggestion was that he would chase some ambulances in Montreal and he would try to represent some lawsuit again me. But Jack Thompson is smarter than that insomuch as he’s knows this is a high profile, mainstream game company that he wants to take down. Which is how he favors his persona.
I’ve had some personal disagreements and we’re no longer speaking because he thinks that I’m a shill for the videogame industry and that I’m some propagandist that’s getting paid under the table or something by the Electronic Consumer Association or the IGDA or someone. I don’t know.
I don’t remember if this was covered in the film. How long did it take you to actually make the game?
The game was made over about six months. And that process was partially coding it, figuring out how I could really if anyone’s ever tried to make a game with RPG, they’ll concede that I did a pretty good job. And anyone who’s never made a game will say that he did a really crappy job.
I’m saying that for the tools that I used, I think I really pushed what RPG Maker could do to the limits. And so part of it was like figuring out what those limits were. And then a lot of it was researching and gathering all the quotations and all of the media that went into the game itself.
Given what ended up happening with the game, did you ever hear from the creators of RPG Maker? Or did they ever comment or say anything?
No, not at all, actually. If you want to talk about legal issues that might arise, at the time I even had this distant notion that because I had a pirated copy of a $20 or $30 software program that that would be a big axe to grind. Some people have said that this is the most famous game to be made with RPG Maker, but I don’t actually think that’s saying very much, although it’s possibly true.
When your anonymity was exposed and you started getting a lot of the hate mail that you read some of that in the film, did any of the families of the victims ever contact you?
You know, a lot of people who were indirectly related to Columbine contacted me. A lot of people who had a cousin of somebody, or, “My older sister knew somebody who….” But no one and in fact I attempted to reach out to a few of the people who spoke publicly about the issue when the press would contact them. But none of them were in touch with me directly.
I’ve met Brooks Brown and I’ve talked at some length with him. And Brooks told me, he said that a lot of people, the fact that they were at Columbine, a lot of the families prayed that the issue will go away and that people will forget what happened. But they’re not coming forward because they’re so burnt out on doing press year in and year out. There are families that are privately grieving and they’re not all going to be media pundits who have a sort of vocal agenda the way that someone like Brian Rohrbough does.
Are you still getting hate mail?
No. On a very rare instance someone who had never heard of it before might email me. But most email I get today is very positive in nature.
So the film had its world premier at AFI. Is it going to be screening at some other festivals? What’s happening with it now?
Yeah, that’s right. It’s screening this weekend in Denver of all places. They’re flying me out to do a Q&A there. And then two weekends after that, I believe, it’s screening at a film festival in Santa Fe. And last weekend it screened at the Bradford Animation Festival in the UK, in I think, Manchester. It’s screened at a lot of colleges. I submitted to a sort of second, smaller select set of festivals. So I have no doubt that it’s going to continue getting screened.
I’m already sort of negotiating with a number of interested parties on getting DVD distribution and things like that. I have no doubt that it’ll find a wide audience, because there’s a lot in there that people want to talk about and look at.
Do you have any sort of plans to try to get it seen in Park City next year? Obviously it wasn’t accepted by Slamdance, which I thought that it was funny that you include that at the end of the film.
Yeah, it was a jujitsu move that I had to make. I did submit it to Sundance, and they tend to notify in the next few weeks, although competition at Sundance is really fierce. I think the fact that it already premiered at AFI makes the likelihood of it screen there low. I don’t know. It’s funny, because the festival director at Slamdance probably hates my guts now. I don’t really expect to be in good standing with the festival and I’m okay with that.
But the whole debacle that ended up happening when the game was kicked out of the competition at Slamdance, that sort of makes this crucial point in the film and it ends up becoming a lot of the focus. Would this movie have happened if that controversy hadn’t arisen, do you think?
Well, I think you can decide how you want to tell a story. I decided to make the Slamdance controversy my third act, the complication that really ended up uplisting the game because it was the first time people were actually defending it. It was easy to hate the Columbine game when it was cited by Kimveer Gill as one of his favorites.
And it was a lot easier to like the Columbine game when it was pulled out of a festival that it was judged to be a part of, and all these other game developers were protesting it. So there’s kind of that wave, and some people like to point out that they were ahead of it. Like, “I’ve been behind the Columbine game from the beginning.” And other people were like, “I’ve always thought this game is wrong and nothing you can do to rationalize it is going to change that.”
My impetus to make a movie would have been a lot less likely. I probably still would have done it, but it probably would have focused less on the game and it would have focused more on the other issues that you do see as being raised. I would have had to make some of those issues more abstract, like Tom Nelson, who is from the Loyola Marymount campus.
As in the film, “We invited Danny to speak about the First Amendment and video games.” And when the game was pulled from Slamdance, he said, “OK, there’s your First Amendment connection.” Because when I was first invited to speak there, I think the First Amendment is important and video games are relevant to it, but I don’t really know why you’re bringing me to campus to talk about that.
And so Slamdance happened like weeks before Loyola Marymount, before I spoke there. It was a perfect kind of object lesson in what is censorship, what is free speech, when do stand behind unpopular speech and things like that.
Were you aware of these other movements, like the Serious Games movement and Indie games, you know Sam Roberts is heading Indiecade now, which kind of champions games that come out of left field, like yours and others that you wouldn’t typically think of when you think of video games. Had you been aware of these other groups until you had been accepted at Slamdance? Or until people started jumping on the bandwagon to support your cause when the film got taken out? Did you know about these other people?
Like I say in the film, I gave a deep sigh of relief when I found 911 Survivor. And I was also aware of Waco Resurrection. Those were about the only two. I didn’t know about Darfur is Dying or some others that hadn’t even come out yet.
I think the biggest single link that was formed with me was when in the summer of 2006 I met, or started corresponding with, Ian Bogost, who sort of I see as one of the heroes, that’s always kind of like one of the cooler people, and not just because he was on The Colbert Report.
He introduced to me sort of a lot of the concepts that I, myself, wasn’t aware of, that he kind of gave me an aesthetic and political context for my work when I really thought I was throwing stones in the dark.
Speaking of figures in the film, who was the other guy that was involved in the Slamdance, one of the judges? Not Sam Roberts, but the other guy who was very adamant and got very upset when the game got pulled.
Yeah. He’s another one of my heroes. That’s Brian Fleming. Brian Fleming is a filmmaker. The funny thing about Brian is that I’ve been a fan of his since I saw The God Who Wasn’t There in 2005. And years later when I go to Slamdance, Peter Baxter is trying to make me feel good about being at the festival even though my work was kicked out of it.
And so he introduces me. He says, “This is Brian. Brian’s a documentary filmmaker.” I shake his hand and I’m like, “I know you! You made a really great movie.” So he was kind of someone I already like and it’s kind of like an absolute blessing that he ended up being part of the controversy and a really staunch champion of my cause and of my work.
And he just sat there that evening, that very evening, and he’s discovering the game for the very first time. And we’ve been in touch. He tried to get the game an award, and he, I think, comes across really well in the film, talking about what it takes to be controversial artist of any stripe.
Can people still access and play this game online?
Yeah, absolutely. That’s kind of the point. It’s available online. It always has been. I think just on principle I’m going to make sure that it always will be. Every once in a while someone informs me that they’re going to shut the game down. And it’s like, “OK, man, good luck. You and what army have already tried doing that.”
The game was… at one point the server crashed because it was so popular. And that’s when sort of spread the load between a number of mirror downloads and other sites. At one point the Rocky Mountain News tried to claim copyright infringement and ordered me to cease and desist because it included images from the shooting.
Which, if I was smarter at the time, I would have called them out on, and said, “Actually this is a public event and I’m using these images as part of fair use in media to comment on and social critique a social issue.” But at the time I was just like, “OK, I’ll tell you what. I’m just going to replace those with other images and you can tell me if these are under ownership” They said they weren’t and so I uploaded a new version of the game identical with the exception of those four images during the cut scenes, which weren’t even dear to me at the time. So it was like, all right.
So, yeah. I’ve continued to moderate the forum on the website. A lot of people every time there’s a new school shooting, or even issues that arise like YouTube is pulling a lot of their Columbine related videos as reported by the BBC earlier this week. People go on that forum and talk about it. It’s really cultivated a surprising number of global sort of experts at heart among teens and young adults who are researching school shootings and doing some pretty interesting work in trying to understand them.
One thing that I found interesting was Jonathan Blow, who developed Braid, he was one of the people who wanted to pull out. He was very outspoken about the fact that the game was taken out. But he said in one of his statements he thought the game lacked compassion, and he felt that your statement about the game I’m guessing he means the statement… actually I don’t know what statement he’s referring to. Is he referring to…
The artist’s statement on the website for the game.
He found that disingenuous. What I found myself wondering, and this statement reminded me of that, was what kind of film would this have been if Danny wasn’t the one directing it? Did you have a response to what Blow said?
You know, just so you’re aware, I invited Jon to be in the film, and I met him when I went to the game developers conference. I really respected what he said. We corresponded specifically about how he found my artist’s statement disingenuous.
I said, “I meant every word of it. If you have suggestions as to how I could rewrite it in a way that would resonate more with you or to help clarify for you what I’ve said, please let me know.” And he didn’t write me back. But I did say, “I really want you to be in this film, and you can talk about why you made the decision that you made.” Because certainly my goal with making the film was not to whitewash the praise or criticism of the game, because that’s not even representative of what happened. But I get the sense that Jon just doesn’t like doing press in general. And that’s more of personality thing than I think any specific issue with my game. That’s how I read the situation.
But, yeah, I really tried to develop an eye as a editor for what I thought was most important. There are moments in the film where the game gets criticized and I get criticized pretty heavily. There are other people who praised the game and praised me. But I always tried as best I could to stay true to the real subject here, because I think I have enough self esteem that I’m not trying to just prove to people that I always know what I’m doing and that I always do a good job.
There are number of legitimate points that people make about how we do need to think about the kind of work that we create and the effect that it has on people. And those lines aren’t always black and white. I let points like that stick because they rang true to me. There was a lot of introspection that I did after the shooting at Dawson, and the whole way through. My answer is I did my best. I know that everyone would have made a slightly different movie. But I think people, when they see the film, they’re surprised at how even handed it was, or at least how it attempted to get beyond sort of my own perspective.
Because it’s not a film that I host and narrate. I don’t maintain a strong on camera presence, because I’m trying to give other people a voice and to raise the larger issues.
In the film you said you were on a similar path to Dylan and Eric when you were in high school yourself. You were bullied. I think that kind of gives you an insight to what happened to them. You say you could very have ended up like they did. How close would you say you actually were to that and what kept you from going down that path?
You know, it’s weird in a way. In a way, Columbine itself kept me from going down that path. In terms of how close I was, myself and a high school friend of mine had talked fairly openly about how we would stage a similar attack at our high school. I think we had done so, actually, at an assembly that we were forced to attend in which for Spirit Week they got a lot of macaroni and cheese and they dumped it in a giant kiddie swimming pool and then they had people wrestling in it with halfway thawed fish from the produce section. They were then throwing this at the audience. I got this stuff on me, and I was thinking, this is what they made me attend. My friend and I tried to leave the school so we could go shoot some video for our class. And I was just like so enraged that this is what I was forced to do.
I think that’s when the real gestation for that idea, and I think that anger that I had toward this system that I felt trapped in, that’s where it came from. I don’t try to belabor the fact, but I was bullied to, I think, an abnormal degree as a young teenager. I think by the time I got to high school I had gotten better. But I was picked on a lot. I definitely, to some degree, really identified with these kids who sort of felt alone.
And so a lot of these scenes in the game, where Dylan is eating by himself in the cafeteria or Eric is thrown up against the walls in the locker room and called a faggot and was pushed around and beaten up, those were things that happened to me. And so they were included in the game because I felt they were sort of personally important.
They were historically true for the two shooters, but it was sort of moment of personal resonance as well. And I think what finally got me out of it in some ways, as I mentioned in the film, was being able to make films. Even like angsty ones and being able to vent in that way was really helpful.
I also had a bit of good fortune in that I had some friends who cared about me. I had some parents I was pretty close to. Yeah, I had these creative outlets to be able to deal with that. And in some ways, seeing Columbine and the aftermath of Columbine forced me to kind of introspect myself and say, “This isn’t really the desired outcome after all, now else can you resolve some of these issues?”
And so on the forums for the Columbine game, I’ve talked quite a few times about what life after high school is like, because that’s really difficult to envision when your day to day life is this kind of hierarchical elitism where there this certain group of kids who rule the school and if you’re not part of that group, your life is over.
It’s kind of mentioned in Bowling for Columbine when, I think it’s Matt Stone, one of the creators of South Park who grew up in the Littleton area says, “If you don’t get into the 7th grade pre-algebra class and the 8th grade algebra class, you don’t get into 9th grade advanced math and you don’t go got college, you’re never going to make anything of your life.”
You’re whole life is ruined if you don’t do these few things when you’re in this one stage of your life, and that’s what you’re kind of led to believe. But all those people just kind of ended up being insurance salesmen in Littleton. So that’s the perspective that I lacked and that I think a lot of young people lack, in terms of you can actually go out and do cool things with your life.
So amidst all the hate mail, I’ve gotten letters from people who say that I’m one of their heroes or that I am their hero, because I’ve been able to represent for a group of people that don’t have a lot of people that they look up to. I guess their perception is “speak truth to power,” or try to do something with what you’ve got in spite of, or perhaps augmented by, your nerdiness or your social ostracism, or whatever that would be.
What do you think, as someone who’s made this film and who created this game, do you think there needs to be stricter control on the part of the publishers over what they’re putting in these games? Do you think there needs to be better controls as to the ratings? Or do you think it just boils down to the parents needing to be better parents to their kids?
The bad news for parents is that if they weren’t planning on getting involved in their kids’ lives, this isn’t especially a great period of human history to do that. And video games are very complicated toys or pieces of literature, depending on how you look at them.
Some people like Henry Jenkins have thought aloud, if parents are willing to go to their kids’ soccer games not because it’s an amazing game of soccer or they’re going to their kids’ band concerts not because it’s and amazing orchestral composition, but rather to stay involved in their kids’ lives, why can’t parents be involved in their kids’ Halo tournaments or World of Warcraft guilds, or whatever that would be.
I was lucky in that I played Street Fighter with my parents. Sonic the Hedgehog or Tetris or whatever it was. Being able to connect with them on that level is pretty cool. But I think more so than ever, parents have a lot of opportunities at their disposal not only to understand how the games are rated, looking at their content, but all of the modern consoles allow you to block content or filter it based on its rating.
So the information is out there. And incidentally, the question about video game violence has never not been talked about a lot. I mean, I’m looking at games like Death Race, when they were released in the late ’70s, there was moral outcry over that. You look at that game and you think, what could people possibly have been offended by?
And by Lieberman’s own admission, he says, “I look at Mortal Kombat now and the graphics do seem pretty primitive and pretty rudimentary,” when you compare it to Manhunt 2 or something like that. I think we’re always going to look back to five of ten years ago and say, “Boy, those were the good old days of video games. The way the blood splattered in Killer Instinct, it’s a lot more tame back then.”
But, yeah, I think the bottom line here is that video games are really reaching a point of cultural examination where it’s not as though all video games are for all players. Just as not all films are for all audiences. And so it’s not a matter of the ratings system per se, it’s a matter of our culture recognizing that games are not in fact always children’s toys.
And once you understand that, it becomes easier to understand why some games are more developmentally appropriate than others. I certainly know kids and parents who are comfortable playing Grand Theft Auto at the age of 12. Because they understand on some level what the game is about. On some level, they still have a healthy relationship with reality. And some of them even appreciate the kind of satire of modern American society that a game like that presents.
So I think the answer is not censorship or regulation, I think it’s media literacy and awareness and involvement.
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