A week after writing about Super Columbine Massacre RPG in the Rocky Mountain News, the game's creator was unmasked by a friend of one of the Columbine survivors.

Yesterday, I spent about an hour talking with Danny Ledonne, 24, of Alamosa, about his life and how the things that happened to him while growing up lead him to create the game.

There are two things that are interesting about this profile. First is the fact that Ledonne said he was headed down the same road as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when their rampage at Columbine snapped him out of a downward spiral. The other is his reasoning for using a video game to explore his reaction to Columbine and the realization he came to that video gaming is not a proper medium for provocation.

"I have inside me the same interest everyone does in understanding the shooting, because it is one of the darkest days in American history," he said. "I just choose to confront it in a unconventional manner and that's hard for people to deal with, but it is important because I am reaching people my age and younger who do understand the world through video games." ... "I understood outright that if I wanted to write a book it would be pretty evenly accepted even if it contained some critical points, people would still regard it as an acceptable form of communication," he said. "But saying the same or similar things in a game is both so new and so outside of the context of what people are used to looking at a video game for.

"This is a medium in which people use to drown out a few hours of their life after they get home from work or something. This is not the place you turn to for a challenging, moral program."

I say with all humility that the profile is worth a read. —Brian Crecente

Gamers was on a deadly road [Rocky Mountain News]

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