Kotaku
I've written up a piece about the reasoning behind Super Columbine Massacre RPG being pulled from the Slamdance festival for the Rocky Mountain News.
In it the festival president Peter Baxter says that he made the decision free of any outside pressure based on moral grounds and concern for the future of the organization.
"On the one hand a jury selected this game, and as a result of that decision it leads to our organization supporting their creative decision," said Slamdance President Peter Baxter. "On the other hand there are moral obligations to consider here with this particular game in addition to the impact it could have on the Slamdance organization and its community."Ultimately it was my decision to pull this game and I hope that a choice like it will never have to be made again."
We first broke the news of the game being pulled from the Slamdance game festival yesterday and the reaction has been, as expected, very mixed.
Surprisingly, one of the strongest reactions seems to come from Sam Roberts, the man who is in charge of the Slamdance's games' competition and helped convince Ledonne to enter the game in the first place.
"I believe this festival's mission is to give the artists a place to express themselves," he said. "This is a decision I disagree strongly with. I think it will hurt the competition. This is not what we are supposed to be doing, this is the very opposite of it."
And while Baxter even seems to worry over the implications, both Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference, and Simon Carless, chairman of the International Games Festival, see to caution moderation in the reaction.
"We in the game industry love to compare films to games but the analogy is not 100 percent complete," Moledina said. "Games are interactive medium. There is this kind of grey area here. We need to be careful and not automatically fall for that analogy."Simon Carless, chairman of the annual International Games Festival competition, while concerned about the decision to pull the game, said he doesn't think it will impact many other game designers.
"I don't think this will discourage people from making games that have social meaning," he said. "I think there is plenty of interesting and important ground we can cover in games before we get that far out."
Super Columbine Massacre RPG "is such a polarizing title," he said.
Check out the full story over at the Rocky.
Columbine Game Pulled From Competition [Rocky Mountain News]
