I, Columbine Killer

When you actually get to the school and begin the attack, things become subtler yet. As you wander through the hallways, the little pixilated victims scurry around in semi-random paths, and any time you cross paths a battle is triggered. You encounter the same six or seven kids over and over again: the "Jock Type," the "Preppy Girl," the "Sheltered Girl", the "Preppy Boy."

It's a neat stab at the mindset of the killers, who, for all their bombast about being objectified by their tormentors, did precisely the same thing to their victims. They didn't see them as individuals: They were just metaphoric targets for their hatred. Indeed, in the game, as the killers did in real life, you don't target any particular kids. You just wander around killing randomly. And Ledonne's aesthetic decision to make Super Columbine so retro-looking enhances this effect: The game's style evokes the killer's pared-down, simplistic, self-serving view of the world.

Ledonne also gets in a few sly jabs at video-game culture itself. When you acquire your weapons, the game announces it with the sort of cheery dialog box that is typical in an RPG: "You acquire a Fire Spell! You pick up a Frag Grenade!" Except here, because the weapons are drawn from real life ("Eric got a Hi-Point model 996 carbine rifle complete with shoulder strap!"), the exuberant tone highlights just how psychotic and disconnected from reality the conventions of video games can sometimes seem.

And this, really, is what makes Super Columbine so artistically interesting: It uses the language of games as a way to think about the massacre. Ledonne, like all creators of "serious games," uses gameplay as a rhetorical technique. (In fact, to support Ledonne's artistic license, almost half the finalists in the Slamdance competition have pulled their games, and USC's Interactive Media Division has withdrawn its sponsorship.)

The game is hardly perfect, of course. Ledonne's sardonic touch sometimes becomes a bit heavy-handed, detracting from its power. And his use of the killers' many self-mythologizing quotations -- including material from Nietzsche, Shelley's Frankenstein and T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, among others -- wind up seeming merely ponderous, instead of thought-provoking.

But you certainly can't argue that the game merely trivializes the killings, or voyeuristically revels in them. As the school shootings wind up, your avatar commits suicide in the library alongside Harris. The game cuts to real-life photographs of the killers' dead bodies, taken from security cameras in the schools. These are the only photos of real-life carnage you see in the entire game: Ledonne follows them up with a montage of news photos of the survivors clutching each other in horror, then archival shots of the killers as young boys, but he avoids any pictures of the dead victims.

The overall effect is a bit bathetic, but still -- after all the pixelated abstraction, the sudden appearance of real-life photos leaves you pondering the mystery of the shootings anew. Though you know more, you still can't quite fathom why it happened.

There was one final bit of gameplay I didn't understand at first. After you commit suicide, you awake to find yourself in a parody version of hell. I wandered around, being attacked by demons that -- in a hilarious meta touch -- were plucked from Doom, the very game originally blamed for inspiring the Columbine killings. But I didn't get very far, because the game became suddenly very hard, and the demons quickly overcame me. I knew from reading online descriptions of Super Columbine that the hell sequence goes on for a long time, but I couldn't figure out how I could possibly play such a hard level.

So I called up Ledonne to ask what the secret was. He pointed out that in his game, as in any RPG, you become more powerful with each enemy you kill -- "leveling up," as it's called. To survive in hell, you need to level up as far as you can while you're still in the school, which means you need to kill virtually every student in existence. I hadn't done that, so when I got to hell I was too weak.

"It's a little joke -- you have to be really, really bad to survive in hell," Ledonne said. "But I'm also making a point about choice in real life. The killers made a choice every time they pulled the trigger, and it affected them. You make the same choices in the game, and it affects you."