Game
On 20 April 1999, an event shocked the USA. Several students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were killed in a horrific shooting. Six years later, Danny Ledonne created a video game for amateurs that analysed the movements and possible motive of the two killers. That game received close to half a million downloads, and became a hugely controversial topic, raising questions about what is and is not acceptable in the “ethics of play”.
The documentary Playing Columbine: a true story of videogame controversy traces the history of the game, from its beginnings to the Slamdance 2007 Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, in which the game was eventually removed from the list of finalists. The documentary has managed to bring together people from different fields to analyse the issues surrounding the future of videogames as an art form and to try to explain how a game has managed to deal with the phenomenon from an emerging form of expression.
