Starz Denver Film Festival: Danny Ledonne
The creator of Playing Columbine has few answers
The creator of Playing Columbine has few answers
Playing Columbine
Former Alamosa resident Danny Ledonne has been dealing with a backlash (to put it lightly) since he released his tauntingly titled online video game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!,in 2005. In Ledonne’s game—which is, as promised in the title, based on the tragic 1999 school shooting at Littleton’s Columbine High School—players assume the roles of Columbine gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, blasting away students and ultimately battling monsters in hell.
It’s no surprise the game drew howls of protest. To answer questions and tell his side of the story, Ledonne made Playing Columbine, a documentary screened Saturday, Nov. 22, at Starz FilmCenter as part of the Starz Denver Film Festival. The film predictably touches on the horrified responses to his game, as well as the purpose of video games as an artistic medium. Ledonne, along with Brian Crecente, former Rocky Mountain News video-game critic and current managing editor of Kotaku (Gawker’s gaming blog), led a panel discussion on the subject at Starz on Saturday. Titled “Deadly Games: Echoes Of Columbine” and moderated by the Denver Film Society’s Robert Denerstein, the talk dealt with the role of video games as art, and brought up plenty of questions about Ledonne’s motives in creating his controversial RPG.
While the panel as a whole was lively, the smug, bearded Ledonne never strayed from the canned message of the film or dipped into a real give-and-take discussion. He talked, as he does in the film, of his own experience. He was a sophomore at Alamosa High School when the Columbine shootings happened, and he was surprised at the time how much he identified with the media portrayal of Harris and Klebold—right down to the duo’s alienation, worship of Marilyn Manson, and love of the violent video game Doom.
Ledonne created the game years later, he said, to spark discussion and confront the people who exploit school shootings—those who argue, for instance, for the installation of metal detectors in schools and “putting the Ten Commandments on the walls.” Defending his game, Ledonne continued to lean heavily on the prefab rebuttals he’d already used in his film.
The most vital part of the discussion came from Crecente, who was more interested in theorizing about the development of video games as an artform than in rehashing Ledonne’s self-created controversy. Crecente touched on the evolution of games from an ostensibly frivolous medium into a malleable, interactive mode of reality—citing BioShock, a game that transmits the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand through a survival scenario in a dystopic society. “We have to stop differentiating video games from other forms of expression," Crecente said at one point.
Crecente confronted Ledonne head-on a few times, but his criticisms were few and far between. It would have been refreshing to hear from someone not wrapped up in the video-games world, but directly connected to the Columbine shooting. Without that glaringly omitted voice, the panel felt very one-sided.
Ultimately, the real question that emerged from the discussion remained unanswered: How does a society engender things like school shootings, and what can it do to prevent them? And with all Ledonne’s lofty speech about analyzing the society that creates alienated youth, he never really did that himself. His solution? Work at a Boys & Girls club, like he does. When asked what players of his game have to do to win, Ledonne answered, “I guess you win in the game by learning more about Columbine.” Okay, Danny, we’ve all learned plenty about Columbine over the past nine years. But now what?
