The game pits you in the role of the two disaffected teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who tragically murdered many of their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School in 1999 before taking their own lives. You relive the events leading up to the shooting as either Eric or Dylan in a graphically very crude environment (a pixelated, top-down affair featuring cartoonish sprites rather than the photorealism of today’s high-powered shooters). Once your character(s) die, the game then sends you to Hell, where you shoot your way through hordes of demons.

As the film unfolds, it attempts to mount an eloquent defence of Super…RPG! Scores of interviews conducted with various game industry professionals, academics and independent filmmakers point out the experience of playing Super…RPG!, of immersing yourself into the roles of these two young men, leads to a far better understanding of the complex web of socio-economical constraints that led them to visit the horror they did upon those around them. The film also branches out by showing other examples of games with agendas, such as Darfur is dying, where you play as refugees in Sudan attempting to escape murderers in a desert setting, or Fatworld, a critique of fast-food restaurant chains.

There is just one problem. Playing Columbine’s director is Danny Ledonne, the same man who created Super…RPG! in the first place.

Now, this shouldn’t completely invalidate the film’s thesis, but it certainly does raise a few questions. First and foremost, one wonders why there are so many in the movie who are ready to come to Ledonne’s defence, and only a few actually deeply critical voices. Of the latter, only one, New York Senator Andrew Lanza, trying to enact legislation that would label violent games more clearly, comes off as somewhat reasonable, and even he isn’t given the chance to fully explain exactly what he is trying to do. The other major two critical voices are just too easy to brush off for viewers. One, Roger Kovaks, a young man who had a friend that died in the Columbine massacre, clearly confronts Ledonne from an emotional standpoint, unable to view the amateur game maker’s work objectively.

The last major critical voice is simply a complete caricature, well-known to gamers worldwide as a tireless, now actually disbarred U.S. lawyer who would be perfectly happy to see all violent games banned forever, Jack Thompson. When he is introduced as explaining that he wakes up at 5 a.m. every morning because he is very busy saving Western civilization, it becomes a little difficult to take anything else he says seriously.

Watching the film yesterday night at Concordia University’s cramped J.A. De Sève Cinema, I felt as if it was preaching to the choir, particularly whenever anyone remotely critical of Ledonne’s work appeared on camera and promptly got booed and hissed by the rather immature group of four-five people sitting behind me.

There is a part of the movie which will resonate with Montreal viewers, as it ties into Kimveer Gill’s Dawson College shooting attack in 2006. When Gill died, it was discovered one of his favourite video game titles was actually Super…RPG!

This section would have particularly benefitted from a more objective point of view. Obviously, Ledonne must have gone through a whole range of sentiment once he heard the news. How could he not have? A video game that he created with the stated purpose of allowing people to better understand what caused a school shooting in 1999 in his native Colorado actually wound up becoming a favourite of yet another school shooter in another country seven years later.

Yet we do not gain much emotional insight from Ledonne, either here or in other segments, as he remains too shy to turn the camera on himself for lengthy periods of time.

The film is not particularly long at 94 minutes, but could have probably used a few trims here and there, as there is much repetition among the battery of industry pros who ceaselessly defend Ledonne’s work and call for more games that challenge the mainstream idea of what kind of subject this nascent art form should be allowed to tackle. The message is clearly understandable, there is no need to repeat it ad nauseam. This is probably yet again something that could have been avoided if Ledonne had let someone else direct the movie, or at least co-direct it.

The film played twice at Fantasia this weekend and no further screenings are scheduled as of now. For more information on it, visit www.playingcolumbine.com

More information about Fantasia can be obtained here: www.fantasiafest.com