Comment Comment from last year's winner (Score 1) 209
Wow, this is terrible. I'm sure the festival organizers, including Sam Roberts whom we met last year when we competed there, are devastated by being forced into this. They courted SCRPG! for the festival, but in hindsight, it was a little too risky. Sam is a good guy who wants to push on the frontiers of gaming; he must be very disappointed. But he should be proud he had the guts to originally include it in the festival, I hope people realize it was against his wishes to pull it. It would have been unfair to the other finalists to have not pulled it, leading to the festival being cancelled.
It's unclear how much this will tarnish the reputation of Slamdance, or the broader game industry somehow, but hopefully this event will lead to more debate and discussion about games as a medium for serious expression. Although school shootings are a very incendiary topic, I think it's a better tool for debate than, say, the more puerile controversies over the right to have prostitutes and hidden soft-core sex in the Grand Theft Auto games.
I also recommend everyone rent Elephant , if you haven't already — a movie on the same topic as SCRPG!, which won the top prize at film's most prestigious festival, for crissakes! The irony is thick here.
(Trivia: My local Portland game developer meetings are sometimes organized by a guy named Corwin Light-Williams, who made the videogame parody footage for Elephant by programming an actual custom videogame, which allowed players to shoot at Gerry . How many people get "video game designer" in a movie credits?)
It's unclear how much this will tarnish the reputation of Slamdance, or the broader game industry somehow, but hopefully this event will lead to more debate and discussion about games as a medium for serious expression. Although school shootings are a very incendiary topic, I think it's a better tool for debate than, say, the more puerile controversies over the right to have prostitutes and hidden soft-core sex in the Grand Theft Auto games.
I also recommend everyone rent Elephant , if you haven't already — a movie on the same topic as SCRPG!, which won the top prize at film's most prestigious festival, for crissakes! The irony is thick here.
(Trivia: My local Portland game developer meetings are sometimes organized by a guy named Corwin Light-Williams, who made the videogame parody footage for Elephant by programming an actual custom videogame, which allowed players to shoot at Gerry . How many people get "video game designer" in a movie credits?)
