I should be frank: I'm actually a bit tired of hearing about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. That's not because I don't support the game -- I was one of its earliest supporters, and I remain impressed and intrigued by the way the game attempts to put the player in the disturbing shoes of Harris and Klebold. Rather, I'm tired of seeing conversations sparked by SCMRPG that only advance theories about games in general, instead of making actual critiques of this particular game itself.

The latest volley is from Will Interactive CEO Sharon Sloane, who recently wrote an opinion piece about the game on industry trade site Gamasutra. You can read the piece for yourself, but here's the part I'm most bothered by:

The increasing industrialization of all art contributes to opinions like this, which seem to hope that all expression can be made into science, guaranteed "effectiveness" and "results" that can then be measured against some known standard. I even devoted the last chapter of my forthcoming book to a commentary on this state of affairs. If all that "serious games" comes to mean is educational drivel produced to exemplify the latest learning theories then you can count me out.

Art is not supposed to be comfortable. Art is not supposed to be a "positive educational experience," to use Sloane's words. Art must be allowed to be disturbing and dangerous. It must be allowed to make us uncomfortable. There is a place in art -- and in games -- for work that speaks on its own, without appeal to authority, educational standards, psychology, or anything else. Designing solely for reception is a weakness we must overcome.

I made this point at the end of Georgia Tech's Living Game Worlds III symposium last month, and I'll make it again here: discussing how games do or should be created or received, in the abstract, is not useful. Discussing how and how well specific games succeed in their attempts at representation is useful. That's what we call criticism, and it's something we desperately need more of in games in general.

The world is a messy place, and we don't always, or even often, get to make sense of it in a clean way. We have to get our hands dirty. Art is one way to help us do that. And art does not take exit surveys.

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