Hello
I'm Lauren Rae Orsini, a graduate student, journalist, infographic designer, anime convention reporter, and documentarian. Welcome.
This is the second installation of my interview with filmmaker Danny Ledonne, to be published in three parts. In this section, Ledonne shares his views on interactive narratives, and weighs in on how his own interactive narrative, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, fits into the canon.
Q: One thing we’ve touched on is how, in interactive narratives, you think you have a lot of control, but you don’t really have as much power as you think you do- it’s what the author of the narrative is influencing you. It’s linear at your own pace so it’s still going to go to the place that the creator deems. What do you think about that?
A: I know a number of game designers who have confided to me or they’ve said out loud in panel discussions, “You know, we’re actually not giving the player the opportunity to do whatever he or she wants, we’re giving them that feeling, we’re giving them perhaps that illusion. But ultimately all you’re doing is creating lines of codes, and on some level we’re still experiencing life in a linear way, we can’t travel through time, we exist in a three dimensional space and have gravity. So there’s all these restrictions in our real lives and in our virtual video game lives that are actually sources of constraint, so we don’t have no limitations, but I actually think that’s probably a good thing. If you were to exist, and there have been video games that have tried this, if you were to start a game with no explanation as to what it is, what you’re supposed to do, you don’t know what the controls are, and you just sort of go around and interact with objects but there’s really no clear reason as to why, you kind of have this existential moment in the game where you’re not sure what the purpose of the game is or what your purpose in the game is. So I think as much as we talk about interactivity, I think people still really secretly desire some elements of vary straightforward linear experiences in the game world because without that the experience just really falls apart. Some games do this in a more open ended way, “sand box games” like maybe The Sims or whatever where you can freely explore and experiences things. But even games like that have all kinds of assumptions built into them about how you’re supposed to interact with the game, and those are sort of, much like life, as with any game whether it be a video game, a board game, a sport, or an activity you play, there are rules to govern what the limits of the game are and how you play the game.
Q: I’ve heard that this is a negative, when interactive narratives are used in the news, that games do not give you that many choices and allow the creator’s bias to seep through. So you don’t think this is a negative?
A: I’m thinking about a game I played recently called “What Goes Around.” It’s a very simple video game made by a video game designer in his off hours, inspired by a poster that’s on a lot of billboards around New York City. Actually, they’re on pillars because it’s a circular design. It’s this poster where, on one side, you have a soldier where he’s holding a gun, and the barrel of the gun wraps around so its actually pointing at the back of his head and it says, What Goes Around Comes Around- Stop the war in Iraq or stop the war in Afghanistan. It’s a really basic point about warfare, and in the video game form, you’re this F-14 fighter pilot, and you encounter this UFO in the sky that’s wearing a turban, and that’s supposed to represent the Other in the geo-political imagination. You fire this missile, and it blows up the UFO. But the missile continues, and ends up spinning behind you and it’s kind of futile because eventually, the missile keeps going around and it will hit you and that’s the end of the game. You see a montage of war footage and a [ciron] at the bottom talking about recent warfare calamities. So that game is making some assumptions about warfare and what it is and what it isn’t. For some people those assumptions work really well so if you’re more of a pacifist mindset, you’ll say, “Oh, though these options are limited in the game, what it’s doing is forcing you to think about that particular relationship.” There are other people that think there are certain military actions and warfare that’s justified and this game precisely doesn’t represent those situations. People have leveled those accusations about the Columbine game as well in terms of what choices it allows you in terms of enacting these murders and what choices that it doesn’t. Any game is going to have some sort of confining factors. Think about a game like Grand Theft Auto, where though you have all this range of motion, you’re still cast as a criminal in the city and what you do relates to becoming a more credible or well known thug in Vice City or Liberty City or wherever. So let me think about what you said though. For journalism, I think, as a documentary filmmaker, it’s really bunk to lead people to believe that your work isn’t biased or that you’re showing both sides, as though there were really two sides, as though it were that simple to begin with. So I think there’s definitely room to present diverging points of view whether it’s traditional media or interactive new media. But let’s be honest, people should look at a variety of sources and make their own minds up, and not think that any one source, even if it has two sides, is going to give you all the information you might need about that topic.
Q: When you came out with SCMRPG, it was really controversial, to put it as an understatement. But what if you had waited a couple years? What if you had put it out now? Do you think it would still ruffle so many feathers?
A: 2009 was the ten year anniversary of the shooting so there was a lot of retrospective. I think if I had waited until after the ten year reunion, the shooting would have lost some of its resonance in the popular imagination. When I released the game, Columbine was still the worst school shooting in United States history- this was still before Virginia Tech. And that’s not to say that VT diminishes Columbine in any specific way, but that did force America to go through that kind of grievance again, in a slightly different more contemporary way. I think the short answer is, until there was a video game about Columbine, the first video game about Columbine would be controversial. Or the first video game about any such topic. My game was released within about two years of a lot of other significant games that look at, as the film shows, issues of Darfur, or the shootout in Waco, Texas, or 9-11, or the scandal of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, so this game actually kind of was released at the right time, although I wasn’t doing this consciously, I did see games like JFK Reloaded and 9-11 Survivor and thought, you know, I guess I’m not totally crazy for thinking a video game could do this about Columbine. But in the minds of most people who think video games are still just children’s toys, it doesn’t matter what year it gets released because it’s still going to be seen as controversial in that sector of society.
Comments
One Response to “An interview with Danny Ledonne, part II”
Leave a Reply
Upcoming Events
Danny Ledonne has some really enlightening comments in this section of his interview. I agree with him that games give us a false sense of freedom, even “sandbox” games that are considered to be open ended and allow unparalleled levels of interactivity… tend to be very limited in the choices your actually able to make for good reason. If you go the other extreme (Noby Noby Boy) they tend not to be fun anymore. A very good interview so far, can’t wait for part III… if there is a part III.