It’s been a while since the first time I played this game. I would have though that having had played it before the second play through would give me a different perspective on the whole game. The odd part was that it really didn’t. Granted I had a much easier time placing the propane tanks this time around (Yay RPG Maker limitations) but that’s not really the part the gets me, it’s more the stigma associated with the game. It’s awefully hard for us to humanize our enemies, heck everytime we go to war we fight against them. If we look back to past serial killers and our enemies at war time, we as a species have an amazing tendency to forget that our enemies are indeed, to at least some extent, just like us. I guess that’s why I enjoy the game, for me personally I have a real feeling of, “There but for the grace of God, goes I.” I played the same games these kids did, I listened to the same music, I wore black and trench coats and I was ostracized a bit as a nerd. heck at the time Dylan and Eric were only a few years my senior. I can relate to their frustrations with their surroundings and their problems in school, however the part that gets me every time is wondering what made them go over the edge. The game designer apparently had a very similar view point. The game doesn’t try and justify the actions of two boys, it just tries to help you understand them, to humanize them. Understanding why people do monstrous things does not mean you condone it, or that you also are a monster; it means your just as human as they were.
Chris,
Great comment. Yes, SCMRPG! doesn’t condone the actions, but it does make us look at those who committed them to help understand why. We can’t completely avoid looking at what makes them human because what makes a killer human is the same thing that makes us human – and the fact that someone could become like them makes it all the more sobering. I recommend the film Stray Dog by Akira Kurosawa; this asks the exact same question of “What happened between me and this other guy that made him become a criminal and me become a cop?” I saw it as well in a book on the Bataan Death March where the author used several accounts from the Japanese perspective to better illustrate the events (though the account still seemed incomplete). There’s not really a good answer to this, but we definitely don’t want to avoid looking at the face of those we hate. That aversion is as much out of fear of what we might find there (either good or bad) but whether we might see some of that reflected in ourselves.
-Devin Monnens