Video game based on Virginia Tech meant to help victims grieve

School shootings are horrible events, and video games are often vilified if it’s learned the shooter(s) played them. This is magnified when some disturbed individual makes a game which glorifies the shooter. But what about a game where the object is to deal with the grief after such an incident? One game developer wants to create such a game, using the Virginia Tech shooting from 2007 as his scenario.

Manveer Heir, a game developer with Raven Software, graduated from Virginia Tech in 2004. He wants to help his Alma mater deal with the shooting by designing a game set on the day after its occurrence. His goal is to create a game which utilizes an internal “grief score,” determined by your character’s actions, that affects the game’s outcome. Heir’s outline of his game can be found here and here, but he describes it as a game of choices with multiple paths and endings that shows how people deal with grief in real life.

Heir says on his blog: “To make a video game based around these events is difficult and delicate. Instead of dealing with the violence of the actual attacks, what struck me was the way the community rallied together to start the healing process.”

Heir’s additional motivation for creating the game comes from video game designer Steve Gaynor. Through his blog, Gaynor has sought out game developers to create games with, “an experience that the player will find meaningful…novel, poignant, interesting, personal, or enlightening.”

“As video game designers,” Gaynor says, “we’ve explored a few forms of conflict with great fidelity: mostly direct and violent. If we’ve succeeded by now in conveying feelings like “exhilaration,” “fear,” and “victory,” and conflicts [like] “good vs. evil,” the Call to Arms focuses on some more elusive aesthetics.”

Many of you probably cringed at the idea of a Virgina Tech-inspired video game, and understandably so. Video games have often been stigmatized as a cause of school shootings and, even worse, as mocking them.
After the Virginia Tech Rampage in 2007, an Australian kid named Ryan Lambourn created a game about the attack where you play as the shooter. Lambourn says he created the game, “because it’s funny.” Lambourn, you and the guy who made Super Columbine Massacre RPG should be thrown into the bush and mauled by dingoes, mate.

Video games and gamers need better representation than disturbed GTA fanboys that go on real world rampages, and while grief-games may not be best-sellers, they could serve as useful counseling tools. However, video games may not be the best thing to turn to after such a tragedy, and probably why grief is an “elusive aesthetic” in games. Some issues can’t be dealt with virtually, and something that happens in reality should ultimately be dealt with there. Otherwise, as we’ve seen, the line between fantasy and reality may be crossed with disastrous results.