V-Tech Videogame: WTF?
A Sydney, Australia based newspaper reports on how one sincerely twisted kid has made a rudiamentary video game based on the recent Virginia Tech massacre and posted it to both a gaming website as well as his own site for the world to enjoy. He softened the initial horror and outrage by offering to remove it from all sites for $2,000. An apology will cost $3,000.
The game features a gun-toting character based on Cho, the dormitory where the killing spree started, the post office where he sent his manifesto to a TV network and Norris Hall, the building where most of the murders took place.
The game first came to light after it was uploaded to a site called newgrounds.com which hosts a large number of basic, mainly home made , computer games. Game makers upload their creations on to the site much in the same way as people upload videos to YouTube.
V-Tech Rampage is the work of 21-year-old Ryan Lambourn from western Sydney who goes by the screen name, Master PiGPEN.
“I’ve done offensive things before but they’re not usually this popular,” Lamourn said, adding that he made the game “because it’s funny”.
I’m not trying to be sensationalist here, and I definitely don’t want to give credence to this idiocy by calling attention to it. Nor is this meant to be a swipe at Australia as a country…
I suppose that as an American, I am so used to this type of nonsense happening here that it is bizarre to see a citizen of another country - even an English speaking one - take a foreign national tragedy and mistake trivializing it for clever irony (if it even goes that deep).
To you media pundits out there: it’s true that more people die every day in Iraq than the single day tally for Cho Seung-hui. It’s also true that it takes a country with the vast media obsession of the US to instantly generate worldwide notoriety of a heinous crime when countless other unspeakable violations against humanity were occurring fairly unnoticed for a long while in Darfur before recent high-profile efforts helped shed light on the genocide there.
What really stings the US, though, is the nature of the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. It’s another indicator that we are failing as a society to care for each other and engendering isolationist malcontent - fertile ground for unpredictable, entropic mass homicide.
Having another country’s citizen make light of such an occurrence only serves as a painful reminder that the US owns the dubious distinction of global leader in terms of frequency and scale of these sort of crimes worldwide. Just the type of instance that anyone with even an inkling of revulsion for American social establishment would use to drive their point home.
On that note, I still am baffled by the power of the NRA and other pro-2nd Ammendment lobbyists to prevent any sort of revision to US gun laws despite such overwhelming empirical and statistical evidence to do so.
Without venturing any further down the partisan path, it’s suffice to say that there is an undercurrent of severe unhappiness in first world nations. In the countries where basic humanitarian values and provisions are taken for granted - with the US being the most exaggerated example - the undercurrent most often manifests itself as society’s self-inflicted wounds.
How do we evolve?
Stumble it!
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