Sunday, January 7, 2007

Slammin' Slamdance

I'd been meaning to post about the Slamdance/ColumbineRPG thing for a while, but am glad I held off, as the plot has thickened.


- Slamdance is an indie film festival that has a games competition component to it.

- There's been a bit of a brouhaha about the fact that the organizers first nominated/invited Super Columbine Massacre RPG, and then recently, removed it.

- Kotaku reported on this, citing that Danny Ledonne, the game's creator had been told by festival organizers that pressure from financial backers had been the cause.

- This was followed up by a piece saying that the festival's organizers had clarified that it was pulled on moral grounds (though the same piece says the organizer of the games portion of the festival was strongly opposed to it's removal).

- N'Gai Croal was among many to point out the double standard applied when films addressing the same or even more risquee subject matter are never pulled from such festivals. Greg Costikyan's post on the subject does so as well, and is worth reading.

Raph has also posted a lengthy piece on the subject here, in which I learned the latest twist: That Jon Blow has pulled Braid from the competition in protest. Braid, a game I blogged about briefly in my GDC post (which I really liked plain, despite the fact that it made my brain hurt!), was one of the other nominees.

Now a skeptic might say that this is good publicity for Jon, and that he was going to have a hard time winning against games like Flow, Toribash and Plasma Pong (revolutionary, no, but it's pretty), and that this move will get him FAR more press love. However, I know Jon, and I know this is not the case. He's the real deal. His statement on the subject is worth reading.

Plus, he's already won something out of this competition: I intend to buy him drinks when/if I see him at GDC this year, as a token of my appreciation for his taking a stand. :-)

Nicely done Jon! Cheers!


Anonymous said...

The seriousness of this issue derives from the festival director's apparent medial bigotry; Braid's leverage against his decision, even if it were met by the threatened withdrawl of a few other teams, perhaps even all of them, would probably be desirable to a man who would have given the film festival award to Elephant a few years earlier. Film is the focus of HIS festival, and the possiblity of Super Columbine winning, effectively overshadowing any film entries in publicity terms, is unacceptable for him to allow.

Anonymous said...

Greg Costikyan supports the festival still, despite his pitch of "games for gamers". My opinion is that his position on the festival is rubbish, regardless what is said about the game.

His post is not worth reading, nor is his blog any longer until he reverses his hypocrisy.