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Arts & Entertainment

Someone tried to release a school shooting video game; we should do better

Video games are one of the most common scapegoats of the modern age, treated unfairly by anyone who doesn't understand them. When there's a shooting, somebody blames video games. When men start working fewer hours, somebody blames video games. It's a ridiculous, knee-jerk reaction that is almost never founded on evidence.

Games are like any other art form that came before them, such as film, theater and music. They are typically seen as entertainment, and they can be used to convey a wide variety of messages and emotions. Some games will make you feel competitive and even stressed, yes, but others will make you happy. Some will make you sad. A few might even make you cry.

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But just as there are tasteless movies, tasteless books and tasteless songs, there are tasteless video games, and one of those games never should have come as close as it did to release.

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The game in question is Active Shooter, which recently made waves for being a game about school shootings. By all appearances, the unreleased product was not a thoughtful game about the subject (as much as one could accept that "school shootings" and "game" could ever reasonably be in the same sentence), but rather an action game focused entirely on shooting. Players could choose to play as an active shooter or as the SWAT forces tasked with taking the shooter down.

Disgust and outrage spread soon after the pre-order page for the game appeared on Steam, an online storefront that is practically ubiquitous in the world of computer gaming these days. Parents of the Parkland shooting victims, as well as outspoken survivors like Emma Gonzalez, expressed disgust online. A Change.org petition pleading with Valve Corporation (which owns and operates Steam) to remove the game garnered more than 200,000 signatures.

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Beyond just being tasteless and opportunistic, Active Shooter appeared to be what many people refer to as an "asset flip" -- a game quickly cobbled together with purchased art assets (rather than original content) for the sole purpose of making a quick buck. Some notorious developers in the past have released dozens of sub-par, barely-functioning games per year in an attempt to generate quick income.

On Tuesday afternoon, Valve responded by removing Active Shooter -- and its developer -- from Steam. As it turns out, the developer was someone Valve was familiar with.

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"We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher ACID from Steam," Valve told news outlets in a statement. "This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously been removed last fall when he was operating as '[bc]Interactive' and 'Elusive Team.' Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation. His subsequent return under new business names was a fact that came to light as we investigated the controversy around his upcoming title. We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve."

One instance of the developer "publishing copyrighted material" was his game Piccled Ricc, which clearly had no official connection to the Adult Swim show it was ripping off, Rick and Morty.

Valve was right to remove Active Shooter from its store, and I'm glad they did so before it was even released. It the right move for the platform and, despite what some of the game's defenders say, it's good for video games as a whole.

Don't misunderstand. I would not advocate for a governing body to raid the developer's home and force him to stop making Active Shooter, nor do I think it should be illegal to play it. But no self-respecting storefront -- especially one that cares about the future of video games -- should sell it. It makes the medium look bad, and it's the kind of thing that provides ammo for anybody who would want to heavily regulate what games can be created or sold.

Every game needs an antagonist, right?

A lot of games -- digital and not -- require somebody to play the bad guy. Kids have grown up playing Cops and Robbers. The board game Axis and Allies is a classic. The competitive Rainbow Six games (based loosely on old Tom Clancy novels) require some teams to play as terrorists watching over hostages. Furthermore, movies like The Godfather and shows like Breaking Bad are all about the villain.

One of the biggest differences, though, is that every single one of those pieces of media was created with much more thought than Active Shooter. If more thought had been given to a game about school shootings ... well, frankly, it probably wouldn't have progressed passed the idea phase.

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There's also the extremely important factor that other games which supposedly have "worse" violence (games like Carmageddon, an old vehicular combat game that allowed you to run over pedestrians) are centered around adults.

The rules are different when dealing with children. Other video game developers know this, and they have set the precedent.

The fantasy video game series Fable for example, was well-known for giving players the freedom to do all sorts of things -- including killing entire villages worth of people. The only people you couldn't kill, though? Children. Despite the game being rated M for Mature by the ESRB (and thus deemed suitable only for adults, ages 17 and up), the people making Fable were self-aware enough to avoid the drama of creating a way to slaughter a bunch of kids.

Think of the timing

Earlier this year, the console release of an independent video game called Death Road to Canada was delayed in the wake of a tragic attack in Toronto in which a man drove a van through a crowd of pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring more.

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Death Road to Canada isn't about driving cars into innocent civilians. It's about surviving a road trip through a world filled with zombies. Still, the game's publisher said at the time, "We feel it would be deeply inappropriate to launch the game at such a time. We would like to express our deepest condolences to everyone affected by the tragic events in Toronto."

The developer of Active Shooter, meanwhile, tried to rush his game out the door not long after a deadly school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.

Video games can provide powerful experiences that add a lot of value to the world. They can excite us, encourage friendships, teach us empathy, force us to grapple with tough choices and so much more. But if we can't agree to use them responsibly, uplifting the good while decrying the bad, then people are just going to continue blaming Call of Duty and Fortnite for all of society's ills.

For more on video games and geek culture, follow @BrittonPeele on Twitter.