Blogs / Reality Base

We’ve covered the Torture Game, in which players can gratuitously torture a captive avatar to their hearts’ content. But the controversy over violent and potentially exploitative video games hit an entirely new level with Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a free online game that lets players recreate the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School that resulted in 15 deaths (including the suicides of the teenage shooters).

MSNBC reports that the game “presents players with a low-res gaming experience that uses material culled from [the shooters] Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebold’s own words, media reports and police documents.” Players are placed in the roles of the shooters and allowed to relive their last two days. No surprise, it’s sparked considerable uproar since its launch, so much so that the creator, 26-year-old Danny Ledonne, made a documentary about the aftermath.

Granted, while the Columbine game may be one of the most politically and emotionally charged, plenty of other games allow players to reenact national and international tragedies, from the JFK assassination to “September 12th,” which lets players send missiles into an Afghan Village. (For a list of these and other controversial games, go here.)

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Americans love to hail our democratic system as the pinnacle of freedom and justice, the gold standard in the protection of human rights. But according to a new study by FSU political science professor Will Moore, countries with checks and balances systems in place are less likely to outlaw the use of torture.

The reason, Moore explains, is that a multi-faceted system of government makes it inherently more difficult to effect change:

“Checks on executive authorities are viewed as a positive attribute of liberal democracies,” Moore said. “Unfortunately, they are also associated with the continuation of the status quo. So this liberal democratic institution that at first pass one might expect to be positively associated with the termination of the use of torture is actually a hurdle to be overcome.”

After analyzing nine years of data from the CIRI Human Rights Database, which is based on Amnesty International and U.S. State Department reports, Moore found that other “traditionally democratic” aspects of government such as universal suffrage and a right to free speech increased a country’s chances of terminating the use of torture. They also found that 78 percent of the world’s governments used torture at least once during the last 25 years of the 20th century, and those who used it in a given year had a 93 percent chance of using it the next year.

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