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A new video game in which the player stalks and shoots fellow students and teachers in school settings is drawing fire from school district officials.
"School Shooter: North American Tour 2012" is a first-person game that allows the player to move around a school and collect points by killing defenseless students and teachers.
The game, developed by Checkerboarded Studios, is actually a modification, or mod, of a popular first-person shooter game called Half-Life 2. According to Checkerboarded's website, checkerboarded.com, the producers' specialty is Half-Life 2 knockoffs meant to be satirical.
In describing School Shooter, the producer's site says that "you play as a disgruntled student fed up with something or other (We're not exactly sure), who after researching multiple school shooting martyrs, decides to become the best school shooter ever."
Players can arm themselves with the same weapons used by real-life student gunmen, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot and killed 13 people in April 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado before killing themselves, and Seung-Hui Cho, who fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007. He also killed himself.
"The possibilities are endless!" the site boasts. "You are free to do whatever you want (So long as it involves shooting people in a school)."
The mod had been posted on the ModDB online repository of game add-ons. It was pulled from ModDB because, founder Scott Reismanis said, it was "getting quite a bit of mainstream press due to the controversial nature of the content."
What Research Shows
Much of the controversy stems from the combination of the sensitivity surrounding school shootings and a demonstrated link between playing violent video games and an increase in violent behavior, according to Douglas A. Gentile, the director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University, in Ames.