School Shooter Mod Gets Taken Down From ModDB

School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 is a completely unremarkable mod for the Source engine.

Its unremarkable content can be summarised as “shooting standard adult Half-Life 2 citizens in a single box map described as a school, and absolutely nothing else”. The mod itself isn’t worth the time it took to arrange that sentence.

However, what you may find interesting is that this mod was removed last week by the moderators over at ModDB.

Founder Scott “INtense!” Reismanis went on to give a (fairly reasonable) explanation as to why, stating:

The challenge faced is we are currently receiving quite a bit of threatening mail as people believe we are the creators, supporters and makers of this content… As a result of this confusion and hate, at the moment we feel the best course of action is to remove the mod.

He also defended their commitment to free speech several times, saying that while they felt that it was in poor taste, they also believed that people have the “right to be creative” without it being dictated by the brass.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG is seen as the spark for school-shooting games, of which there have been a handful over the last few years. One of which being a Counter-Strike map set in a school (one of many), resulting in the creator being arrested as a possible “terroristic threat”.

Though their decision was defensible, I utterly disagree with it. While ModDB themselves were not judging the game by removing it, they are supporting the judgments of a vocal, yet ill-informed minority. It would be incredibly hypocritical to accuse the game of being tasteless, given our hobby in which we quite often kill adult civilians — I mean, just look at it — and vain to assume that our definition of what is tasteless is unique and precious. By acquiescing, ModDB have taken something forgettable and harmless, and turned it into a censorship debate.

Naturally, Jack Thompson had something to say about it. But hey, what would a transparent, meaningless controversy be without a gormless nutjob letting everyone know about it?