New Video Game ‘Active Shooter’ Allows You To Take on the Role of a School Shooter

From Snopes.com:

In May 2018, survivors of the Parkland school shooting massacre, and many others both on and off social media, responded with horror at reports of a video game in which players could assume the role of a school shooter.

Jaclyn Corin, a survivor of the 14 February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, called the game (which is titled Active Shooter) “disgusting” in a tweet and urged others to sign a petition calling for the game not to be released. (The online petition garnered almost 100,000 signatures within four days.)

Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter Alaina was killed in the shooting rampage, accused Valve Corporation (the Bellevue, Washington, company that runs the Steam platform on which the game would be distributed and run) of “trying to profit from the glamorization of tragedies affecting our schools across the country” and also called the game “disgusting.”

The game is indeed real: it was published by a Russian company called Acid and developed by Revived Games (featuring games such as Furry, Tyde Pod Challenge, and White Power: Pure Voltage. which carries the following description: “The Underworld is an alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human species world. It contains the same parts of the Universe as humanity does, but much more in a darker, colder and hostile manner.”)

Active Shooter‘s descriptive entry on Steam’s web site read as follows:

Pick your role, gear up and fight or destroy! Be the good guy or the bad guy. The choice is yours! Only in “Active Shooter”, you will be able to pick the role of an Elite S.W.A.T member or the actual shooter.

A video preview of the game showed a shooter armed with a rifle, handgun, and knife stalking the classrooms and corridors of a school, shooting at both police and civilians while a “kill counter” shows the number of “cops” and “civ” (civilians) the player had murdered.

This is a real game that is still scheduled to be released next month. We will see whether it actually happens, and report back in the future.

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, Canada –

Hackers around the World have been rampantly posting online about their opinions on the new Ubisoft video game “Watch Dogs,” which was released last week. The video game is based around a fictional hacker who wanders the streets of Chicago using his cell phone to control nearly any electronic device he wishes, which he uses to gain information and help avoid cyber-terrorists.

“As a hacker, it makes me feel really lame – I could point my phone at a person, and it won’t just hack their bank account. It’s completely absurd that this guy can do this stuff with such ease.” Said a self-proclaimed hacker who goes by the online name Lord Nikon. “The game makes it look too easy. He just scans people with his cell phone, takes their cash or their music, unlocks a car, and drives like an asshole through the city. I can’t do any of that at all. Watchdogs is totally unrealistic.”

Throughout the years, the art of hacking has been portrayed throughout movies, television, and now video games as some sort of exciting, other-worldly experience, where the hacker is always a half-step ahead of the law or other hackers, and spends their nights staring at a computer screen filled with gorgeous graphics. As hacker Cereal Killer points out to us, that isn’t generally the case.

“You know, I don’t see the big deal with this guy in the game.” Said Killer. “Even if I could just take a stroll and steal peoples stuff, walking just takes too much outta me, ya know? I like doing this stuff because I can sit here in my room, eating Bagel Bites, downloading music illegally and watching anime porn. That’s the true life of a hacker. Well, at least it’s my true life. I can’t really speak for everyone.”

Real-life hackers tend to experience extreme amounts of boredom brought on by so much waiting around, so bringing the technology developed for the fictional story in Watchdogs to life would be a silver lining for the hoards of anonymous hackers throughout the world.

“If these people could walk around while hacking the computers around them, it would greatly decrease their risks of collapse due to ennui.” Says Dr. Emmanuel Goldstein of the Chicago Memorial Hospital, cardiology division. “This concept would be the best thing to happen to cyber-crime since the invention of wireless internet!”

As technology expands, the hackers that we spoke with had mixed feelings about how great it would be to be able to commit hack the people around them like a character in a video game.

“I prefer to just relax, enjoy a Jolt cola, and watch reruns of The Outer Limits with my girlfriend AcidBurn.” Said a hacker whose online alias is ZeroCool. “I just can’t imagine why I’d want to run all over the city and get all sweaty. Hacking is an intelligent man’s game, a real-world thrill posed in an unreal world. I’ll keep playing the game, but I would never buy into that sort of technology.”