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Revive Interactive

When Stephanie Robinett, a mom in Seattle, first heard about Active Shooter, a video game being released via online marketplace Steam next month, she was appalled.

In the game, the player can choose to either be a member of a S.W.A.T. team or the titular active shooter. "Depending on the role," the game's description reads, "your objective might be to protect and extract or hunt and destroy." The game advertises several features, including "Realistic First Person Controller," "Variety of real life weapons," "Impressive A.I.," "Destruction physics," and, "Real Life situations," one of which is a school. In demos, you can see the shooter picking off students, teachers, and law enforcement. It's gruesome, and the timing, to Robinett, could not have been worse.

Robinett started a petition asking Valve, the Bellevue company that owns Steam, not to release the game. "The company is taking the stand that this game is legal because of free speech and everything else that tech billionaires hide behind when they are doing something the public knows is absolutely, morally corrupt but legally fine—but we cannot stand for this," the petition reads. "How can anyone sleep at night knowing that they are profiting from turning deadly school shootings into entertainment?"

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, tweeted a link to the petition, which now has over 93,000 signatures.


Tasteless as this game may be, studies have consistently shown that playing video games doesn't actually make people more violent. And this doesn't just play out in studies; it plays out across the globe as well. Take Japan: According to the New York Times, over half (60 percent) of the population there played video games in 2016 but there were almost no deaths by gun. Why? Because guns are banned in Japan. In the U.S., where guns are easier to procure than abortions, there are over 33,000 gun deaths per year. Plus, there is the added worry of social contagion: Reseachers have found that mass shootings tend to take place in clusters; when one occurs, the media rushes to cover it, and the rate of mass shootings spikes soon after. In the first 21 weeks into 2018, there were 23 school shootings in which someone was hurt or killed, as CNN reports. Now, it's not clear that this particular video game would have the same impact, but stilll, turning an ongoing national tragedy into a game just feels wrong.

In response to the outcry, game developer Revive Interactive posted a message on Steam:

Since this games storefront has been live, I have been stormed with accusations and heavy critics from people across the globe. While I see everyone's points of view and where are they coming from - I wanted to clarify a few things:

First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft of a mass shooting. As I said in the description of the game:

"Active Shooter is essentially a dynamic SWAT simulator in which dynamic roles are offered to players."

Originally when this game started its course of the development, I have planned on having SWAT only based game-play. Then I thought about adding more gameplay to it by adding additional roles: of the shooter and the civilian. While I can see people's anger and why this might be a bad idea for the game, I still feel like this topic should be left alone. As I mentioned on steam discussion forums, there are games like Hatred, Postal, Carmageddon and etc., which are even worst compared to "Active Shooter" and literally focuses on mass shootings/killings of people.

I have wrote to Valve regarding this game and waiting for the reply. After receiving such high amount of critics and hate, I will more likely remove the shooters role in this game by the release, unless if it can be kept as it is right now.

Valve did not immediately respond to request for comment.