Active Shooter simulator game on Steam is insensitive to victims of mass shootings

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It is May 2018 and there have already been 23 school shootings in American schools, that's one school shooting a week.

What's more alarming than the frequency of these shootings is the thought that these horrific acts are the new normal, that they are inevitable, and that they are bound to happen again.

This is why Active Shooter, a first-person simulator video game is a bad idea.

The game puts players in point of view of either an active shooter killing students and cops in a school or a SWAT operative, is a terrible and deeply insensitive idea. While the game's developers Revived Games and distributor Valve/ Steam can trivialize this as another first-person shooter, or a 'Dynamic SWAT simulator', it's clearly an expoitative and deeply insensitive game.

Active Shooter enables children to play as active shooters in schools. It allows them to terrorize and kill students, teachers and officers of the law  for points under the guise of simulation or gaming. It takes the horrifying idea of children killing other children in school, where they should be safe, and sells it as a fun and challenging game.There's no excuse for this. Mass shootings are no joke, they are not a game and should not be profited from.

A Change.org petition calling for Valve to not make the game available now has 52,500 signatures.

Update on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 at 9:27PM by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Valve has removed the Active Shooter title from their platform. In a statement to Change.org, the company :
"This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously been removed last fall when he was operating as "[bc]Interactive" and "Elusive Team". Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation. His subsequent return under new business names was a fact that came to light as we investigated the controversy around his upcoming title. We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve.