The San Francisco Playhouse is set to debut Aaron Loeb’s play First Person Shooter, about the impact of a potentially game-influenced shooting at an Illinois school.
The main characters in the play are the CEO of JetPack Games, a fictional developer whose violent game Megaton is the hottest title on the market, and a local farmer, the father of one of the 14 victims at the school. The two men come together when news breaks that the killer was a Megaton expert.
Loeb, a former game journalist who now works for developer Planet Moon Studios, began writing the play after the Columbine school shootings in 1999. He says he was struck by how polarized people became over the violence in videogames debate and wrote the play to try to bring some clarity to the issue, as well as focus on “the people caught in the echo chamber of the debate.”
In an article in the Examiner, Loeb also points out that every generation has been forced to deal with its own corrupting influence, from Elvis Presley to comic books. “We’ve abandoned the idea that comic books led to moral degradation,” he says. “I think we’ll come to the same conclusion about videogames.”
The play will debut on May 5 and run until June 9. Details about the San Francisco Playhouse production of First Person Shooter can be found here.
