Each piece in this series functions as a counter-memory.
In “It’s just a video game, not reality”, the artist juxtaposes Makarevskiy’s public defense of his game with a visual mapping of U.S. schools that have experienced fatal shootings since 2012. The quote in the title is not abstracted; it is confronted.
Game Stats overlays the game’s scoring system with a stark chronology of actual school shooting deaths in the U.S. since 2000, unsettling the line between game mechanics and national grief. “Just a bad timing”, another direct quote from Makarevskiy, investigates the dialectics of erasure and assimilation that occur when real suffering is commodified.
In Twinkle, Twinkle, the viewer encounters the original lullaby interwoven with a revised “Lockdown, Lockdown” version. An adaptation created by a kindergarten teacher to prepare children for the reality of in-school violence. The juxtaposition of innocence with strategy renders the piece devastatingly real.
The final work in the series, There’s no such thing as too much ammo, borrows from popular U.S. gun culture rhetoric. Through irony and critical distance, the piece probes the entanglement of nationalism, access to weaponry, and the myth of defense.
This series is not merely a reaction to a video game; it is a larger meditation on what happens when simulation eclipses mourning, and when policy fails to distinguish between play and harm.