These games really push our buttons

Should games tackle touchy subjects?
As the film explores the ins and outs and ups and downs of making a game that treads on touchy territory, what Ledonne finds is that while movies, books, and even paintings are free to explore difficult topics, video games remain confined to something of a good-time ghetto — that is, it’s all fine and dandy if a game asks players to merrily save princesses or battle giant cartoon apes, but for some it’s inconceivable that something called a “game” should tackle controversial topics and provoke real debate.

“The controversy should be that there aren’t more games like ‘Super Columbine Massacre RPG!’ that are as demanding and as artistically innovative,” David Kociemba, an art professor Emerson College, says in the documentary.

“Why is it permitted for Michael Moore in 2002, to make ‘Bowling For Columbine’ — a film essay on this subject — and to use far more graphic footage than Danny Ledonne does three years later in a primitive low-res video game? Are we really going to say that video game designers are the one set of artists that do not have the right to engage in contemporary political issues?”

But New York state senator Andrew Lanza questions the ability of games to explore such topics. "The question is, can you take real life tragedies and somehow turn them into educational games. You know, I'm sure it's possible, but I think it’s difficult."

Testing…testing
Despite the resistance developers encounter when making games that tread on taboo territory, there’s a growing number of games out there that provoke both ire and insight.

Wafaa Bilal “Virtual Jihadi” puts players in the role of a suicide bomber tasked with killing President Bush. Critics accused game-maker Wafaa Bilal with promoting terrorism. Bilal counters that he was trying to raise awareness about the civilian toll of the war in Iraq.

Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-born-Chicago-based artist, was recently accused of promoting terrorism when he began showing his game “Virtual Jihadi” at art galleries. The game puts players in the role of a suicide bomber tasked with killing President Bush. But Bilal insists instead that he wanted to raise awareness about the civilian toll in Iraq and show that many Iraqis “have been forced by the consequences of the invasion to become suicide bombers.”

The Italian developers at La Molleindustria have taken a jab at the Catholic Church’s handling of the molestation scandals with “Operation: Pedopriest,” a game that puts players in the role of a Vatican task force charged with covering up for priests with a penchant for pedophilia.

Meanwhile, while a graphic novel called “Maus” depicted the lives of Holocaust survivors using anthropomorphized mice as the main characters and even went on win a Pulitzer Prize, when artist Luc Bernard recently announced he was working on a video game about a child’s experiences during the Holocaust, the outcry was immediate. Many insisted that a game could not and should not explore such a serious topic.

But Bernard disagrees. “I decided to do this game because the market is full of shooters that are about the war but don't focus on what a war really is. And that's the death of thousands of innocent people. To me the war is not a ‘game’ so I wanted to show the other aspect of war.”

One thing’s for certain, as game development kits become cheaper to buy and games become easier to make, more and more people are using games as a vehicle for expressing their opinions, agendas and even their darkest fantasies. And that means we’re likely to see more games that make us uncomfortable…and sometimes even mad.

Take “The Torture Game” for example — a game made by a 19-year-old living in South Africa. When we asked readers to weigh in on the value of his controversial creation, the response was loud and overwhelming.

Many responded much like Amy Fagan, of Charleston, South Carolina.  “I think this game is a disturbing reflection of the desensitization of our society. It saddens me that we have devalued human life so much that a ‘game’ has been made of unspeakably torturing another human being.”

Some, like Deano from South Dakota, went even further: “I think the government should secretly monitor this torture site and begin collecting data on the users who spend the most time on it. Maybe it would become a useful tool for future and present sociopaths. Aside from that, this game has no value whatsoever.”

But plenty of you said that even games as disturbing as “Torture” have an important contribution to make.

“They're really no different from our love of horror movies, our fascination with tragedy and murders, macabre literature like Shelley or Poe, or the cult of death art that grew into the renaissance,” wrote Jim of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Each of these art and social forms allow us to delve into that forbidden yet fascinating part of us without actually hurting someone.”

Note: This story has been edited to correct the attribution of a quote.

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