What begins here with a series of George Bush speeches poorly edited together to sound like they popped out of a far-right fantasy world slowly morphs into something like a wonderful joke. Eric Vaughn, the game's creator, takes the most vengeful and sadistic of American impulses and puts them on display in such a way that they lose at least a little of their affect by the silliness of the whole enterprise. Vaughn claims that his game is harmless because he believes that all media is harmless and that children especially are more influenced by their parents than by random, internet goons. And despite your stance on that particular sentiment, there is something strangely refreshing about a game this seemingly cruel being made as nothing more than a dumb internet gag. It's a flexing of freedoms, which is nice, but it also takes some of the power out of the hands of the people who would otherwise be making this sort of material. From now and into the foreseeable future, any game about slaughtering Muslims will have to rub shoulders with Vaughn's purposely insipid work. And if it looks like it was made by a racist but was actually made by someone pretending to be an idiot then what does that make racists by default? Illiterate, with any luck. Too bad that still wouldn't stop them from putting out dreck like...
Eric Day co-hosts the Murderville Podcast at www.welcometomurderville.com
Give it a listen. Five minutes. Maybe you'll dig it. Maybe you'll hate it. But at least you'll have tried something new.
