Are politics and games a good mix? I’ve been reading the August 2007 issue of Edge magazine (an excellent UK gaming magazine, btw), and I came across an preview article about Blacksite, Midway Austin’s sequel to the 2005 game Area 51.  In the article, creative director Harvey Smith states:

“The tone is from the left, but we didn’t want to beat you over the head with it.  We wanted to organically weave it into the whole thing, so there are allusions to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, to the Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] scandal.”

Why, why why?  I own Area 51.  I downloaded and played the Blacksite demo on the Xbox 360, and I thought it looked like a rather entertaining, squad-based FPS killing aliens.  Now I’m not interested in the game at all.  Why?  Because I think that the entire time I’d be playing it, I’d be thinking about what kind of political statement the developers are trying to sneak into the game.

It doesn’t matter whether you are left-leaning or right-leaning.  Games are in many ways an escape from all of that stuff, as are movies and other forms of entertainment.  Like this year’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie, where Mr. Fantastic reveals his flying car with a Dodge logo on the seats and emblem stamped on the front grill, and the Human Torch asks, “Is that a hemi?”  I can just hear the classic sound effect of a needle scratching to a halt over a vinyl record, as all suspension of disbelief is wiped away and the moviegoer’s attention is totally kicked right out of the movie.

People don’t like that kind of stuff.  And people don’t always agree on stuff either.  Stating “we made a left-leaning FPS” is just stupid.  You potentially just alienated (no pun intended) the half of your audience that isn’t left-leaning.  I’m not one to constantly be on the lookout for conspiracies, hidden meanings in things, or people’s unspoken agendas, and I probably would have played Blacksite without ever seeing the connections that Smith refers to.  But now that I know they are meant to exist, my brain no longer sees “alien FPS” but rather “political FPS”, which is not really something I’m interested in.