Area 51 To Deal With Tense Political Issues 102
Since the days of the arcades, the Area 51 games have been brainless bughunts: find the aliens, shoot the aliens. When game designer Harvey Smith was hired a few years ago to work on the next iteration of the franchise, he began to despair at the lackluster story elements in the game. As he put it: "Area 51 just bored the sh-- out of me, and I was like, 'How can we make this interesting?'" As MTV News reports, frustrations with politics both in the United States and abroad led to a solution that required months of convincing executives to see implemented. Blacksite: Area 51 will feature a new and more poignant story, as the aliens become poor American citizens put in harm's way. "Wait, what if they are terrorists we helped create? What if the people supporting us in our fight against the terrorists aren't completely clean either? What if they're sending us after them now, but what if 10 years ago it was safe for them to create them?' ... So what we have in 'BlackSite' is a delta-force assassination squad hunting down and killing members of an Army training program. So on American soil, Americans are fighting Americans, basically." The game is intended to be enjoyed regardless of subject matter, but Smith hopes that gamers will accept a title that even touches on some of the issues that popular television shows deal with on a regular basis. What do you think about this? Is there room for politics in gaming, or do you just want to shoot stuff?
Of course there is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there room for politics in art, or do you just want to listen/watch/taste/sense it?
Of course there is place for politics in gaming: It's not as if there -haven't- been any 'political' games around yet, some might be more upfront about it (random example: www.powerpolitics.us), while others still give out a political message, but are very clever in hiding it (see americasarmy.com).
For myself, I don't mind if a game has 'politics' in it: But I think that the game from the article is a lame attempt at trying to intermix all the popular elements of today, together with some hot mix of controversial sauce. Trying to pass it off as anything more than that, is ridicilous.
Shoot stuff. Sorry. (Score:4, Interesting)
Shoot stuff. Sorry.
In real life, I'm a left-leaning SOB, but I completely enjoy smacking people over the head with a hammer and jacking their ambulances in GTA. I also enjoy squashing other cultures under my heel in any number of RTS games and generally being a dick in MMORPGs. Do you know why? Of course you do: it's not real.
Is this new game really political? I'm not sure. Remember in Warcraft III you had all these random "stories" behind why battle 1 is humans vs. humans, battle 2 is humans vs. elves, etc.? I think what this guy's done is similar to that rather than being political.
If you want political treatment, write a sim where you're an arms contractor and you need to pay off your local congresspeople in a legal or at least hidden way. Or, write a sim where you get send to a base in Cuba with no hope for escape, rescue or legal representation. There's plenty of dirt to really dig into without making up crap about spec.ops. vs. spec.ops.
Re:Lame (Score:2, Interesting)
People play games for different reasons. The online multiplayer is nice, because AI just can't measure up to real people...but I buy and play games for their stories.
Re:politics, not polemics (Score:3, Interesting)
Take the mindflayer hunt and talk to the petitioner. The petitioner talks about twin brother. He talks about how power hungry he is, and how dangerous he has become. The brother's name? "Ashkroft".
Re:politics, not polemics (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no need to use an alternate history to find good examples [wikipedia.org] of this that could be used for a game.