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It's unfortunate that the examples were all statements of "Lookit me! I'm an insensitive asshole!" But the answer is yes, they can express that.

The real question is if games can make statements that aren't

-I want money
-I want attention
-I hate (insert group of people here)
-I'm a jerk

The answer is yes, but we haven't been able to do it very sophisticated like yet.

One GOOD exmaple I'm thinking of is the guy who made "the emo game" You can find his works here
http://www.emogame.com/

Emo game 1 basically is making fun of emo music. A worthy goal. One of the sequels is an extremely not-subtle condemnation of conservatives, republicans, Bush, Paris hilton, the anti-stem cell movement, and shooting various other fishes in barrels. They're free and sometimes funny. Again, not subtle. Try them. A lot of the message relies on you playing through not very good gaming portions and then coming to a word document with the message inserted. It doesn't flow seamlessly with the game.

There are also games that are clearly environmental, and they range from bludgeoning you over the head with it to so subtle that you could miss it.

Bioshock I'm told has some moral questions for you to ponder. As I haven't played it yet I can't comment on that. I suspect though it's largely using movie techniques between game sequences.

Videogames as statements are clearly in their infancy, so it's to be expected that the examples we have are fairly crude. Props to the emogame guy for being a pioneer of sorts though, and of course for making a statement with his soapbox. But it definitely is possible and with time they'll develop mechanisms to make it actually part of the game as opposed to gaming between statements.

Well, when game developers will actually use the medium to make political or social comments, critiques, and social change, that's when gaming will be an art form.

Done.

Altought I still can't quite say if it is a parody or particularly inept propaganda...

As if nobody had ever played emogame...now there's a game with political content....

This is just old-fashioned "cultural work," as the communists used to call it. Use a popular art form to drive home political messages. Songs, dances, operas, novels....all can be used as propaganda. Why not games? The U.S. Army sems to think so--witness the success of the America's Army game.

A more useful question, it seems to me, is what one gets out of such games. It seems like their "educational" value is limited to demonstrating the correctness of the underlying ruleset, which is to say, the correctness of the developers' prejudices. Passing that off as "learning" seems entirely counterproductive to me.

Exactly. Who decides what is educational or not? Recently 'intelligent design' was recommended as a part of the curriculum of our 'educational system'. Will the same people proposing 'games for health' consider Bush Game educational? Or will a game about aliens creating life on earth for harvesting after a few billion years be educational?

Michael Moore would have approved this game.

Is there anything similarly quantitative that you want me to know about Kerry's opposition to the war after having served in it, before I vote?

The best political video game ever is still the anti-bush game.

-FL

Bushgame

but this is an anti-bush side scroller. The gameplay is pretty boring, but the intro is hilarious.

You can check out cool art.

In the future they'll teach kiddies about 'the bush years' with bushgame ?