Flash Games as Political Commentary

Clive Thompson writes "All over the net, there are little shockwave games inspired by political events -- from the WTO-style New York Defender to War on Terrorism to even Downing Street Fighter (where British politicians beat each other senseless, Street-Fighter-Style). Sure, like most Shockwave-generated stuff, they may suck as games. But that's missing the point. What's happening here is nothing less than the emergence of the online video game as a form of social comment -- something you dash off in a couple of hours to make a sardonic political point about something. It's a new notepad for communication. Or at least, that's what I argued in this piece in Slate today. In addition to the craven self-promotion of sending it in to Slashdot, I'm interested in hearing what everyone thinks of this issue. After all, courts have recently been arguing that video games cannot be protected speech; these games make it patently obvious that this view is insane." The columnist missed a better example of the genre - the EFF's game of digital restrictions management.

Comments

Oh yeah, the establishment is afraid!

[Hairy_Potter]

These flash programmers are making waves by dicking around with flash toolkits, oh boy, how scary! Now, all sorts of other, white, well educated, middle class techies will see them too, oh boy, what a highly charged political situation!

If you want to really make a political statement, start conducting voting drives in lower class minority neighborhoods, nothing like getting the disenfranchised to vote to really bother the man. On the plus side, with the fact that there are more black men in prison than in college, even a fat, pasty faced geekboy has a good chance of finding an unattached woman.

Re:Watch those links

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

closing of about half a dozen adult site popups

Well, the person is probably using smarter / better browser than you are. I get no pop-ups with Konqueror or Mozzie. My guess would be that the submitter didn't even know there were pop-ups. Just as I didn't.