selectparks - Blood in the Game Code

La Petite Claudine pointed me to a blog entry by Ed Halter (author of the book "From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games" which I haven't read but have bought) covering the not-so-small controversy of a new mod by 'The Global Islamic Media Front" 'provocatively' titled "A Night Of Bush Capturing".

Of particular note is that the game they modded was called Quest For Saddam which, as La Petite points out, is widely considered a perfectly upstanding example of good old fashioned American family values.. perhaps ever so slightly coloured with belly-warming patriotic feeling. The ESRB rating for QFS is Mature for Blood, Mature Humor, Violence. 'Mature humour' as in Benny Hill ..? No, probably not.

Here we have a great example of a political battle being fought in the game-code itself; while the mod inverts, or returns, the message of a prior game, it was clearly important to the makers that they drive the point home by also inverting the medium of that message. It would seem the videogame division of the pro-US propaganda effort is being fed a little of it's own medicine. Interesting times ahead..

Because Ed Halter's blog is so excellent, we've added it to our link tree.