If you want to do serious political satire, you'd better have all your i's dotted and t's crossed. You'd better know the difference between sensationalism and burlesque, between "look at me!" hand-flapping and "look if you can stand to" tongue-in-cheek. And if you want to interpret something as political satire or parody, you'd better have more in your quiver than a few feeble lines about metaphors and stereotypes.
Take Sam and Dan Houser's Grand Theft Auto IV, either a grand game of "chase-me" threaded with puerile humor or a shrewd, mocking commentary on American culture. Clever commentary or adolescent comedy? I vote 'clever'. You may vote differently.
The latest case in question: Muslim Massacre, the self-styled "game of modern religious genocide," is a small freeware PC action game that lets you "take control of the American hero and wipe out the Muslim race with an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons."
Satire or screw-brained? Parody or preposterous? Ironic or just indefensible? Curious, I downloaded the game and gave it a go.
It launches with a chirpy 1980s synth-style tune and a montage of images backgrounded by ostensibly nipped and tucked audio clips of George W. Bush seeming to denigrate Islam and excoriate the religion's prophetic central figure, Mohammed. (For the record, here's the White House's official collection of quotes on "respecting Islam.") The images are pictures of apparent terrorists, wearing hoods or holding guns, bookended by blocky abstractions of American flags tacked atop multi-hued skyscrapers.
Then the game begins, you're airlifted into the middle of a desolate landscape, and little black-robed and crudely bearded figures blindly charge you, chipping away at your health. How's it play? Sort of like Atari's old multidirectional arcade shooter Berzerk without the maze stuff. Using the mouse to fire a gun or lob grenades, you point and aim in a flat 360-degree arc, slaughtering as many of these figures as possible in "60 to 90 seconds per round." Finish a round and the game launches a new one, eventually ratcheting up the difficulty level by trotting out Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Muslim prophet Mohammed, and even Allah (the Arabic word for 'God').
British Muslims are not surprisingly condemning the game, calling it "deeply offensive" according to London AFP this morning. "The makers of this 'game' and the ISPs (Internet service providers) who are hosting it should be quite ashamed of themselves," said Inayat Bunglawala, spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain.
The game's creator who goes by the name Sigvatr describes it simply as "fun and funny." Some online have been trying to read it as parody, but even Sigvatr himself says the original goal was just to make a game "where you blow the gently caress [slang for a common offensive word] out of arabs."
How you frame something invariably affects how it's received. Everyone's susceptible to persuasion, particularly when it's issuing from the author. If Sigvatr were shrewder, he'd be calling it something like what he nonchalantly tosses out at the end of the Times piece as an "if I had to" comment, i.e. "something along the lines of metaphorically destroying the stereotypical depiction of a Muslim." But since he's not, it's hard to be sympathetic to what as a parody feels utterly devoid of anything remotely Swiftian, and which viewed at the mechanical level is pretty weak, monotonous sauce.
Should it be banned? I don't think so, but then I'm no fan of bans in general (if you want to "ban" something, boycott it, and if you want to prevent your kids from accessing it, supervise them). Should it be viewed as tasteless? I think so, because in the end, all it's saying is "made you look!" And when it comes to poking fun at the morbid seriousness of various hot-button issues, we could use a little more Jonathan Swift in our satire, and a bit less Bart Simpson.
Muslims are the new N-word of America and therefore shooting them up in video games and Hollywood blockbuster films is perfectly fine and will not raise much of an outcry. In comparison, doing the same for blacks, Hispanics, women and other groups is not socially or culturally acceptable and happens less often, although unfortunately, it still does.
Check this article on racism in video games for more details:
http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/326267.html
I would not at all be surprised to find out that those who torture Iraqis like we saw in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 and American and other soldiers who shoot and kill innocent civilians and children in Iraq play games or watch movies "where you blow the gently caress [slang for a common offensive word] out of arabs."