Torture

I played this thing while listening to Bromst.

Sad Moon Mission is the latest rapid product of the Poppenkast, everyone's favorite launch pad for Scandinavian retro games done in a minimalist style in less than a day. I could have made this in Game Maker in about two hours, it took JW 75 minutes, and yet it's totally dank.

Raph Koster made a point in his book, some punk Brazilians made it into a playable game. It´s Tetris meets Torture. The idea was, gameplay and content can be totally divorced, such that a classic puzzle game, loved by many millions, could be made into a metaphor for torture most foul. A clever idea, but only when played does the point come home.

Life Is A Race is an artsy banner-game from Cactus, you click to make a baby move across the screen, prompting it to run, get that briefcase and then become old and die. It's like Passage but with an emphasis, rather than ambivalence, on the speed of aging and mortality.

Torture Game 2 has you torturing a rag doll. I linked to the New Grounds page rather than direct because you gotta read those comments. Then you gotta read Ian's response to an MSNBC article about it. A sick world indeed.

I haven't played Rendition to the end, and I don't plan to. I suspect most people reading this won't want to either.

Rendition is a short interactive fiction about torturing a terror suspect for information. It is both banal and distasteful. The piece provides little motivating background, little to make the player want to commit the atrocities the piece demands; and, for that matter, since the torturer and his suspect don't apparently even speak the same language, there's no possibility of finding out anything of value. The goal is simply to accumulate points for thinking of new areas of the suspect's body to which to apply pain, while remaining within the literal confines of the Geneva convention rules. (The legalistic way it approaches these makes a mockery of them, which is also part of the point.)

The correct response, I'm fairly sure, is to quit.