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Old 9/11 video game creates
fresh outrage
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw
Story
Friday January 4, 2008
A six year old video game based on the destruction of the
World Trade Center is serving as a pretext for fresh outrage
in the media following its re-release with upgraded graphics
and sound effects.
In the original version of New York Defender, which is widely
available online as a crude Flash game, the player is challenged
to shoot down an endless series of planes that head for the
twin towers in Space Invaders fashion. When enough planes
get through, the towers collapse. (The new version is available
at the developers' site, under "Chaos Games.")
When it was originally released in October 2001, this simple
game was taken as a grim but appropriate commentary on the
events of September 11. A writer for Slate reported at the
time, "Unlike most shoot-'em-ups, New York Defender doesn't
give players a sense of excitement or joy. Instead, it makes
them feel powerless. It is, in essence, a grim message about
the hopelessness of anti-terrorism: Try as you might to knock
every enemy out of the sky, one will always slip past."
(Article continues below)
In 2004, game designer Jonathan Pitcher explained, "We
only meant to fight our feeling of impotence. We reacted to
September 11 like kindergarten children, by drawing planes
crashing into buildings. It's just some kind of release. But
looking back, we find there is a political statement to it.
Since there is no way to win this game, you could say that
violence cannot stop violence. Or that you cannot win against
terror by using force."
The upgraded version appears to be only slightly more complex,
requiring the player to distinguish friendly planes from hostile
ones, which also target the Statue of Liberty, the Empire
State Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge. However, it is now
being taken as exploitation rather than as grim remembrance,
and is being met with a sense of outrage that was not present
at the time of its original release.
For example, CBS News complains, "Remembered as one
of the worst days in American history, countless millions
believe Sept. 11, 2001, should never be duplicated, not even
in a video game. Apparently, a group of French Internet video
game makers never got the message, and now families of victims
from that horrid day are enraged with the notion that children
get to replay the tragedy over and over again."
Jim Riches, whose firefighter son died on September 11, told
CBS, "For somebody to exploit a tragedy, where so many
people died that day ... it's sick, it's a sick mind. ...
It's hurtful to all the families. It just brings up that pain
again of seven years ago."
Both CBS and WNBC in New York interviewed Lee Ielpi, co-founder
of the Tribute World Trade Center 9/11 Visitor Center, who
also lost a son on 9/11. "This is what it comes to,"
Ielpi told WNBC. "You're going to use 9/11 as a gimmick
to sell to make money. That's just tasteless."
However, a British site which has taken note of these accusations
of tastelessness comments caustically, "Once again the
mainstream media is using video games as pariahs of bad taste
while simultaneously displaying the kind of gross ignorance
and ratings chasing that you couldn't write as satire. ...
SPOnG is all for the criticism of tasteless, poorly realised
and plain shoddy entertainment in all forms. So, isn't it
about time that the mainstream looked to muck out its own
stable of drear and desolation before pointing fingers in
order to make use of tragedy for money itself?"
This video is from ABCNews.com, MSNBC.com and Fox's American
Newsroom, broadcast on January 2, 2008.
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