Trigger Happy
Frank Zappa once asked, as the title of a 1986 live album, Does Humor Belong In Music? He meant the question as an ironic ventriloquy of his critics, implying an answer in the affirmative. Today, by contrast, a vocal subset of the geekerati is asking “Does politics belong in videogames?”, and shrieking “No!”
It is, to be sure, an odd time. This summer, Ubisoft has said that it doesn’t make “political” games, just “mature” is not going to be “politically charged”. This is odd since is set in a galaxy dominated by corporations, while Ubisoft’s recent output has included a game in which Americans are encouraged to kill other Americans, of the white-supremacist type. Not political?
