Air travel hasn't been much fun since 9/11.

Fear, heightened security regulations, long waits and inconvenience are standard features of flying commercially these days.

Fortunately, a new online game may give you a chuckle next time you're queued for the metal detector. Prof. Ian Bogost and his Persuasive Games studio have released Airport Security, a satirical take on ever-changing regulations for air travelers.

In the game players must remove prohibited items such as toothpaste and shampoo from passengers' bags before they reach the security checkpoint. New regulations appear randomly, prohibiting, for example, pants. It only takes a mouse click to remove those as well. You character may be reduced to its underwear, but at least he - or she - will be allowed to pass through security.

Airport Security is chock full of clever touches. Instead of the usual "easy, normal, hard" difficulty levels, for example, players must choose among "fickle, arbitrary and knee-jerk," presumably the security employees' attitude du jour. The airport loudspeaker references the random prohibition of clothing articles with announcements such as "Security fashions are chaging daily. TSA stylists are available for consultation."

On Water Cooler Games, Ian Bogost explains that Airport Security is the first product of a new partnership between Persuasive Games, Shockwave.com and Addicting Games. We look forward to future efforts.

"The world, as usual, is more complex than we'd like it to be," said Georgia Tech Ian Bogost, addressing concerns that an amateur video game based on the Columbine massacre inspired a 25-year-old man to go on a shooting rampage in Montreal on Wednesday.

Bogost, interviewed by CTV, added, "Certainly, (the shooter) was using media of all kinds to culture his antisocial fantasies. Should we hold (this game) responsible? Clearly, these are overly simplistic explanations."

Bogost has much more on the Dawson shooting on his Water Cooler Games website.
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Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
by Ian Bogost
Reviewed for GamePolitics by Jeff McHale

Reviewing Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism presented a quandary: how does one go about critiquing a work that is itself based on an entirely new method of criticism?
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GP readers have tipped us to some worth-catching programs from the mainstream media this week.

On Tuesday NPR's excellent Here & Now did a segment on Serious Games, including the highly controversial Super Columbine RPG. Host Robin Young interviewed the game's creator, Danny LeDonne as well as Columbine victim Richard Castaldo.

In defending his game, LeDonne said, "We as a society have not yet viewed video games with the same level of academic or artistic credibility that a film would have."

Young also interviewed Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost, founding partner of Persuasive Games, who talked about the controversy surrounding the Columbine game.

"Video games are still struggling to be seen as a medium and not just a distraction," Bogost said, "Not just a kind of leisure time activity that you use to waste time. This happened before in every other medium. You can just look back at graphic novels and comics for example and think of a work like Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is this graphic novel about the Holocaust and see some of the same kind of issues coming up as we try to make sense of a medium like the video game."

Here & Now also covered MTV award winner Darfur is Dying, the United Nations' Food Force, and the execrable Border Patrol.

On Comedy Central last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson and apparently the two spent a goodly amount of time talking about video games. GP missed that, but is Tivoing this morning. It looks like the Colbert Report repeats at 8:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M. here in the Eastern U.S.
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Now that summer's here, perhaps you need some light reading for the beach.

In case you hadn't noticed, a surprising number of game-oriented books have come out in recent weeks. We've got reviews in the works for all of the following:

Dean Takahashi's The Xbox 360 Uncloaked spins the tale of how Microsoft's next-gen system came to be. Dean also wrote a great inside look at the development of Microsoft's original system, Opening the Xbox. The author covers technology for the San Jose Mercury-News and writes about games along with Mercury-News colleague in the excellent Dean & Nooch on Gaming blog. GP's Matt Paprocki is working on a full-blown review...

Best-selling author Douglas Coupland (Microserfs, Eleanor Rigby: A Novel) sets his latest work of fiction, JPod in a fictitious game development company.

Village Voice writer Ed Halter examines the militarization of games in From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games.

Finally, Prof. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech - and the excellent Water Cooler Games blog - takes a scholarly approach to dissecting games in Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Jeff McHale will be reviewing this one for GP.

Want to talk about it? You can discuss this story via the "comments" feature (click below), or in the new GamePolitics Forums...

Friends don't let friends drive with a Kennedy.

But a friend might let you try Drive Like a Kennedy. The free Shockwave game from KewlBox lampoons the recent driving-while-drugged problem that forced Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) to enter rehab.

From the Drive Like a Kennedy site, here's how to play: "Avoid hitting guardrails and traffic as you make your way to Capitol Hill while under the influence! As either Senator Ted Kennedy or his son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, you'll try to make your way to Capital Hill without destroying your car.

Sen. Kennedy, of course, has had notorious driving problems of his own. In fact, a fatal accident may well have cost him a shot at the presidency. In 1969 Kennedy was at the center of the Chappaquiddick scandal in which a female passenger in his car was killed when Kennedy drove off a bridge after a night of partying. Kennedy later plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.
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Video games rarely capture the attention of the mainstream press. When they do, it's usually a sensationalized story about violence or sex or some other hot-button issue.

So it is with Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a non-commercial game available only as a free download via the Internet. Thanks primarily to a story in the Rocky Mountain News, the mainstream press is all over this one. In addition to the coverage in the Rocky, the Associated Press has written about Super Columbine Massacre and the game has been linked on The Drudge Report.

The story has gotten such wide play in the last couple of days that there's really no point in regurgitating the facts here on GamePolitics. At this point, the public reaction to the game seems to be the defining part of the story.

Like many GP readers who track developments in the video game space, I became aware of Columbine Super Massacre about two weeks ago when word of the game began to make the rounds of video game blogs. I chose not to address it at that point. Perhaps I should have, but for me, Columbine remains an open wound - not in the sense that I knew anyone there, but along with September 11th, the trauma and tragedy of the Columbine shootings was seared into my brain by live television coverage. Both are generation-defining events. For me, the Littleton community seems very much like my community and Columbine High School much like the schools my kids attend.

It probably comes as no surprise that initial reactions to the game are negative. Families of Columbine victims, of course, were sought out by the media for comment. Necessary, I suppose, but somehow distasteful. What are the families to say? What would you expect them to say? If even a jaded gamer like GP is uneasy with the Columbine Super Massacre, it has to be an incredibly raw nerve for the Columbine families. And it is. The Rocky Mountain News piece quotes several surviving relatives:

"It's wrong," said Joe Kechter. His son, Matt, was gunned down in the school library.

"We live in a culture of death, so it doesn't surprise me that this stuff has become so commonplace. It disgusts me," said Brian Rohrbough. His son, Dan, was killed outside the school building. "You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent."
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What could be more controversial than a computer game based on abortion?

Not much...

At last week's Game Developers Conference (GDC), Ian Bogost (left), founder of Persuasive Games and a professor at Georgia Tech, unveiled work on a game which examines both sides of the abortion issue, challenges biases, and educates players about opposing views. Bogost explained the reasoning behind the game to Stephen Totilo of MTV News.

"Let's take on the most complicated, difficult problem that we could possible take on in contemporary American political discourse. We'll make an abortion game," he said.

While the underlying philosophical right-to-life question is not addressed within the parameters of the game, other aspects of the abortion debate are. The current build features mini-games in which the player guides a teen mother through pregnancy, explores a city in which all forms of birth control are outlawed, and rummages through the house in search of a condom.

Future plans could allow the game to tweak its presentation based on the responses of the player. For example, if the player was pro-choice, the teen pregnancy mini-game would emphasize discussion of personal responsibility and suggest alternatives such as adoption in order to help the player understand the other side's perspective.

Bogost doesn't expect a working prototype until the fall. He explained to MTV that the purpose of the game isn't to push a particular agenda.

"This isn't a game that changes your opinion, but tells you why people have the opinion they do."

LifeSite, an anti-abortion website run by the Campaign Life Coalition, wasted no time in criticizing Bogost's early prototype sketches, claiming they displayed an "incomplete understanding of arguments for protecting the unborn." The site also protested that arguments against abortion are "rarely, if ever understood by the casual observer of the abortion battle."

CM: The abortion debate has been marred by misinformation and rhetoric from both sides. Rather than criticize a game in the early stages of development, perhaps abortion opponents such as the Campaign Life Coalition could offer their talking points to Ian Bogost and Persuasive Games for possible inclusion in the final product.

-reporting from Saskatchewan, North American GP correspondent Colin McInnes (aka Jabrwock)