I’ve no idea why, but it seems no accident that the week before Easter I went back to start over the original Assassin’s Creed, the only game I’ve ever played that is set in the Holy Land. More »
Well, maybe we won’t have to change the filters on our office Bullshit-o-meter after all. As we kinda-sorta-maybe suspected, the cleverly named Anti-Spore website Antispore.com was not all that it seemed.
Rather than a blistering attack on Spore’s neo-Darwinist pro-evolution agenda and pollution of our children’s precious bodily fluids — a post to the site today revealed it was in fact an incredibly elaborate Rickroll.
In a post entitled “Understand my beliefs please” the creator of the site laid out a scripture-heavy exegesis culminating in the following nugget of pure genius.
Sooo.. The Kotaku bullshit alarm has been flashing a code amber since we got a tip about Antispore.com, but.. well, we just don’t know.
The site purports to be a protest against Spore and its ‘attack on Christian values’ and consists of several Creature Creator movies of Penis Monsters and other Spore grotesques, alongside posts about what the author claims is the game’s pro-evolutionary agenda and corrupting influence on children.
Oh, and the fact that Will Wright is Evil.
Our first thought was “Ha! A clever satire on religious censorship and the intelligent design debate!” quickly followed by, “hang on, it’s quite deadpan for satire, isn’t it?”
I initially thought it might be some kind of quite funny, reverse-psychology marketing campaign.. but then I got to the bit about the Episcopalian Church being a ‘perverted church’ that endorses homosexuality and it seemed.. less funny.
The irony is that Spore is only nominally ‘about’ Evolution. If anything you as a player are an Intelligent Designer. Do you see? It is teaching the controversy!
Anti Spore -Resisting EA’s War on Creationism [Thanks to Scott Owens for the tip]
With the announcement of Guitar Praise, the Guitar Hero knockoff with a Christian twist, came a new round of ‘Isn’t there a commandment about stealing? Surely that applies to IP, right?’. Simon Parkin took a look at why Christian-themed gaming is so maligned; who cares if people are catering to a niche market? He does concede that in some cases, like the really awful looking Zoo Race (Destructoid aptly summed up the results of that little debacle as looking ‘like someone handed [the designer]a bag of cocaine and a Quake mod and said “Go crazy”.’) it’s less about Christianity and more about poorly made games:
This month sees a big push among Christian publications around the country towards educating parents and families about the growing influence of video games in our culture. The focus of the push is a lengthy article by Christian journalist Steve Rabey titled “Getting serious about gaming – Impact of video game industry raises concern”, and quite frankly it isn’t at all what I expected. Instead of being a religious rant about the dangers of video game, Rabey’s article offers varied points of view on the subject, especially when discussing video game violence and the effect it has on children. Some researchers are convinced that repetitive play of violent games instructs kids in violence, making violent acts more likely. But others argue that video violence is a cathartic replacement for real violent crime, which has gone down since the advent of video games.
