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Papers, Please
Papers, Please – a thought-provoking look at the human politics of border crossings
Papers, Please – a thought-provoking look at the human politics of border crossings

GTA V is not subversive – but these games are

This article is more than 10 years old
Punk's not dead: the spirit lives on in games. But if you want to find truly transgressive experiences, don't rely on mainstream blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto. You need to look harder

Over a decade ago, the Grand Theft Auto juggernaut hit hard. In a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world, its playground of violence undercut with sharp critiques of American consumerism and hypocrisy quantified an important protest against moral panic, deftly skewering the nation's tendency to blame new technology – particularly video games – for social ills.

The recently-launched Grand Theft Auto V cost upwards of $250m (£155m) to develop and market, and its investment in a realistic universe of unprecedented scale paid off: the franchise brought in a billion dollars in its first 48 hours on the market.

It's a bit like the corporatisation of punk rock: What does the traditional industry's most mammoth juggernaut have left to say on behalf of society's easy targets? Its casual violence, lazy misogyny and lavish attention to what an empowered young male demographic finds funny no longer seem in step with the edgy rebelliousness that brought the franchise to international dominance. At worst, GTA V now looks a lot like a reinforcement of the same status quo that constrains the video game industry's prominent and expensive console retail business.

Genuine transgression occurs at the fringes of art, and the same is luckily still true in gamings' independent scene. One of my favourite releases this year is Lucas Pope's Papers, Please, where you play as a border control officer for a dark fictional nation called Arstotzka.

Inside the bleak, detail-intensive and challenging work of document processing is a fascinating essay on nationalism and the fundamental conflict between freedom and security. Among many other things, the game allows you the option to perform nude body-scans on frail refugees if you think it might prevent terrorism, and in so doing, forces you to think about the human cost of bureaucracy by creating empathy with all its living components.

Independent designer Merritt Kopas describes her recent game HUGPUNX as a "a fluoro-pink queer urban hugging simulator". It's a direct descendant of PUNKSNOTDEAD, a joyfully violent, neon-drenched primal scream made by a developer called mooosh in just 12 hours – except Kopas' "cutie aesthetic" reinterpretation – where you prettify the game's world by embracing people and kittens – acts as an interrogation of traditional testosterone-fueled death fantasies.

At the turn of the new millennium, online game SiSSYFiGHT 2000 cast players as awful little playground girls in battle, at a time when non-sexualised female characters in video games were even more of a rarity than they are now. The fully-customisable avatars could be represented through a palette of unnatural colours and often looked subversively grotesque. Players also had the incredibly-uncommon option of creating androgynous avatars. Thanks to Kickstarter, SiSSYFiGHT is set to be revived in HTML5 as an open-source game on modern servers and mobile devices, with passionate volunteers stepping up to lead the grassroots community around the game.

There are countless others: Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, who describes himself as more interested in examining "forms of violence and oppression that are somewhat invisible," released Best Amendment earlier this year, "in an attempt to come to terms with games' obsession with guns."

Molleindustria also created iPhone title Phone Story, where players lead developing world children in coltan mining and try to catch plummeting Foxconn workers – a satire on the incredible global cost of gadget fetishism. It was apparently too subversive for Apple, who banned it from its App Store in 2011, just four days after launch (it can still be downloaded on Android devices).

Zach Gage's 2009 game lose/lose experimented with real-life consequences within a video game – it spawns aliens based on actual files on the player's computer, and killing them destroys the player's own actual data. The aliens never actually attack, an interesting statement on motivation and consequences, and if the player touches an alien, the game itself is deleted from the player's computer.

Ohnoproblems' Sabbat is a gleefully-monstrous, choice-intensive satanic ritual simulator delivered only in text; its opening act is to greet the player as "witchdumpling", and ask about their genitalia. It's made in Twine, a free and simple game-making tool that has widely democratised self-expression in game creation, earning it particular favour among historically-under-represented communities – for some of these new creators, including women, gay people and minorities, raising their voice in the games space at all is itself a rebellion.

The medium of interactive entertainment still has the incredible potential to create a broad palette of meaningful provocation, social dialogue and the thrill of pure rebellious mayhem. You just have to know where to look for it.

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