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Review
I found this game to be an effective argument that the fear that games may be hiding secret hateful content is silly, because games don't need to do that in order to send ideological messages. While in the accompanying essay the author writes that he "decided to take out all the Nazi stuff," just because the hidden mode is gone (or at least, has been rendered inaccessible via the originally intended method) doesn't mean the game is suddenly perfectly innocent. We're told that the PC took bus 88 to get to their destination, which is Muranowska Square, and our task in the game is to seek out the hiding places of frightened rabbits--which given this context takes on a deeper, more sinister meaning. A child playing this game might never understand or pay attention to these references, but an adult can see that the game is not, as it claims, simply a cute story about bunnies.
This game is an effective illustration that messaging can be baked into games in far more subtle ways than via a "hidden Nazi mode", and for that reason, vetting games for objectionable content is never going to be as simple as glancing over the source code and verifying that it doesn't contain any slurs.
Comments on this review
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I haven't played this, but I've got the general idea, and this review makes me want to try the game, to see what I would've missed a few years ago, or what else I can google.
One thing that strikes me is that when this game came out, I'd have had no idea what 88 or 1488 meant, despite understanding other dog whistles like "states' rights." Now, I know what it means--it's hard not to know what it means if you've been paying attention to hate, or hate speech, or slightly decoded messages, or even stuff like "All lives matter," since 2016. And of course there are ones I would not have been aware of, like Muranowska Square.
On the one hand, this is a bit scary--there's so much we don't know that could be awful, so many dog whistles. But on the other hand, we can see that yes, indeed, some of this stuff can be brought to light, and it's not a witch-hunt to do so.
(As a side point, I've noticed college basketball players who hit a 3-pointer used to raise the okay-sign, but that has been appropriated by white supremacists who pretended the WP it was just a harmless okay sign for a while and, of course, reveled in the confusion they caused. Now players pull down their pinky and 4th finger. So society can learn and adapt and reject white supremacists etc. appropriating certain things. It's especially heartening to see young people leading the way, pushing back against 18-year-old edgelords.)
Thanks for the insightful review!
