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Not that there's any culture or [societal label] I'd rather blame for this, but it makes me really sad that something like this is coming from a Scottish firm.

Ach.

# posted by Terry 12:53 PM

Just think of it as a company with insensitive and moronic upper management. Those are attributes that can tag along on any nationality.

# posted by Bill 1:01 PM

I agree with you that the subject of the game is kind of weird, but isn't almost the same as, say, medal of honor: rising sun or vietnam? the goal of the game is killing vietnamese or japanese people.. so, wouldn't the japanese or vietnamese feel insulted by these games? and yet.. many people play them and the games themselves are awarded for realism.
I'm not tring to troll or anything.. but i think that must be fairness to all people

# posted by samael 1:34 PM

the difference between this and a WWII game is simply the difference between blood shed among combatants in a mutually declared war and the murder of a non-combatant outside of war by a treasonous nutjob.

/prefers killing aliens of the extraterrestrial variety

# posted by Tom 1:50 PM

I get what you are saying when you talk about histrorical combat games, because you are able to kill soldiers from other nations. I guess that doesn't really bother me since you are re-playing a war and specific and war is hard to pretty up into something other than what it is. I can play the confererates and kill Union soliders if I want to try and change the Civil War and all that, but it is wrong to play sides in a war game?

But in this case, if the game allowed you to storm the book depository and prevent the assisnation or some spin like that, then maybe it would be OK from a historical perspective with a little twist, but this is just a simple way to kill Kennedy yourself and see how well you did compared to Oswald, which is just sick in my book no matter how you slice it.

# posted by Alice 2:11 PM

To add to what Tom said (which I agree with), this game is also about murdering a specific individual who existed in real life, and doing so in as close to an historically accurate way as possible. In the WWII and other historically based war games, yes you are killing soldiers of the opposing nationality, but you're not re-enacting the killing of a specific soldier. And even there, as Tom said, in that case you're still dealing with a declared war where if the American didn't kill the Japanese soldier, the Japanese WOULD kill the American, because that's what he's required to do by his country and by the situation.

This one, I think, is a continuation of some morally questionable trends in gaming over the last while. I'm certainly not against violent games (me loves to kills me orks and demons, me does), but games like GTA, Hitman, and Manhunter are moving into the territory where you are hunting defenseless people for fun and profit rather than fighting to survive.

# posted by Anonymous 2:11 PM

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110034/
Here is what Clive Thompson of Slate.com had to say about playing the game:

"When I play blood-soaked shoot-'em-up games, the vamped-up violence doesn't really bother me—the more cartoonish the action, the fewer consequences the game seems to have. Even war games where you're theoretically fighting a real enemy—like German or American or Japanese armies—don't really feel personal. But JFK Reloaded is different. When you peer through the rifle scope, the faces of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy (and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife Nellie) are completely recognizable. These are real people who still have immediate living relatives—or, in the case of Nellie Connally, are still alive. While the game's ostensible purpose is simply to re-kill Kennedy as accurately as possible, you can perform any number of alternative scenarios. Shoot the driver first, and the motorcade comes to a halt, allowing you to pick off anyone you want. Or sometimes the driver dies with his foot on the accelerator, driving the car off the road and into a lamppost. You can, if you wish, kill Jackie instead.

"When I finally managed to kill JFK and watched his head blow open while he flopped forward like a rag doll, I was genuinely horrified. The game wants you to think about what's happening as a mere physics experiment, but you can't, nor would you want to. Because it's focused solely on the narrow question of whether you can replicate Oswald's shots, it doesn't try to achieve the sort of catharsis that is supposed to come from wrenching art. When the ballistics reports told me, for example, that one of my shots hit JFK in the right shoulder, exited his chest, bounced off his right fingers, and ricocheted through the limo until it hit Connally in the shin, I wasn't really thinking about how if I just aimed a little higher, then I could've gotten closer to 1,000 points."

Now if that isn't truly creepy what is???

# posted by Alice 2:38 PM

I like Alice's idea of taking out the shooters and saving the President. The "magic bullet" stuff is still theory (and beyond bullshit in my book) which reminds me of something Robert Duvall said as the "Great Santini": "Oh God, why did you put so many stupid people on the planet at the same time!?"

# posted by WRM 3:12 PM

I can't argue between this and the realistic war games, because they honestly all sicken me. I'm not going to dispatch anything to hell unless I'm sure it came from there in the first place. Aliens are abstract and unrealistic enough that I'll make an exception in their case, but that's as far as it goes with me. I found Wolfenstein to be incredibly disturbing. These are GERMAN PEOPLE. I KNOW German people!

And specifically regarding Bill's specific response to me:
"Just think of it as a company with insensitive and moronic upper management. Those are attributes that can tag along on any nationality."
I'm not sure how many people it takes to release a "product" like this, but I know there had to be at least one programmer in addition to the upper management, and that programmer probably wasn't enough of a historian himself (or herself*), so there must have been at least one of those. There was a whole team of people who concented to this. Nobody was just "following orders." The whole thing disturbs me. People disturb me.

*Somehow I don't find it even remotely possible that something this disturbing was created by a woman. I guess that means I'm sexist?

# posted by Terry 3:19 PM

I really don't have any problem with this. I mean it's a game! Yes, he really did die, it's not really speculative in nature. If you can kill aliens, run over people in a car, and deal out all kinds of hayhem in other games why not reinact something that actually happened? It may actually teach them something of history, although I doubt it.
If you can kill all sorts of people who never existed, why can't you kill someone who's already dead?
If on the other hand you are opposed to the sickening amount of violence in games of ALL types, you may be able to justifiably say this is a terrible game, but that means giving up all your 1st person shooters, plus many of the other games as well.

# posted by Anonymous 4:35 PM

I view first person shooters as more of team thing. When you play multiplayer especially with friends you know, you are delighting in blowing them up, so it's not that the genre is too violent for me. I like the the challenge of outwitting your own friends and seeing who can outlast the other, and it's a great way to blow off steam. I also never play war games, I guess because that's not my thing. But I really think that the idea of "getting" to kill Kennedy is just really twisted.

This weekend I finally played the new GTA and I have to saw it was really turned up to the point that it was all just about violence and driving all over LA killing people. In the end, that just didn't do it for me either. Most hardcore gamers are looking for challenge and great multiplayer action, not ways to kill an innocent man in a car for points. Yuck.

# posted by Alice 4:56 PM

ok, i'm only 28, so maybe i have a different perspective. But as for only shooting things that came from hell in the first place, we are talking about JFK, not Lincoln. This is the man who gave us the massacare of cubans in the bay of pigs and essentially SENT US TO VIETNAM, and if not for a timely assination his camalot career (aka, family of mobsters and bootleggers) may not have been all that glorified.

On a side note, i remember a game back in the 80s on the C64 called Libyan Commando that featured bonus rounds where you shot up a wall of unarmed prisoners.

# posted by Anonymous 5:51 PM

Dude, you are sounding like an untapped buyer of the game. So head on over and open up your wallet if you're gung ho. In case you forgot, someone obviously disliked the man enough to assissinate him in the first place. Do you need to do it now yourself too? And where does thinking like that end? Sorry but if that is your criteria, there is a much longer lisk than JFK. How dark do we need to get here? Move on....get help.

# posted by Anonymous 7:13 PM

I just don't see two ways about it.
Pretending to kill a specific real person that actually was murdered in real life is sick.
I'd like to imagine that I'm open minded enough to see other views but this one has me stuck.
MAybe it's easier if you dehumanize him by saying he was a bad guy or something, I don't know.

# posted by Tom 7:23 AM

Yo, "only 28" year old "Todd" do some research: both of the operations you mentioned were in progress before JFK took office. You could also blame the guy for all of us having a personal computer as the Apollo program is where the founders of Intel, AMD, etc. all came from (Fairchild Semiconductor).

If this "game" is only about killing the President it will not sell. If it offers some insight into a still unsolved murder, and the circumstances surrounding it, maybe it can be of some use for educating a younger generation that may not know much about it.

As for shooting characters in a game vs. shooting a real person, please. If you can't make the distinction...'nuff said.

When does that Warren Commission Report come out?

# posted by WRM 8:43 AM

I think its a little scary to think about people in a meeting brainstorming the most realistic and interactive way that this experience could be presented.
I think I realized that the direction may be changing for violent gaming when I saw a tv ad for an assassination game, where the player comes up behind a lady and strangles her with a length of wire. I feel pretty open minded about entertainment, but this was a disturbing advertisement, let alone game.
In the wake of seemingly ridiculous claims that violent games desensitize children, it gave me pause. Perhaps the less abstract you make the experience, the more likely it is to inspire action.

# posted by metermax 8:51 AM

Everytime there is a Columbine-type incident, the press trots out every gaming editor in the world to ask if video games are to "blame." I just have to say that it's an eaasy target (so to speak), but millions of people play video games, and listen to angry music, and participate in aggresive sports, and watch movies with explosions and killings, and all of those things to me are basically pressure release valves. When I triumph in Age of Empires (my personal favorite game of all time) I feel relaxed and happy and it takes the pressure off instantly, even though I technically wiped out a civilization. Go figure. But it works for me.

As comedian Chris Rock said "whatever happened to crazy?" Some people are just plain crazy and they may or may not play video games when they snap, and they may or may not use hardcore porn, and listen to Metalica, etc etc. But I do think that creating sick video games is another story, and the JFK game just crossed a line.

I stick to my premise that they missed a real opportuinity if they wanted to use the topic and graphics of the grassy knoll. Why not have you change history and save JFK? Even GTA San Andreas has a mission where you have to stop a gang from killing your homies. Violent, yes, but it is still oriented to saving people not killing them.

# posted by Alice 10:28 AM

You know, I expect that most hard core gamers will strongly defend their right to vote with their wallet what is acceptable and what isn't. I can't think of a good context for enjoying the assassination game experience, much less the subject matter.
I'm saying that there is a line of taste and common sense that is crossed when you show characters killing innocent people for points, and that's what is supposed to motivate you to buy the product. I think that is fundamentally wrong, and that businesses who deliberately develop and market trash like this should not be supported. You know that at least some preteens and teens are going to look at the ad and say 'Cool'. I can guarantee that if the product exists, it will be acquired by the wrong age group and played, i.e. not "Mature". I can also bet that this is what unscrupulous companies are banking on.
Is there a television ad for the JFK game? Or is it now being pushed just by debates in these forums and the media?

# posted by metermax 11:04 AM

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