Shadow Complex is a game that is pretty awesome, I’m told. I don’t know much more about it than that it is based on the metroidvania style of exploration-based gameplay. Which does sound awesome. Oh, and that it was based on the novel Empire, by Orson Scott Card, which could be awesome. I haven’t read anything by him other than his Enderverse books, 2 of them being my favorite books of all time, ever.
The problem with this, is that while he is a fantastic writer of beautiful words and novels, OSC is also an enormous douche in real life. It would seem that all the time he doesn’t spend writing wonderful books is spent telling people how much of a menace gay people are, and how earth-shatteringly bad an idea it is for them to get married to each other. For this reason, there is a movement to, among other things, boycott the game. Gamasutra has a write-up and editorial on the whole mess, which, as far as I’m concerned, gets it mostly right.
The big thing that he says that eats at me is that we can’t judge games like we used to when we were children, which is just entirely false. People can (and do) play games for every reason under the sun. Just because I play, say, Bioshock because I think that the storyline is ethically and morally interesting, doesn’t mean I can’t play, say, Assassin’s Creed because I just enjoy watching people climb shit. It’s the same story with movies: I love V for Vendetta because of the political warning and the ties to 1984, but I enjoyed the (first) Transformers Live-Action Movie because it was a bunch of shape-changing robots fighting the crap out of each other. It’s the same with books, and any and every other medium of art that exists: You enjoy this things for whatever reason you want, be it simple or complex, political, or… (what’s the opposite of political?) reasonable?
By extension, Even if I disagree with everything the author stands for, I’m not going to not read his books, or play his games, or whatever, unless what I’m reading and playing are designed to push forward his plan for whatever it is I’m in disagreement with. Ender’s shadow has exactly zero to do with gay rights, and I’d be willing to bet that Shadow Complex matches that amount.
Christian Nutt ends his his article with the question “Are we ‘just gamers’ or are we adults?” And I believe the clear answer is that we whatever we want to be, whenever we want to be it. In the end, boycotting Shadow Complex isn’t going to help anyone, or, I suppose, more importantly, hurt anyone. You’ll just have missed out on what could potentially be a very good game. There’s no reason to restrain potential enjoyment in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with said enojoyment. That said, there’s also no reason not to go, say, protest OSC’s papers and speeches that actually have anything at all to do with homosexuality. Or don’t. That’s the beauty of it. You have a choice.
