The New York Times website has a piece today on forthcoming DS game, Imagination is the Only Escape, which follows a French boy who escapes into a fantasy world in order to survive the brutality of the Nazi occupation. Published by small UK company Altern8, it's the latest dark interactive tale from designer Luc Bernard, previously responsible for hand drawn-style DS adventure Eternity's Child.
The NYT article quotes from a Nintendo of America statement, which claims that the company has 'no plans' to release the title in the US. Just as censorship theories began circulating across the web, Bernard pointed out on his blog that Nintendo has not actually seen the game and that its 'no plans' stance was merely the company's default position on unannounced titles.
Bernard clearly feels he has walked into the eye of a particularly nasty hurricane here. His blog makes references to press reports describing the project as a Nazi Torture game, while on his Myspace page he links to a sickening thread on a Neo Nazi forum.
"This game was NOT create to be controversial, it was created to show that games can be educational," claims Bernard on his blog. Curiously, both clauses of that sentence seem disingenuous. Games dealing with highly emotive real-life subject matter have always caused controversy - just look at the ruckus surrounding JFK Reloaded, Super Columbine Massacre RPG and Kuma/War. And surely even the most committed of technophobes have now conceded the basic tenet that games can have educational value? Or is it me that's being naive here?
And is this really a controversy? A newspaper gets its facts wrong about a game - this will not cause the Earth to spin off its axis. Certainly, at the moment, it's mostly game sites reporting on the incident.
One thing's for sure - a very small publishing company and a lone game designer have earned a bit of pre-publicity for an education app. They will need to tread carefully from here on - more carefully, perhaps, than Roberto Benigni, who dealt with a similar concept in his movie, Life Is Beautiful. Some attacked the work as a crass over-simplification of a horrendous subject, but it still won dozens of awards - the project was accepted as an artistic endeavour. Game makers do not have the same cultural sanctions as film directors - it was bizarre to think they did.
