An Artist's 9/11 Space Invaders Remix Sparks Outrage Among Gamers

It's just a game. So goes the hue and cry among players wherever the subject of violence and games is debated. That's not the case, apparently, when designers and artists try to use the medium to go beyond death matches and free-form sandbox thuggery.

Fallout from an art installation at the Games Convention 2008 in Leipzig, Germany, yesterday spread across the Atlantic and consumed the American game community in vitriol and, in the process, made hypocrites out of an entire subculture.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders, the Games Convention included "Invaders!"—a work by French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley. The original installation consisted of a Space Invaders machine set amidst a large interactive space. In that installation, the game screen was overlaid on an 8-bit backdrop depicting the two towers of the World Trade Center, which fell in September 2001 after being struck by a pair of hijacked jetliners. The version put up at the Games Convention did not include the interactive elements.

From the artist's blog:

The World Trade Center attacks mark a deep cut in our recent history that is still being processed. The French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley has found an unusual – though obvious – metaphor with his work “Invaders!”, which is based on the 1978 arcade original. In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy.

The juxtaposition of the terrorist attack and a classic arcade game, coupled with the full-body gestural control scheme, seems as though it could have been an involving, if challenging, experience. Like Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, "Invaders!" pushes back at our tendency to lock horrific events into an untouchable cultural trophy cabinet, forever off limits and sacrosanct. When we fail to challenge our assumptions about such horrific events, however, we often fall victim to emotional and unthinking responses. And that can be dangerous. The war in Iraq is, arguably, an example of just such a dangerous failure.

American gamers yesterday weren't buying that line. Megablog Kotaku led off their report by saying, "Let's file this one under "Too Soon," and went on to add

We're not quite sure what's going on here...we do know, however, that the 8-bit tower jumpers and the negative score applied to each WTC tower to indicate damage aren't going to sit well with, we're thinking, everyone we know who doesn't hate freedom.

That was enough to set off a firestorm in the comments section, where hordes of 'core' gamers, who love to berate those who criticize games without playing them first, did just that. The comments were initially peppered with readers pointing out that art sometimes offends you and that if games are going to be an art form, then they, too, will occasionally offend.

But in true sheeple posting fashion, as the number of offendees exceeded those who reserved judgment, the comments got uglier. Stanley was serially accused of being an 'attention whore' who was making fun of a tragedy.

Things got even nastier at the artist's own web site, where a poster to his blog wrote:

Wow your idiocy and pompousness is amazing. A frenchie speaking about war strategy while simultaneously infusing the biggest terrorist event in the last 50 years. I intend to develop a game which speaks of france’s heat wave of several summers ago where your countrymen died because they lacked the intelligence to get an air conditioning unit.

Another wrote:

I have an idea for a piece of performance art you might be interested in, it involves me shoving the Eiffel Tower up your ass until you choke on your damn colon and begin to vomit your own lungs. Let me know if you are interested I’m sure we could get together sometime and work out the logistics.

It was an embarassing few hours to be an American gamer.

Later in the day, however, after Kotaku actually bothered to go to the artist's site and read his intentions behind the piece, the community seemed to settle down a bit. At that point, the comments turned mostly thoughtful and intelligent, even if many still found the installation's themes inappropriate or distasteful. Gameplay footage from an earlier incarnation of the installation is shown below.