It was apparently too subversive for Apple, who banned it from its App Store in 2011, just four days after launch (it can still be downloaded on Android devices). Molleindustria also created iPhone title Phone Story, where players lead developing world children in coltan mining and try to catch plummeting Foxconn workers – a satire on the incredible global cost of gadget fetishism. There are countless others: Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini, who describes himself as more interested in examining "forms of violence and oppression that are somewhat invisible," released Best Amendment earlier this year, "in an attempt to come to terms with games' obsession with guns." Thanks to Kickstarter, SiSSYFiGHT is set to be revived in HTML5 as an open-source game on modern servers and mobile devices, with passionate volunteers stepping up to lead the grassroots community around the game. Players also had the incredibly-uncommon option of creating androgynous avatars. The fully-customisable avatars could be represented through a palette of unnatural colours and often looked subversively grotesque. It's a direct descendant of PUNKSNOTDEAD, a joyfully violent, neon-drenched primal scream made by a developer called mooosh in just 12 hours – except Kopas' "cutie aesthetic" reinterpretation – where you prettify the game's world by embracing people and kittens – acts as an interrogation of traditional testosterone-fueled death fantasies.Īt the turn of the new millennium, online game SiSSYFiGHT 2000 cast players as awful little playground girls in battle, at a time when non-sexualised female characters in video games were even more of a rarity than they are now. Independent designer Merritt Kopas describes her recent game HUGPUNX as a "a fluoro-pink queer urban hugging simulator". Among many other things, the game allows you the option to perform nude body-scans on frail refugees if you think it might prevent terrorism, and in so doing, forces you to think about the human cost of bureaucracy by creating empathy with all its living components.
Inside the bleak, detail-intensive and challenging work of document processing is a fascinating essay on nationalism and the fundamental conflict between freedom and security. One of my favourite releases this year is Lucas Pope's Papers, Please, where you play as a border control officer for a dark fictional nation called Arstotzka. Genuine transgression occurs at the fringes of art, and the same is luckily still true in gamings' independent scene.
At worst, GTA V now looks a lot like a reinforcement of the same status quo that constrains the video game industry's prominent and expensive console retail business. It's a bit like the corporatisation of punk rock: What does the traditional industry's most mammoth juggernaut have left to say on behalf of society's easy targets? Its casual violence, lazy misogyny and lavish attention to what an empowered young male demographic finds funny no longer seem in step with the edgy rebelliousness that brought the franchise to international dominance. The recently-launched Grand Theft Auto V cost upwards of $250m (£155m) to develop and market, and its investment in a realistic universe of unprecedented scale paid off: the franchise brought in a billion dollars in its first 48 hours on the market. In a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world, its playground of violence undercut with sharp critiques of American consumerism and hypocrisy quantified an important protest against moral panic, deftly skewering the nation's tendency to blame new technology – particularly video games – for social ills. Over a decade ago, the Grand Theft Auto juggernaut hit hard.