The John McCain campaign put out a Flash video game based on Space Invaders, called “Pork Invaders”. to show how McCain will fight against pork-barrel spending. The invaders have been replaced with pigs, the UFO is now a pork barrel, and so on. I give them kudos for offering HTML that lets you embed the game in your blog, facebook page, or any other web site where you’d like to play it. That shows an understanding of how people like to use the Internet these days, and I’m going to take advantage of that to let you play Pork Invaders below.
I think it’s really interesting that the McCain campaign chose such an early game. I’m going to skip the snarky comments that come to mind about the game’s age and McCain’s age. And, I’m going to assume Space Invaders was chosen because it’s easy to program quickly & on a budget. Still, one thought came to mind when I started playing it, and I wanted to share it with you.
It’s a quote from Rob Fulop, one of the early developers for the Atari 2600 (VCS). It can be heard over the closing credits of the first episode of Once Upon Atari:
God knows what those video games did to the minds of the kids that played them. I think about this a lot. I meet adults now that, by the time they were twelve, they played 100,000 hours of those early VCS games that we made. Well, you know, I watched 100,000 hours of TV and, you know, when I was twelve, and I, certainly as I’m getting older, realize the effect that had on me.
A lot of kids walking around now are shaped by the video games they played when they were younger, and the message was pretty clear: you always lose. Now, it’s the nineties, and there’s a lot of nihilism in our music and in our culture. It’s like these kids grew up, and what’s coming out is “we always lose, there’s a pointlessness to our lives“. I believe video games had a key role in that inner world of a lot of people.
We didn’t grow up with that. People in my culture grew up with “it’ll all work out, you know. The End. Roll credits. It’ll always work out in the end.” The next generation that we helped create, that we helped form, was “we always lose”, and we’re all responsible for that.
I’m tired of hearing politicians and their promises. Sorry, but I can’t believe anyone who promises they’ll get rid of pork spending, or end the war, or anything really. When it comes to politics, we always lose, and people keep on believing that if we just elect the right person, everything will be hunky-dory. It wont. We always lose.
