Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Harpooned, an anti-whaling game

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Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Harpooned, an anti-whaling game

by Ian Bogost January 18, 2008

categories: Political Games

As a statement against and satire of Japanese whaling, three Australians have created Harpooned: Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator. The tongue-in-cheek creator's statement amounts to a sentence: "You play the role of a Japanese scientist performing research on whales around Antarctica." It's probably one that will . Additional coverage at NineMSN.
The game is a shmup in which the player controls a whaling vessel that fires harpoons at whiles while avoiding protesters. Some gameplay footage appears below. The adaptation of shmup to whaling is pretty effective.

Like the recent Mega Man-themed game-like video about Robert Dziekánksi The sarcastic commentary may be lost on some, as the NineMSN article seems to suggest.

Comments (1)

I wonder if that '10%' of people who just didn't get that the game was a damning attack on Japanese whale research are media-illiterate or are simply clueless. The text is clear and you don't even have to play the game to get the idea. I just don't see how this could be taken as anything OTHER than farce, unlike Mega Man vs Polish Immigrant, which requires considerable knowledge of the Mega Man games to clear up some otherwise ambiguous sequences. Of course, people also misread Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" which is 'clearly' satire. As they did the videogame Cannon Fodder, for that matter...

I will say the soundtrack for this game is very reminiscent of the work of Rafael Dyll, who scored Last Hope (Dreamcast) and Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer (PC) and the game is pretty well designed as a simple shmup.

dmonnens on January 19, 2008 10:51 PM