Molleindustria, one of the only outfits that has devoted their entire artistic practice to videogames with an agenda, has released a new game, and this one's a doozy, bound to be either hated or mildly appreciated, but maybe never loved -- and that's by design. Operation: Pedopriest is a game about child sex abuse in the Catholic church.

Paolo tells us that the game is based loosely on the BBC documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican, which you can watch on YouTube if you want the backgrounder. The documentary is about a secret procedure for dealing with child sex abuse.

Of course, the idea of a "secret procedure" is perfect fodder for a videogame. The game itself doesn't so much operationalize the reported Vatican strategy as render it absurd and psychotic. The player musters eunuchs to intercept parents, priests, and police to disrupt the priest's progress. There is a rhetoric of failure at work here, of course, because infinite attention would be required to succeed at preventing all abuse.

You can play the game online at Molleindustria's site. Don't let the characteristic cartoonishness fool you though, this is a game -- perhaps the only game -- with an explicit representation of child sex abuse.