The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>There's an X-Box demo station at my university's gym. It's really quite random, it just appeared there one day.

So I've just run my 2.22 miles in under 15 minutes, and I'm quite hot. It's quite cold outside, which means I have a sweatshirt and a jacket to put on before heading out into it. Before I get outside, however, hot from running + two layers of jackets = icky. So I try and cool down for as long as is reasonable before leaving. The X-Box demo station made a perfect medium for this.

I watched the Splinter Cell demo. Basically, the voice over said "I provide you with everything you have by doing very, very nasty things around the world with no oversight whatsoever."

Yeah, it's a game, but I really can't get into a game with stuff like that going through my head. Well, it is Tom Clancy, afterall.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>And how is this different from MGS?</div>

<div style='font: bold 9pt ; text-align: left; '>You can't get into a game where you do nasty things all over the world?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>The game itself probably isn't, but MGS2 didn't have a demo that was using this sort of logic. I now associate the game with this rationale.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>It's the justification they're giving behind it.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Jesus, man...get yourself together. It's a goddamn game! I'm going to shoot people and kill them, but not in real life.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That really has nothing to do with my point - they're the one's who politicized it, not me.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "Comic Sans MS"; text-align: left; '>Well, with MGS, Hideo limited stuff to "rogue" soldiers and Snake going in to try to send them back; basically, Snake is a glorified police officer. Snake didn't like his role, but he was forced into it, and really, you get the feeling that not everybody was in the know by the end of the game, though you know the US was up to something dishonest.

With Splinter Cell...well, the political atmosphere alone makes the patriotism inherent in the game somewhat repulsive to those who can recite that 5th freedom with the taste of bile in their mouth, mostly because one must ask: "If the US is so good, so democratc, and so advanced, who are we practicing this 'fifth freedom' on and why do we have to make it a covert operation?" Remember, covert operations got a huge jump start during the Reagan administration, when the public didn't like <I>anything</I> Reagan was doing to the rest of the world so insteadof going public like Korea and Vietnam, the government had to go underground (more or less) to get their objectives (expansion aka Imperialism) completed; the Iran-contra scandal is proof of that.</div>