State of Emergency isn't all socialist agitprop disguised as a video game. It's mostly a frenetic, arcade-style fight title, merged with an extended story line and featuring as much onscreen chaos as the PS2's engine can handle. (At some moments, 250 people are displayed at once, running wild through a shopping mall and city streets.)

The player gets to choose from five avatars, and even here, the characters are obviously designed to serve political purposes: there's Hector Soldado, the reformed Latino gangbanger who believes the Corporation is doing more harm to his neighborhood than the daily drive-bys; there's Libra, the biracial human rights lawyer who decides the only true justice now possible comes from the brick and the gun.

Joining the Freedom Movement means accomplishing a series of tasks -- blowing up security stations here, killing an executive there, and so on -- as the resistance gains ground across Capitol City in a march to Corporation Central to confront the company's overlords.

All this is depicted with a sensibility that feels far more streetwise than most console games -- compared to, say, anime-influenced titles from Japan. In State of Emergency, the look is downtown and hip-hop, and the soundtrack is loaded with funk-driven, drum 'n' bass samples. The game play itself is fairly simple and repetitive. And after the initial giddy panic of maneuvering through a crowd of hundreds recedes, you notice the limitations of the game's artificial-intelligence programming. When chaos nears, civilians cover their faces and cower for awhile -- otherwise, they seem unswervingly fixed to their pre-scripted panic routes.

"It's no Grand Theft Auto III," says Erik Wolpaw, co-founder of Old Man Murray, the popular hardcore gamer site, referring to that game's epic, open-ended game play. And while State of Emergency's prologue depicts corporate security whaling away on suspects in a way that's decidedly reminiscent of the Rodney King beating, the in-game fascism is much more low-key.

"Even though there's a riot going on," says Wolpaw, "the corporate police appear perfectly happy to let the looting continue ... The only time they react with violence is when you start blowing up gas trucks and pumping shotgun rounds into crowds of innocent civilians. The whole thing starts to feel like a ringing endorsement of stormtroopers."

The most interesting element actually seems to be the game's social outlook, which is ironically conveyed in announcements over the game's shopping-mall P.A. system, or in a news crawl constantly running at the bottom of the screen, enjoining viewers to consume more, stop worrying about the environment, and so on. Also, for kids: a TV show explaining why capitalism is good for them.

But if all this seems overtly political, suggests professor Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's comparative media studies program and a leading game-studies academic, perhaps it's because most games are so covertly conservative. In his view, popular business simulations like Mall Tycoon and action titles like the SWAT series are really interactive paeans to the status quo.

"For every game which questions capitalism," says Jenkins, "there are hundreds more which encourage us to fantasize about becoming a tycoon. For every game which celebrates countercultural forces, there are hundreds more which side with the police. Most of the games on the market position themselves in the boardroom or the patrol car, not on the side of the people in the streets."

Whether that principle applies to this particular game is something Jenkins hasn't yet decided: He tried to purchase it for his program's collection, but found it had already sold out everywhere in his neighborhood. Still, he says, "If the game encourages kids to learn more about one of the defining political debates of our times, the game will have served a useful purpose."

But turning the American Trade Organization into the nameless Corporation may have already diminished State of Emergency's ideological impact, and Wolpaw (who has played the game) scoffs at the idea that it has anything coherent to say about globalization.

"Totalitarian corporations are basically right behind fascist aliens and Nazis on the list of overworked video-game villains," says Wolpaw. "They're even ahead of mean elves." Wolpaw is no stranger to converting video games into political statement: Shortly after Sept. 11, distraught by Islamist terrorists and American apologists for them, he turned a Playstation hockey game into a kind of hilarious vengeance theater, renaming the opponent's goalie Noam Chomsky.

Wolpaw even examined one popular gamer bulletin board to see if interest in anti-globalization issues had been spurred by State of Emergency. But so far, "after wading through 46 pages of posts, I couldn't find a single message dealing with the WTO, capitalism or Indonesian child laborers ... On the other hand, I did find a lot of posters begging for the code that makes people's heads pop off when you punch them."

Wolpaw does concede that SoE's politics are more explicit than those of most other games that have preceded it: While previous games have often involved a faceless, evil corporation from the far future, State of Emergency's corporation is more or less set in the present, and the game clearly enumerates why it is so reprehensible.

Ironically, the actual corporation behind SoE, Take-Two Interactive, is no stranger to controversy: The mayhem-happy Grand Theft Auto III was recently censored in Australia, and also earned a spot on the hit list of Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., neither of which, however, prevented the game from becoming Playstation 2's underground killer app and helping drive Christmas sales of the console to record heights, despite competition from the more powerful Xbox.

This new game arrives at a time when the company's financials are almost as controversial. Take-Two was recently obliged to restate two years' worth of its fiscal reports, and its accounting practices are now undergoing formal investigation by the SEC; following postponement of its fourth-quarter 2000 fiscal report, trading of its stock on the NASDAQ was halted on Jan. 22, and unfrozen a day before State of Emergency's Feb. 16 release. The legal and financial eruptions have motivated several stock analysts to downgrade Take-Two's future outlook. When trading resumed last Friday, the stock initially plunged 19 percent.

But in a perfectly delicious postmodern twist, Reuters Financial reported last Thursday that the interactive entertainment company is "expected to benefit from the launch of 'State of Emergency' for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 this weekend." In other words, prospects for the corporation's future profitability now depend on an anti-capitalist video game that criticizes, as Rockstar's Jamie King told Gamespot recently, "genetic modification, brainwashing, globalization, consumerism ..." Early word of brisk sales suggest that these anti-capitalist messages should help put Take-Two's executives back in their shareholders' good graces.

Recent Stories