Is this going too far?
JFK Reloaded, after all, is an online game that deals with the John F. Kennedy assassination and was made available yesterday -- the 41st anniversary of the president's death.
To have players pretend to be Lee Harvey Oswald, crouch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle, and fire those three shots is bad enough. But, for the game's critics, it gets worse. It costs $10 to play, and the company that created it is supposedly offering $100,000 in prize money -- where that will come from isn't clear -- for the player who re-creates the exact timing and angle of the shots that killed the nation's 35th president.
"It's despicable," says David Smith, spokesman for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the late president's brother. "We're not commenting further."
Douglas Lowenstein, president of the locally based Entertainment Software Association, adds: "There are all sorts of things some people find offensive and objectionable on the Internet, but just because the creators of JFK Reloaded call it a video game doesn't make it so. In our view, this product is neither entertainment nor a video game as normally understood."
Learning more about the game isn't easy.
Traffic Management Limited, the Scotland-based company that created what it calls a "docu-game," hasn't uttered much either. Numerous calls made yesterday seeking comment were not returned. But the New York Daily News yesterday quoted Kirk Ewing, the managing director of Traffic, as saying, "This new form of interactive entertainment brings history to life and will stimulate a younger generation of players to take an interest in this fascinating episode of American history. We've created the game with the belief that Oswald was the only person that fired the shots on that day, although this re-creation proves how immensely difficult his task was."
It is a rather edgy, eerie experience, playing a game that aims to kill a president. JFK Reloaded capitalizes on the continued fascination with Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on a sunny fall afternoon in 1963. That day has been memorialized in best-selling books and popular films, including Oliver Stone's "JFK," which explored the conspiracy theories surrounding the event. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that the shots were fired from Oswald's gun.
The images remain timeless: the parade, the grassy knoll, the presidential motorcade, the pillbox hat worn by the first lady. They have become sacrosanct, highly sensitive.
But to Ian Bogost, they're not off-limits. The assistant professor in the digital media graduate program of the Georgia Institute of Technology has watched the game's free demo and says he has played it as well. Bogost, who also runs a year-old blog, watercoolergames.org -- for "video games with an agenda," he says -- finds the negative reaction hypocritical.
"The game, I think, very explicitly positioned itself to try to explain what actually took place -- similar to Stone's movie," says Bogost. "What we have here is an inconsistency. From what I've heard about the criticism, those who object to the game say two things: On the one hand, you have those people for whom video games can never take on a serious topic; and on the other hand, you have those for whom certain representation in a game is offensive and undesirable."
He says the game's Web site, JFKReloaded.com, is in the same vein as the first-person shooter game Kuma War. That game uses current topics -- such as the Swift boat mission in Vietnam that won Sen. John Kerry a Silver Star and became a point of controversy in the presidential election -- as a means for exploring headline-grabbing issues, "another way to create a frame for understanding," Bogost says.
