The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode

I found this game to be an effective argument that the fear that games may be hiding secret hateful content is silly, because games don't need to do that in order to send ideological messages. While in the accompanying essay the author writes that he "decided to take out all the Nazi stuff," just because the hidden mode is gone (or at least, has been rendered inaccessible via the originally intended method) doesn't mean the game is suddenly perfectly innocent. We're told that the PC took bus 88 to get to their destination, which is Muranowska Square, and our task in the game is to seek out the hiding places of frightened rabbits--which given this context takes on a deeper, more sinister meaning. A child playing this game might never understand or pay attention to these references, but an adult can see that the game is not, as it claims, simply a cute story about bunnies.

This game is an effective illustration that messaging can be baked into games in far more subtle ways than via a "hidden Nazi mode", and for that reason, vetting games for objectionable content is never going to be as simple as glancing over the source code and verifying that it doesn't contain any slurs.

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