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There were a good number of stories around gaming blogs about the Games for Change conference, including the one we mentioned about Sandra Day O’Connor’s new project.

One game I didn’t see mentioned during the conference, however, is Harpooned, which is of note as possibly the best use of a video game as rhetoric to date.

Harpooned, as you may have guessed, is a “Japanese Cetean Research Simulator.” This takes the form of an upscrolling shmup where your Japanese “research vessel” messily explodes whales in Antarctica for “research purposes.”

The subject of Japanese whaling is a hearty stew of national pride, percieved slights and bureaucratic inertia, so it can be difficult to address directly. Harpooned realizes that satire often works best with a light touch. As Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau once said, you have to take your boot off the audience’s neck occasionally. Humor is one of the most subversive, corrosive forces known to man, and sometimes you just have to let it work its magic.

The game is never preachy. Instead, its between-level messages mirror the deadpan earnestness of Japanese official agencies that insist that the only good way to research whales is to kill them. At the end of the level, the bloodsoaked whale chunks and organs are offloaded to another vessel, where they are then “reasearched” into cat food and whaleburgers that merrily fly to your points total.

Harpooned is free to download and play, but the YouTube video will give you a pretty good overview if you don’t want to go through the trouble.

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Categories: Video games //