Where do 18- to 25-year-old males stand on the issue of same-sex marriage? You might take a peek at the online chatter about “Shadow Complex,” a new game designed for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which dominates the gaming console market in a demographic cohort better known for, well, downloading video games than for its political engagement.
“Shadow Complex” is the product of a collaboration between Chair Entertainment, which developed the game for Microsoft, and popular sci-fi author—and ardent gay-rights opponent—Orson Scott Card. Card’s 2006 novel Empire, a near-future thriller about a civil war between American progressives and conservatives, supplies the basic plotlines for “Shadow Complex.”
And Card’s political views, in turn, supply the drama for his fiction.
“The first and greatest threat from court decisions…giving legal recognition to ‘gay marriage’ is that it marks the end of democracy in America,” Card said in a piece he wrote for the Mormon Times last summer. “What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them. How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down…”
The suggestion that gamers might consider a boycott of “Shadow Complex” first appeared as a discussion thread at the gaming forum NeoGAF. That sparked commentary by Christian Nutt, an openly gay features editor at Gamasutra.
“If we can have meaningful political discussion in other media,” Nutt wrote, “we can have it in games. And even if ‘Shadow Complex’ itself doesn’t espouse views about same-sex marriage, in some way the product funds Orson Scott Card.”
As the debate went viral, the unusual crackle of static around the controversy caught the attention of Gus Mastrapa, a blogger who writes for the gaming division of Wired, which is where I found the clearest distillation of the array of viewpoints on the call for a boycott.
“Card’s contribution to Shadow Complex is, IMO, minimal and not all that significant,” remarks a poster on the Wired site. “You can use this as an excuse not to start buying up OSC books if you like, but don’t shun this great game worked on by several dozen people.”
That basically libertarian sentiment informs most of the postings at Wired, Gamasutra, Fidgit and the other forums I checked out. To be sure, there’s plenty of trash-talking and chest-thumping, but the thing that really struck me about the opinionating of the young, mostly straight, mostly male voices in the mix was how un-ideological they sounded. I came across very few posters who matched Card’s sulfurous condemnation of queerfolk. And many of the gay writers tended to separate their appreciation of “Shadow Complex”—currently the most popular download for the Xbox 360—from their disdain for the politics of the game’s nominal author.
Behold the “Nones” in action. They are young, politically and religiously independent men (and some women) who seem apathetic to us ideologically polarized oldsters primarily because, unlike us, they tend to see the world in shades of gray.
“While I personally find Card’s political views ignorant and downright offensive,” says one commentator on Kotaku, “that’s probably not going to stop me from checking out this game. Because I like power armor. And guns.”
