Faith Fighter, the controversial browser-based fighting game where you could pit your favorite deities against each other Primal Rage-style, has been pulled from the creator’s website, following a brief statement from the Organization of the Islamic Conference condemning the game as being “incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians.” Molleindustria, who also developed the game Operation: Pedopriest, explains why they removed the game, citing a failure on their part to communicate the inherent irony of the game, which was created shortly after, and partly as a response to, the uproar over the Danish newspaper cartoons which depicted the face of the prophet Muhammed.
A more detailed write-up can be found here, on the liberal news and opinion blog The Huffington Post. Faith Fighter can still be played on Newgrounds.
TIGdb: Entry for Faith Fighter
From the title of the game, you might expect that you’re playing to stop the pedophile priests, but actually, you’re playing to cover up the sexual abuse of the horny paters. This, as you can imagine, changes things quite a bit.
Quote Ian Bogost:
Operation: Pedopriest is definitely disturbing to play, and the cartoony graphics do little to mitigate the how awful it all feels. Which isn’t a condemnation of the game itself, mind you – I’m quite certain this is the exact reaction developer Molleindustria was going for. It does make it quite a mixed bag of gaming peanuts, though – do I even WANT to win at this?
The game mechanics are quite simple, and involve clicking “eunuchs” around to distract adults and police officers while the clergy is molesting children. When things get really bad, you can airlift a priest out of there to go hide out in the Vatican. When a certain number of priests are arrested before the given time limit runs out, it’s game over.
You know, I just figured there wasn’t enough controversy on TIGSource…
(Source: Play This Thing!)