Burn down the shopping malls!

Market success is one thing, but State of Emergency is also getting approval from some actual anti-globalization critics.

"Oh, great!" says Barbara Garson, playwright and author of "Money Makes The World Go Around," when I tell her that State of Emergency already appears to be selling out (at least near MIT). Reached by phone at her mother's house in Florida, Garson sounds every bit like the self-described "little old Jewish lady" (albeit one with a fiery, socialist streak) who tracked her mutual fund money across the globe for her book. The disturbing revelations she discovered along the way have been embraced by many in the anti-globalization movement, so I wondered what she'd make of this new title for the Playstation 2.

"Is this game basically something I'm for or against?" says Garson. "You told me it's already selling out, and I said, spontaneously, 'Great!' ... I obviously have some feeling that, if people are buying a game where the corporation is the bad guy, then I'm happy. That's my thoughtless reaction, and then I'll go see it, and see whether the game does me harm or good."

When I tell her she'll need a PS2 to play it, she shouts to her husband, "Where do we go [to get it], honey?" Then she says to me, "CompUSA has Playstation, Frank said." She tells me she intends to take a look at it there, and in any case, "I'm really flattered that there should be a game that takes some version of me and makes me into a 'Tank Girl,' and makes me into a heroine."

Other activists I contacted offered similarly tentative approval. "Honestly," said "Circuit," who declined to give his or her real name, "unlike a lot of fellow anarchists, I'm not too bothered by the game, per se." Reached via an anonymous e-mail address on a radical Web site, Circuit claims to have participated in black bloc marches during the '99 WTO conference in Seattle, and at the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City. "People may play the game, realize the similarities, and then turn towards good, solid information sources such as books, Web sites, essays, articles, etc. to find out more about what really happens, and, most importantly, why."

But all this brings us back to the co-option criticism originally made by Naomi Klein. Even if State of Emergency elevates anti-corporate awareness among the young, does it really matter, when the more who get that message (i.e., by buying the game), the more Take-Two Interactive and Sony profit?

It might even be difficult to name a cause that has been more thoroughly co-opted by the forces it seeks to overthrow than anti-globalization. A significant portion of the funding for anti-globalization activities is quietly provided by a right-wing billionaire unhappy with how free trade has hurt his textile business. Groups like the Ruckus Society and Global Exchange are now kept afloat by donations from consumer goods giant Unilever.

On the arts-and-entertainment side, anti-globalization has been promoted by Michael Moore's films and books (from Disney and Fox Newscorp, respectively), while its marches are accompanied by the music of Rage Against the Machine (Sony) and Manu Chao (Virgin).

"Very sad to say," Garson acknowledges, speaking about State of Emergency, though she could just as well be referring to those other co-opted products, "but for a game to reach a great many people, it has to be put out by them ... I don't like that a game has to be sold through Sony, but I don't know an answer to that, I don't know how to sell the game otherwise."

"American business is less invested in perpetuating its own ideologies than it is in making short-term profit," says Henry Jenkins, "and if money can be made selling anti-corporate and anti-consumerist messages, they will find a way to commodify them. At the same time, it suggests that within any multinational, transmedia conglomerate, there are individuals who are asking ethical and political questions and who are struggling to find ways to get their ideas into broader circulation."

Others in the movement have complained that State of Emergency distorts their message by misrepresenting infrequent incidents of violence and corporate sabotage in otherwise peaceful protests as a primary tactic. But there's an ambivalence about the use of such methods which makes that objection disingenuous. A recent Village Voice article suggested that anarchism is becoming the mainstream of anti-globalization activism; the idea of smashing up corporate property during protests is no longer rejected out of hand, but treated almost as a lifestyle choice.

"[I]t's hard to find an anarchist who doesn't fiercely defend the right to destroy certain kinds of property, placing vandalism of McDonald's in the respected tradition of the Boston Tea Party," the Voice reporter notes.

"There are elements within the movement who support tactical sabotage, and collective self-defense," Circuit acknowledges, "and those elements are growing in number." (Less receptively, Garson groans at the mention of the Voice article. "There's this bullshit about 'diversity of tactics' that comes up all the time," she says.) But if so many activists are unwilling to condemn force or property destruction, among themselves, aren't they in a poor place to whine when a game developer magnifies those elements for dramatic purposes?

But perhaps questions like that could be answered in future games -- because for all its failings, State of Emergency has vastly expanded the palette of the computer gaming medium, which grows in popularity by geometric leaps every year. Whatever it says about co-option of anti-corporate opinions, the financial success of the game would prove that there's a viable market for titles with an explicit political outlook.

"One of the signs that games are maturing as a medium is that we now have artists who want to use games to offer critical perspectives on contemporary life," says Jenkins of MIT. "It's a step forward any time games are about something more than blowing up things."

And if it's now possible to have a video game with the challenge "Destroy corporate property for bonus points!" then a wealth of alternate views is also available for implementation in future games, to energize our digital play spaces and make them an interactive proving ground for new ideas: a discourse we are constantly changing, drawn for us in cascading slices of light.

"I'm going to call Naomi and see if we can get together and make a game," Barbara Garson tells me. "Why can't we make a game? But does anyone like to play a game that doesn't have real shooting in it?" I assure her they do. "Because I'm not sure our game will have shooting in it ... But I want to explain globalization and if you can explain it through a game, I wanna do it."

"If there's one message you can take away from SoE," says Wolpaw of Old Man Murray, "I think it's that capitalism has finally, irrevocably won. Using advanced technology developed in Japan and financed by a publishing company in the U.S., a group of smart people in Scotland has created what's possibly the most useless consumer product of all time ... Playing State of Emergency is like spiking the ball in the end zone of competing ideologies. Feel the burn, Marxism!"

He may very well be right -- but at the moment, a nice old lady with some radical ideas is making a trip to a nearby CompUSA, to see what other worlds might yet be possible when she gets her hands on the control pad.

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