JFK Reloaded

The Good
Somewhere between 1928 and 1929, René Magritte painted a picture of a pipe above the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe;" "This is not a pipe." Of course it is a pipe, but then it really isn't a pipe, it's an image of a pipe. Enter JFK Reloaded, a game about the John F. Kennedy Assassination, where the player kills Kennedy. Of course, the player doesn't really kill Kennedy; the player kills an image of Kennedy. The player, playing a virtual Lee Harvey Oswald, focuses a representation of a sniper rifle on a computer-generated motorcade as it drives along a rendered Dealey Plaza and earns points for killing a Kennedy no more tangible than any other game character.

Adding another layer of paradox, Traffic, the Scottish design studio which released JFK Reloaded, doesn't actually call the game a "game". It's an "interactive reconstruction" of the Assassination. It would take a history buff to tackle the reconstruction aspect. It looks like they've done their homework, pouring over 1963-era maps of Dealey Plaza, the Warren Commission report, and various ballistic reports. Everything looks right—although the crowds and motorcade can be thinned out to improve performance. About the interactive part…

The Bad
If you've heard about this game, it's probably via the mainstream media who are horrified that this game exists, yet aren’t above providing free advertisement. From what I've read, people think this is the worst thing to come out of Scotland since haggis. While Traffic goes out of their way to explain JFK Reloaded as being an intellectual exercise, intending to prove that only Lee Harvey Oswald could have shot Kennedy in exactly the manner detailed by the Warren Commission, two elements stand out: First, the player acts as the assassin and earns points for shooting the president. Second, players are competing to win up to $100,000 for the most successful reenactment.

Now I don't think gamers are lining up en masse for the bounty on Kennedy's head. However, I do think that honest gamers will admit to being propelled by morbid curiosity. After all, an "interactive reconstruction" which precludes assassination attempts from the grassy knoll, sewage grates, or other speculated areas blindly follows the Warren Commission Report, rather than proving it. Likewise, since Oswald's perfect score seems unobtainable, it seems like creating a straight reenactment would have been more useful, leaving players to analyze the results. I should mention that a ballistic analysis is available as are replays from different perspectives, including Abraham Zapruder's.

The Bottom Line
JFK Reloaded is not available in stores. Visitors to Traffic's web site can download the game and pay $9.99 to unlock the full version. However, if we look at the games widely available in stores, especially toy stores, JFK Reloaded seems rather tame. You can shoot Kennedy in the head, but you can't cut it off with piano wire. You can open fire on the motorcade, but you can't steal any of the cars. Kennedy doesn't even rise from the dead. Still, there seems to be a conviction that clicking on some pixels is okay, but clicking on others is not.

I'm reminded of English Bob's speech from Unforgiven, "Well, there's a dignity in royalty, a majesty which precludes the likelihood of assassination. Now if you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen you hands would shake as though palsied." The American tendency is to make symbols sacred. The Kennedy Family is the American version of royalty and maybe it does make a difference that the Kennedy Family is still in the public eye.

So where does that leave us? The games with the highest acclaim are open-ended. They give us free will. Feel free to exercise that here. Visit Traffic's web site or don't, download it or don't, buy the full version or don't. And in the end, no one is forcing you to pull the trigger. And to those who worry that a 9-11 game is waiting in the wings: it very well could be, but you can't punish people for thoughtcrime.