This Flying Spaghetti Monster thing has been around for a bit, but now that the movement has garnered its own Flying Spaghetti Monster Game it finally falls under our jurisdiction here at a-g. (Okay, to be honest, the game may have been there for a while, but I just noticed it, and it's clearly labeled *new*, so I can call it that if I want to).
Several things strike me as interesting about this game. First, since the game is created to promulgate a rather amusing and widely disemminated satire, I wondered how the game itself might continue in that rhetorical vein. More specifically, I'm always interested in games that use their "difficulty" rhetorically, making, for example, certain difficult ideas or problems actually difficult in
the game's mechanics (JFK Reloaded and Wild West Bank immediately come to mind as examples of this). So I wondered if the game itself would, for example, make conversion impossible or inevitable for the hapless soon-to-be minions of the FSM.
While the game does turn out to be rather simple--one must convert fleeing masses to Pastafarians by "touching" them with the famous noodly appendage--I didn't get it the first couple of times through. I was hovering my monster too close to the ground, not realizing that the perspective in the game is actually an isomorphic 3D. My ineffectual "touches" rained down off screen and my score remained at 0.
"Aha!" I thought, "This game is satirizing the religious conversion experience by actually making it impossible. The best a gigantic, removed deity can hope for is to scare people away, and no true conversion takes place." Even as I congratulated myself for such a shrewd analysis, I suspected that this was not actually the intent of the game, and I kept playing.
I experimented some more and discovered that the noodly appendage does indeed touch the ground, and, yes, "touching" a fleeing human does convert them to a non-fleeing, sword-bearing Pastafarian.
I still think the original trajectory of my analysis holds true, though.
What's being satirized in this game--and indeed with the whole "touched by his noodly appendage" bit--is the predominantly Evangelical insistence on the intimacy of the relationship between the individual and the all-powerful creator. This game calls attention to that awkwardness in that the FSM at close range is, understandably, scary,
but at a sufficient remove, the FSM can reach down and "touch" his minions, guaranteeing them an eternity of beer and strippers:
The fact that the monster reaches down arbitrarily (that is, independent of any decision on the part of the individual) and the fact that the moment of conversion is instantaneous and irreversible recall the determinism and "fire and brimstone" of traditional Calvinism (as does the Puritan dress of the School Board Administrators
), but the game doesn't seem to make any contact with Intelligent Design itself. I could imagine some game scenario in which players must take on the role of creation and proceed through sevaral abortive attempts to make the universe themselves. Better still, a player could "compete" with the FSM to see who could make a better universe. The FSM always wins, and ID triumphs.
I'm not sure how much fun that would be, though. At any rate, the game is well-programmed, well-drawn, and I think it definitely makes its point. Schoolboards of the world, beware.
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