Life imitates art?
In the bleary AM hours of February the 19th I fumbled through the sordid pages of Newgrounds to find a game to play. A bright and pixelated title called Tax Time caught my eye. After hitting start I was presented with some green grass, a blue sky, a can of gasoline on the left, an airplane on the right, and a little house in the middle. Huh.
So I began walking my crew-cutted avatar around this strange space. I picked up the can of gas. ‘Does it fuel the plane?’ I thought. ‘Nope. Apparently it’s for dousing the house.’ So doused I did, and when I finished a match appeared where the gas can sat before. It didn’t take me long to figure out what to do with that. The house went up in flames. White text appeared above. ‘That will show them!’ it said. I even got a Newgrounds medal for it. Burn Baby Burn.
With the house ablaze, the only thing left to do was enter the airplane. As it took off, a triumphant, almost blissful bit-tune replaced the more dissonant one that played before. I had no idea what I was doing in this plane. As it turned out I was headed for an IRS building, which I crashed into shortly. ‘Justice is Served’ it said in giant block letters over the ruins. Then a Prius I had flown over earlier crashed into the building too, just for good measure. A horn played a silly riff, I had a good laugh, and I went on looking for other, better games.
This morning when I got into work I grabbed a copy of the Times off the rack, as per usual. A photograph filled a good portion of the front page; in it a smoking pile of gory rubble was heaped along the charred face of a building. ‘One Man’s Act of Rage Against the I.R.S.’ read the caption. ‘A computer engineer flew a small plane Thursday into a building in Austin, Tex., where nearly 200 Internal Revenue Service employees worked.’ He did this after burning down his own home. Two people were badly injured and one person is still unaccounted for, not including the man who perpetrated the act, who is dead. I literally pulled a double take. Not so funny anymore.
(photo from New York Times)
Maybe I should chalk all this up to my own ignorance, but I find it astonishing that I played a game about a major event before it had even been written about in the papers. As I played Tax Time I had no idea I was reenacting a desperate man’s act of domestic terrorism. And while I will say the game was done in poor taste or at least done too soon, I’m not going to beat myself up over laughing when I did—satire is satire. What I find most troubling—most confusing? interesting? bizarre?—is that we live in a day and age where we can hear news first by playing it out in a flash game on Newgrounds.
