I make it a habit to watch the credits of a game I finish, both out of respect for the people who made it and to see if the developers hid any little stingers at the end, a result of our culture’s many years of conditioning by the MCU movies. And for Penguin Colony, the game that’s essentially At the Mountains of Madness by way of March of the Penguins, there was a stinger, just not the kind I was expecting.
You almost have to fan your face or take a lap outside to mitigate the heat wafting off this statement. While there have been many attempts to take the industry to task for its silence regarding the genocide—members of Geoff Keighley’s now-shuttered Future Class attempted to have the industry’s biggest hype man address the issue the way he did for the war in Ukraine, sending an open letter to the Game Awards that went ignored, and the devs of Big Walk recently explained that the BDS movement is the reason their game isn’t for sale on Xbox—this is most direct statement I’ve seen on the topic within a game.
And the devs have paired these words with action by making the game unavailable for purchase in Israel. In Penguin Colony‘s Steam forum, a user based in Israel asked why the game wasn’t available in their region. One of the publishers responded in the thread,
“While in general we seek to bring our games to as many potential players as possible, we believe strongly that developers have the right to control where their games are sold. In this case, the developer asked us to block sale in Israel. In the absence of more organized sanctions, this act is intended to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine. We fully support their decision.”
But you don’t need blistering statements or country boycotts to understand the kind of time the people at Penguin Colony developer Origame Digital are on. Before the game even started, they had me up and at attention with an unequivocal land acknowledgement.
When I get an unflinching statement of a developers’ values directly in a game, not on social media or elsewhere where it can be missed or ignored, I love that shit. It forces me to confront my own values and how they line up with my actions and thoughts. Often I find myself wanting, which in turn forces change or at least an attempt to do so. I think about how I move, where I live, and how and where I spend my money. I can do better. The penguins and the people behind them demand I do better.