When Hideo Kojima recently announced that his next game would “challenge a certain type of taboo,” we were of courseall over itlike flies on rice. What could old man Kojima be working on back there? What fruit could be so forbidden that the creator of Solid Snake himself would be expelled from the industry if he offered it to gamers?
Above: Metaphor. Glorious hackneyed metaphor
The question isn't even about taboos themselves so much as the rebellious spirit of videogames, which have been thumbing their noses at the sacred and profane since time immemorial (or at least the early '80s). If Kojima – or Clive Barker, David Jaffe, Goichi Suda or anyone else – wants to take on something really transgressive, the challenge isn't how to approach prickly subject matter. It's how to find a sacred cow that hasn't already been beaten like a dead horse. Go ahead, name a topic that's off-limits and there'll be games that say otherwise. In fact, hell, name ten...
Warning: Many of the links in this article – besides being NSFW – point to real-life cases of flouted taboos and should not be clicked by the young, the faint of heart or those who have just eaten lunch.
