I'm the target audience for Clover, an artsy indie game supposedly about the way 9/11 was used by the Bush Administration as an excuse to invade Iraq. It's available for $5 from Xbox Live's Community Games. This section of Xbox Live lets indie developers post their work without having to go through the laborious certification process. Think of it as a direct pipeline for, say, games with politically motivated messages.

I want to see videogames address issues like this. Entertainment has a long and storied history of commenting on politics. Unfortunately, Clover seems to lost sight of the entertainment part of the equation. Or maybe I'm to blame for not having the patience to play through a crudely drawn and even more crudely built adventure game based on inventory management.

I can eventually get past the look of the game, which might be described as South Park run through a Braid Photoshop filter. The visuals have retro charm, if not beauty. But here's how the game actually plays: I finally brought the doo-dad to the castle so I could get inside and jump over the guards' heads to see what was past them, where I found some catnip which I presume is instrumental in getting the cat off the church's pipe organ which will in turn unlock whatever the Vicar is supposed to give me. But it seems I can interact with anything in the church. The cat sleeps peacefully atop the organ's pipes and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the catnip. Am I supposed to find some cat toy to mix it with? A long stick to poke the cat awake? A catnip gun? The Vicar certainly doesn't want it. Does it even belong here? Is it for some later puzzle? Should I carry it around in one of my limited inventory slots?

So here I am playing "guess the game designer's puzzle" instead of "consider the game designer's political message". And from what I've seen of the political message -- mostly through newspaper articles in a publication called Fox Intrepid -- Clover isn't above the low hanging and even facile fruit.

The problem with "message" games is that unless the message is delivered with some sort of nuance or power (see The Path for a shining example of both), the gameplay is going to have to take up the slack. And figuring out what a game wants me to do with a piece of catnip isn't gameplay that interests me anymore.