Violent videogames have been at the center of controversy ever since games could reliably portray visual violence. Something about ceding control to a kid to go on fantasy murdering sprees just rubs folks the wrong way. Some of that is hyper-reactionary concern trolling babble meant to distract from real socioeconomic pressures and gun safety issues that actually result in real-world violence, and some of it is authentically exactly the controversy some games are designed to attract. Here’s the irresponsible problem with Going Postal: The Legacy Foretold — this is the story of the Postal series of videogames, told alongside cherry-picked stories about the medium’s controversy in the media. A proper study of the series would understand it is not the cause of moral panic which ought to be studied next to it with serious gravity, but that the series only exists as a reaction to that state of media paranoia. It is literally the result of it, not the cause, as it’s sometimes framed in Going Postal.

The documentary is also an often incurious white-washing of ‘90s-to-early-‘00s shock culture. It’s so often saying, “we made a game based on whatever pissed people off, look how much it pissed them off.” Low-hanging fruit. Running with Scissors, the developers of the games, get to present their version of history mostly unchecked, but they’ve always seemed pretty suspect, even to casual observers.

The first Postal wasn’t a barn-storming success. Yet, the devs kept rolling along, without much clarity how they stayed around despite mostly mediocre commercial success and extreme critical failure.

Now, these developers also suck. These game launched as gifts to moral conservatives, as though someone manifested all their fears into a videogame. Then the sequels came, revealing the strictly literal homophobia, xenophobia, and all the other phobias clearly held by the staff. When GamerGate came round, the creators seemed deeply aligned with the aims of that online harassment movement. Postal is very anti-PC culture in content and reactionary in an incely far-right way that is disheartening. These perspectives are mentioned almost in passing, that critics took issue with some of these elements within the games.

But, I want to make it more clear: these elements are the games. They are hateful games. Not just on account of their “killing spree for fun” premise, but also their poor handling of social events, their framing of killing gays (accompanied by slurs) and deep-end Islamophobia, especially found in the second game which is very reactionary to post-9/11 events.

There is a documentary to make here, that directly addresses the full truth of what these games were, how offensive and culturally repugnant their ideas became, and how they were not victims of the violence in games discourse, but unfortunate benefactors of those ideas.

The documentary also shows us some studies based on violence in videogames. Fine. But it links their findings, that games can in-fact create short-term impulses of aggression, directly to its stories of real-world violence, which is another case of not at all understanding the series of cause and effect for the subjects captured. It’s just irresponsible and unthoughtful framing, that suggests something worse than the documentary probably means to do.

With other controversial franchises, like DOOM, Grand Theft Auto, and Mortal Kombat, there are legitimate mechanics and interesting, innovative concepts there to meet the controversy. They are not games made for the sake of reactions. They are great games that cause reactions and challenge the constraints of violence by justifying it within their game worlds through mechanical precision, theme, satire, and style.

It’s interesting, for sure, to study the history of game censorship, in which Postal is a more relevant player. It was pulled from shelves, the devs were sued by the postal service, and critics did everything they could to bury it, but its legendarily low reviews became yet another selling point, as the devs proudly tried to trademark the moniker of “worst game ever.”

But, this breezy documentary approach takes the games as inert and dead objects, ones that mostly raised the ire of folks on the outside who just didn’t understand, when really these games were patently offensive and continue to be morally objectionable for a lot more reasons than their murder simulation mechanics.

It’s a bit hagiographical then, reframing the devs as some kind of counter-culture bad boys, which they’re not. They just have a hurtful worldview that they expressed through a more interactive medium. The game’s premise is that folks who stand in the way of living a life where we can do and be anything we want must then be killed with impunity. Layer this perspective with puerile and hateful “humor,” and you can imagine what kind of games compromise the Postal series.

4/10