"My Hindu Shooter"
Allen Varney, who has written some excellent articles for The Escapist in the past, really outdid himself this time. The article is My Hindu Shooter, and here's an excerpt:Regarding the pacifist first-person shooter I designed in 2000-2001 to teach Hindu principles of non-violence using the Unreal Engine, you may justly feel skeptical.
This Hindu non-shooter was conceived and produced entirely by - nobody ever believes this part - recent graduates of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Yes, really. In early 2000, a gaggle of upscale white American 20-somethings with fresh MUM animation and graphics degrees thought it would be fun to create a computer game based on Hindu teachings. Funded by the young heir to a chain of furniture stores, who scraped by on a parental allowance of half a million dollars a year, they licensed Epic Games' hotly anticipated Unreal Warfare engine - six months' allowance right there - and set to work.
...The MUM people, though, wanted a story inspired by Hindu mythology that illustrated the Hindu principle of nonviolence, ahimsa. In other words, having spent $250,000 to license one of the most kickass, muy-macho, hyper-adrenalized deathmatch shmups on the planet, the Maharishi disciples wanted a game where you could only win if you never killed, injured or damaged anyone or anything in the game. Anything at all.
It's utterly fascinating, there are a ton of interesting links inside the article as well, and you can find the whole thing here.
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