Xbox Live Arcade exclusive Shadow Complex was released a week back to overwhelming critical acclaim. Alongside a Metacritic score of 89, where giddy reviewers are declaring it “one of the best new games you’re going to play on your Xbox 360 this year” and “the greatest game in XBLA history” whose “significance might just be unfathomable” in between multiple plays through, it seems Chair Entertainment’s little Metroid clone can’t possibly do anything wrong.

So who’s waving the big red boycott flags then? Hint: it’s not the PS3 Defence Force Brigade, even though they’d be understandably disgruntled about not getting the game on PSN. No, it’s really rather more unpredictable than that – Shadow Complex is courting controversy because it’s based on a world created by novelist Orson Scott Card, and because Orson Scott Card is a vehemently outspoken advocate of homosexual discrimination. He’s on the board of America’s ultra-conservative National Organisation for Marriage, an enterprise campaigning to preclude the legalisation of gay marriage, or the more propagandist “homosexual activist agenda”. According to Card, because “any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law,” there’s no civil rights issue here. Or gay men who don’t want to marry women. Or lesbians, apparently.

But an exposition of homosexual discrimination and Card’s overbearing stupidity is beyond the scope of this particular article. I’m wondering if it’s really worth boycotting something based on such tenuous connections. After all, this is just a narrative context, and a rather insubstantial one at that. The game’s not quite what I’d consider an intellectual or literary extravaganza. Card did not actually contribute any written content to the game – this was handled instead by veteran comic writer, Peter David, a man known for including gay characters in his work, as well as a pro-gay marriage supporter. Having had little active involvement in the project, Shadow Complex isn’t exactly printing money for Orson Scott Card. And the game itself certainly isn’t promoting any sort of social or political ideology whatsoever. It’s just a game.

So are Monkey Island and The Dig, mind you – two games Orson Scott Card has previously worked on, without censure. Besides, he’s just one out of tens of thousands of people working in the industry – you’re already playing games written and developed by every sort of bigoted sociopath out there. Do we start vetting the entire credit roll of everything we play now, just in case the guy who handled occlusion mapping in Kill Everything With Guns IV doesn’t like the French? Should you really refuse to endorse a product because you don’t like someone else’s opinions?

Of course, it’s still anyone’s choice to boycott anything they like, but don’t expect to change the world while you’re at it. As grand insurrection goes, well, it’s not. In the end, Orson Scott Card won’t know, and you’d be done out of the hottest game on XBLA.

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