Warning! There are many, many plot spoilers about BlackSite: Area 51 in this column.

In most respects, BlackSite: Area 51 is a totally run-of-the-mill first-person shooter.

You're a soldier! You're fighting alongside gruff teammates, and infiltrating military bases that have been overrun by insectoid aliens! You've got big nasty machine guns and kooky, hijacked alien weapons! It's all so rote and derivative that I could almost squint and imagine I was playing Halo, Half-Life or even Quake.

Until the characters start talking about Abu Ghraib.

One of your teammates is a military doctor who describes how she mistreated some prisoners in a government prison. "I think we all started to lose our minds a little bit," she says. "We were isolated, no oversight – no one to tell us it was torture."

"Chickenshit politicians and doctors," replies an angry soldier. "They try to cover it all up."

And this, my friends, makes BlackSite a weirdly unusual game. Many videogames include fantasy and sci-fi politics – but BlackSite directly tackles the most divisive political issues of our real-life world. Onscreen soldiers gripe about the wisdom of the Iraq war, the ethics of torture, the hypocrisy of politicians and, perhaps most incendiary, the way Pentagon and White House cover-ups leave rank-and-file fighters to be imprisoned or die for mistakes made by guys in suits and ties.

It's rather amazing to watch a game designer – specifically Harvey Smith, studio creative director for Midway Games – run into this minefield. In his game, the soldiers are persistently cynical about their commanding officers, and wearily accept the grim ironies of modern statecraft. They learn, for example, that the gibbering alien enemies we're fighting in the game were armed, trained and basically created by the United States – a straightforward allusion to how America, by sponsoring Afghan mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in the '80s, essentially trained the same people who attack us today.

At one point, after finishing off an opponent, one of my teammates cocks his gun and shouts, "Kick-ass American engineering, baby!" – at which point another soldier replies, "I hate to break it to you, but those are mass-produced in China." Then we're sent into a U.S. town to quell an uprising of insurgents, but run into aliens instead. "Anyone mention this creepy-crawly shit to you?" asks my squad member. "Nah," replies another sardonically. "Army never knows what's going on." (Later, we plead for a departing helicopter to come back and save us, only to be told, "Negative – I have ranking political staff onboard.")

I realize this sounds pretty heavy-handed (and if you disagree with the game's political point of view, you'll probably hate it). Yet BlackSite doesn't really come at you with a bludgeon: The designers for the most part weave in the political commentary quite deftly and organically.

They're aided by truly superb voice acting: It's by turns dry, funny and serious, and almost never descends into the sort of hysterical overacting that plagues most sci-fi shooters. At the point in the game where the U.S. government's duplicity is revealed, the soldiers get into an argument about military duty and everyday ethics that reads like a superb snippet of Broadway theater.

Videogames, of course, have often employed conspiracies, corrupt governments and sleeper cells. But normally they take place in fantasy realms, where some repressive "one world government" runs the globe. Allegorically, the evil overlords are usually re-skinned Soviets, Nazis, Arabs – or, in a nod to the fever dreams of the canned-tuna-hoarding far right, the United Nations. When you play these games, you're essentially playing as a warrior for the American dream – fighting for freedom against an oppressive elite.

What's so thoroughly remarkable about BlackSite is that the corrupt authority isn't a far-off futuristic one. It's the present-day U.S. government – under the helm of folks like President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (They're not explicitly named, but the game takes place in the present, and the names of the episodes in the game – "Misunderestimated," "Stay the Course," "Last Throes," "The Surge" – are taken directly from these leaders' utterances.)

This makes BlackSite one of the few genuinely subversive games I've ever played. By reframing who's fighting – and why – it upends all the blasé tropes of its genre. Indeed, it forces you to think again about the politics of most other shooters, which are so slavishly devoted to an us-versus-them worldview that you'd swear they were designed by the Project for the New American Century. Not in BlackSite. There, the world is messy and complex – and you're left with the Pogo-like sense that the enemy might, in the end, be you.

At one point, I get into a fierce firefight with some heavily armed guards at an Iraqi refinery. "Who gives assault weapons to refinery workers?" wonders one of my bewildered squad mates.

"Um," says another, "I think they bought this shit from us." Ouch.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.