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Generally, Pipe Troubleaims to take the complex issues surrounding oil pipelines and tries to encourage gamers to think critically about energy extraction.

Or as Pop Sandbox’s Alex Jansen told the Post: “The whole idea is to use over-the-top satire to start drawing awareness and engaging a new audience in the energy debate.”

The game isn’t taking an especially pro or anti-pipeline stance. It’s mostly just trying to get gamers to think about the issues involved.

Which is what Post Arcade wrote about when the game launched back in March and which was highlighted in a slightly reworked fashion on the front page of this newspaper a day later.

About a week after that, a Sun media columnist wrote a far more pointed (although clearly researched) piece about the game which focused on the fact that the provincially funded TVO channel had funded the game to the tune of $10,000 while also portraying Pipe Trouble as leaning in a political direction that was far more radical than the actual game demonstrated.

(The fact that Pipe Trouble‘s publisher decided to donate some of the proceeds from the game to the David Suzuki Foundation probably did little to dissuade the Sun‘s readers otherwise.)

And that’s when everything went to crap.

The histrionic opposition reaction — from both the Ontario PC party and Alberta premier Alison Redford — hit the usual rhetorical talking points. There were people who were enraged that a game would depict the bombing of a pipeline. It didn’t matter that the game was meant to be a work of satire or that the bombing was something you specifically tried to avoid in the game. It hit too close to home. That reaction was predictable.