Do I see a metaphor here?

(He smiles, seems to hesitate) Well, I think that the political events that we live in right now certainly... Again, as any artist working in a craft, you want to explore issues that are relevant to you. And I think that we can't be blind to things that happen on the world stage and not want to incorporate that into our work in a form that allows us to explore those issues and ask ourselves: when you fight for America, you know, what are you fighting for?

The first sequence that was shown during the presentation, with huge zeppelins towering over New York and destroying buildings, brought on shades of 9/11 to me. Was that intentional?

Well... yes! Again, we want to make an action game, we want to make a fun game, we want to make a thrilling experience, but if you want to dig underneath that, you'll find out what the underlying idea is, the core of what we're exploring. You think about something like 9/11, a horrific event that changed the course of politics, of priorities for countries, of how we talk about those events.

But whatever went into that event, all that plotting and all that planning, came down to a guy in a cockpit of an airplane. A single individual that was the final link in a chain of actions. And in that moment, he was the turning point for the world stage. Had he chosen a different path, we might live in a different world today but by carrying through that action, the world changed. And those are the moments that we want to explore in this game.

Do you think that video games are good vehicles for those kinds of messages? I remember talking about this very subject with Harvey Smith, and --

Oh, absolutely! You have a medium that allows for exploration and interactivity in a way that action has cause and effect. Every other medium -- books, films, music -- they're primarily passive. You might enjoy them as part of a social event. You can see movies together, you can talk about them together.

But what you see on the screen has been crafted and is presented in one format. With games, and this is part of what we're trying to do with Turning Point, you can actually present options, you can present choices and explore those choices and, much like we do in life, we hopefully find new meaning depending on the outcome of those decisions.

What is your approach with Turning Point? Are you trying to make a clear political statement through the game or, as with Army of Two for example, do you want to just give the player the information and let him form his own opinion?

The fact that we can even have that kind of discussion around the content to me is very exciting. Because certainly there's going to be a lot of people that will play the game and just want the thrill and experience of fighting Nazis in America, in that broad stroke "what if?" scenario.

However, I think some other people might want to take away some ideas to discuss, or dig in and do some research or do some thinking about current political events and really explore what the game means in terms of what you fight for when you fight for your country, what the rhetoric of war is, and how you evaluate your choices. I love that that is something that is part of what we can discuss with the product at a deeper level.