The year is 2035. You are one of the weak and ignorant plebians trying to challenge the authority of the Corporation -- a capitalist colossus that controls a city and its citizens, telling them how to think, what to wear and where to eat.

You are fed up with being pushed around by a faceless, dictatorial entity that has no soul. So you join an underground brigade called the Freedom Movement, and you fight back.

The city, Capitol City as it's called, is mayhem. The streets and shopping malls are clogged with innocent bystanders who have scattered, willy-nilly, to try to escape the crossfire from the Corporation's goons, the looters, the bad-ass gangs, and your group -- the good guys, who wear bandanas over their faces, muscle shirts, and sport cool hairdos.

Welcome to State of Emergency, the new super-violent game from Scotland's Rockstar Games and VIS Entertainment for Sony Playstation 2 that invites you to run amok as an antiglobalization anarchist. (There is a gore option that allows you to ramp up, or down, the spilled-guts and busted-brains quota.)

The $80 software, which hit video shelves across the country two weeks ago, has created a stir in a number of circles -- political, entertainment, concerned parents. But most upset by the State of Emergency in-home invasion -- Sony Playstation's now in more than six million households in North America -- are the antiglobalization groups who say this game is a new high in cynical corporate exploitation.

Here, after all, is Sony Corp. -- a big-business behemoth -- making profits on the back of a grassroots movement devoted to battling the huge corporate multinationals that, it says, rape and pillage Third World economies and sap the global consciousness.

Naomi Klein caught a sneak preview a few months ago of State of Emergency and wrote in an article for The Nation that she is amazed at the speed -- even post-9/11, when audiences are sensitized -- of "corporate co-optation."

It's incestuous, it's everywhere, agrees Michael Green, a 31-year-old technician who works on the video team of the Independent Media Center in Manhattan. He has not yet played the game, but started monitoring it a year ago when rumours started circulating it was coming out.

"My first reaction was that I was very upset because it totally undermines the hard work that activists have been doing, fighting for global justice," Green says. "I thought it was a malicious attack against us . . . let's mock it, let's co-opt it, and make it part of the monoculture which is not to be resisted."

Now, though, Green is wondering whether he may have overreacted. "From what I've seen, the game is actually not in that vein," he adds. "It's done in a kind of humorous way. You are fighting authority. But you are actually the resisters. So if that's what it takes to reach a crowd that would never be political, or have a critical thought, then maybe, at its raw level, it's okay."

Consciousness-raising in a box? That may be a stretch.

Last April's Summit of the America's protest by antiglobalization groups was mostly peaceful. This video is anything but.

State of Emergency depicts what would be the antiglobalization movement's worst nightmare. The Corporation (whose symbol is a weird Communist Russia-looking thingamabob) dominates Capitol City, has devastated the environment, hands out food vouchers, controls the media and has obliterated democratic governance.

It starts off with an Orson Welles-like voice-over: "The Corporation has been building a brighter future for its citizens, based on the principles of order, loyalty and civic obedience. The Corporation has created a nation that all citizens can be proud of."

Click to chaos and pandemonium in the streets. There are riot-squad police, death squads, security officers who will do anything to take down anyone who tries to overthrow the mother corp. Innocent people are running, terrified. Some chumps are walking out of stores with TVs.

Another voice-over: "Citizens, remember Friday nights at Rocket Burger. Your Corporation food vouchers are worth double points."

More deafening funk music, drum and bass. The violence escalates, and moves into a shopping mall.

The primary leaders of the Freedom Movement are Roy MacNeil (aka Mack), a disgruntled ex-cop who refused to carry out the Corporation's brutal enforcement methods; Anna Price (Libra), a lawyer who hates the Corporation for its efforts to get her to sell out her clients; Eddy Raymonds (Bull), a former sports star who refused to participate in Corporation-sponsored match fixing; Hector Soldado (Spanky), a charismatic ex-gang member who has tired of the Corporation's treatment of innocents; and Ricky Trang (Phreak), orphaned in high school when his parents were arrested as political dissidents by Corporation security.

The screen flashes instructions such as Kill The Executive. You can destroy opponents with mace and pepper spray or, if you're really ticked off, an M-16 assault rifle, an AK-47 Kalashnikov or an Uzi. There's a tear-gas launcher, a Taser (like a cattle prod with extra oomph) and the freedom fighters' standby weaponry, Molotov cocktails and street furniture.

You get more points for destroying Corporation property. You lose points if you knock off innocent bystanders. A news ticker at the bottom of the screen runs constantly, enjoining consumers to spend more ("Corporation gold-card holders to receive bonus food points"); to shrug off the environment ("Last tree is removed to Corporation Museum"); and to watch Corporation-sponsored TV ("Corporation children's hour: A special report on why capitalism is good.")

There are kill missions, steal missions, escort missions, protect missions, rescue missions, destroy missions. Or opt for chaos mode, and then you just smash, destroy and kill.

Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, is unfazed that Sony -- or any other megacorporation for that matter -- would co-opt a social cause for financial gain.

"Am I surprised or shocked?" Gitlin asks. "God, no. This is perfectly normal. This is business as usual. Corporations will sell anything," says the author of a just-released book called Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sound OverWhelms Our Lives (published in Canada by HB Fenn).

"This is marketing politics as a game," he says, the same way Disney bankrolled Michael Moore's films, Sony produces the music of Rage Against the Machine, or that big arms companies sell guns to revolutionary forces in various liberation movements. "But all politics is marketed as a game, so why should left-wing or radical politics be exempt? Why should Sony care? They're not afraid."

Sony Canada did not return calls this week.

"All consumer goods, from lipstick to running shoes, are now marketed as your way of expressing that inimitable, unduplicated you," Gitlin says with a snort.

"I consider this the normal absurdity of a society in which people are led to feel, are taught to believe, that by purchasing X, Y or Z, they are performing some kind of radical act. Well, news bulletin, they're not and they never are."

In video-game circles, the buzz around State of Emergency was that it would be a topseller. It's doing well, says a Toronto store owner, but it's not flying off the shelves like its predecessor (another creation by Rockstar Games and VIS) called Grand Theft Auto III, a Mafioso masterpiece that teaches kids how to get away with grand larceny, among other things.

"Among my friends who are hard-core gamers, State of Emergency gets a 7 and Grand Theft is a 9.8," the shop owner says. "State of Emergency intrigued a lot of people but it's not the same quality of game. It's not as challenging. It doesn't have the same bite."

Ouch.

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See: Video Game Review.com for more reviews of this game