Slave tetris? We should not be surprised

The controversy around the the "slave tetris game" (award-winning, directed by games researchers) should tell us something: it is not enough for the social impact/serious game industry, and their colleagues in the research community, to restrict our discussions to *how* these games are made. i.e. techniques, methods, user studies, etc. It is not good enough that, with only a few marginal exceptions, we maintain a wide consensus of silence in which we neglect questions of *why*, *should*, *who* and *if*. The wider games community (game journalists, indie game developers, gamers themselves) clearly think there are political and social dimensions to question and discuss, so why not the research community? Why are these questions largely unaddressed by the serious/social impact games industry, which manages to find energy to produce an enormous output of books, conferences, festivals, awards and prizes? And then why is it that when anyone does raise these questions, doing so is seen as controversial? I've even seen people quietly marginalised, threatened and ignored for raising them. Maybe because we're all desperately trying to keep the industry research money flowing, yeah? Well OK then, let's just do our jobs and keep quiet. Let us not have the gall to literally get up on stage and make claims about how we can change the world for the better using the magic of gamefulness/playfulness/gamification/whatever we're calling our particularly brand of ludic solutionism. Anyone who does not accompany those claims with an open and honest discussion of what they mean by "change" and "better" (and I'm sorry but that does involves discussing politics and social issues, I'm afraid) should just sit the fuck down and shut up.
(fwiw i'm all for extremely dark, Swiftian satire to make a point, and I'm for taking risks. Whether the game is a misfire or not in the context or not (personally, I'd say this is a misfire) is not the point for me - it's the apoliticising of the serious games industry and serious games research that makes misfires inevitable.)