As NR’s resident lover of blood-soaked video games, I feel compelled to comment on the controversy surrounding the upcoming Xbox 360 title Rendition: Guantanamo. Here’s CBS’s summary:

As revealed in a trailer video, the game depicts the prison in the near future — after its anticipated closing by the U.S. government — as a camp run by mercenaries who detain innocents sold off to their captors to serve as “lab rats” in scientific experiments.

The problems with the game are pretty clear. One plays this game from the perspective of an inmate who must shoot his way out, and former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg (who says he was tortured) served as an adviser to the project and appears in the game itself. It’s obviously intended as a way to simulate violent actions against members of the U.S. military.

The game’s creators and defenders have responded that Rendition does not take place in the current Guantanamo. It’s 2020, and the U.S. government has sold the facility to Freedom Corp., the aforementioned “mercenaries” who perform “scientific experiments.”

The obvious questions: Why Guantanamo, then, and why have a former Guantanamo detainee of questionable history as an adviser? Why would this adviser be featured in the game itself? Will he be featured as a detainee — which wouldn’t jibe with the storyline, considering the game is set in the future and Begg was detained in the past? And why would the director of the development team be expecting “strong sales in the Middle East”?

By all means, this game falls within the limits of the First Amendment. The developer, T-Enterprise, has the right to finish making it; any company has the right to publish it in the U.S. (there’s no publisher as of yet, but if none comes around, the developer plans to self-publish); and Microsoft has the right to approve it for the Xbox 360. But these would be bad decisions: The plot is over-the-top and over-the-line, lashing out at American War on Terror policy (not to mention military members) in a mindless and needlessly violent way.