Discipline ~Teikoku no Tanjou~ (WII).

The game is set in a mixed residence cell in a maximum security prison, run by a private security firm at the request of certain country's government. The player takes the role of one of the prisoners, and the aim of the game is to communicate with other prisoners and get them to confess to you - although you don't know whether the other prisoners are really criminals or not, while the identity of the player's character is also something of a mystery.

Iida-san said the game is influenced by writer Philip K Dick, the movie A Clockwork Orange and the work of director David Cronenberg, with seven development staff scheduled to have spent 10 months in total creating the title. I had the chance to take a look at a preview version of Discipline recently, and I felt that some of the characters on-screen were familiar. One seemed to be the former executive officer of Oum Shinrikyo, a cult religious community which spread Sarin in an underground train in 1995, while another looked like the suspect in last year's indiscriminate knife attacks in Akihabara, both residents of the cell that your character is in.

Iida-san declined to comment on those similarities, but it seems certain that his ideas are taken from real cases: "Crimes are actions of one side of a human being expressed in extreme form. If we want to represent real humans even in games, we should not avoid these themes," he told me.

"Even in the Grand Theft Auto series, the event in the prison is omitted. I'm in conflict as to whether I can deal with it in a game, but you are dealing with it naturally in literature or film. Somebody must develop it so that a game is accepted as culture."

Iida-san told me that he had a plan to develop games in which we can experience events normally hidden from society, for adult gamers who grow weary of Brain Age and its ilk. The target platform was to have been the Nintendo DS, but it's too hard for original titles with difficult content to succeed in the regular package retail market, because there are too many big titles already out there.