Like alot of Aaron Hogg shirts, "Playing God" is superficially funny, but after you live with it awhile, it's horrifying. Mixing the Old Testament God with an old vector-graphics style video game is funny, because it's so goofy and incongruent. It's also funny because it's so natural, because most of us have been there, we identify. We've built doomed sandcastles too close to the shore, fryed ants, ran over pedestrians in GTA. It's a clever, funny design.
But it makes me uncomfortable, and I'm pretty hard to discomfort. It could be, as it was aptly put, "The Max Headroom" like face of God, a smug, artificial parody of good cheer. That's creepy enough on its own. It also taps into what makes alot of of Hogg's work creepy. People getting what they wished for, and it being horrible.
That we had super powers, and that they could let us stand up to, and over-power our siblings. We get Timmy melting his sisters arm with his new found gift. That there really were dinosaur's alive today, who'd eat us, of course. That our stuffed animals were alive, like Paddington or the Velventine rabbit. They are, but all they want to do is kill, like Mr. Hoppy. That's why Hogg's imitative skills are so useful, that's why his twists are so twisted, because his images so clearly resemble our various dreams and memories.
Many wish there was an active, interventionist God watching over their every move, guiding and shaping the world. We have that in "Playing God", but it doesn't sit well. We're trivial points to be talled. The comic twist of our identification with the playful destruction by God becomes creepy. What if God isn't better than us? What if God is really just a frivolus, mean little boy, playing in his sandbox. Cheating at a game HE made, all for himself.
Sorry if I got too far up my ass, I was just very affected by the shirt.