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Where Do Game Subjects Cross The Line?

Posted by simoniker on from the i-nominate-evil-clowns dept.

Thanks to GameSpy for their 'Spy Vs. Spy' editorial discussing whether any reality-based subject should be made into a game, referencing games like Kuma:War, which offers "the hunt for Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq and their eventual deaths in a shootout with U.S. forces" as a scenario. The first editor suggests that " I believe that such 'ripped from the headlines' titles are disrespectful to the soldiers in combat and the issues involved", whereas another editor presents a different view, arguing: "I'm all in favor of games working in contemporary events... one way for games to be more relevant to people is to bring current events to an interactive medium."

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There is no line by missing000 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Until you see tastless games like, "Abortion by coathangar!" or "Rape that chick!"

    Kind of like this?

  2. Re:There is no line by PainKilleR-CE · · Score: 2, Informative

    Only to a point. There is a line, though, when it comes to violating certain laws. I don't think you'd have the "freedom" to create a kiddie pr0n game, which other paedophiles could download and play at their leisure. Sure you could do it, but law enforcement would be on its way pretty quick. Flying planes into a building, while certainly murderous, is in an entirely different category.

    In many places you do have the freedom to create a kiddie porn game, as long as you don't use actual images/video of real children. In some states and countries even the simulation is illegal, but definitely not in all. In fact, some states have the somewhat arbitrary definition of child pornography as anything that depicts something that looks like a child in a sexual manner, even if it's demonstrable that the person in the images was over 18 at the time they were taken (or if it's not even a person at all).

    Many of the games that are fairly commonly available in Japan would be illegal to ship into many states of the US because of these types of laws.

    --
    -PainKilleR-[CE]
  3. Ender's Game? by Rand310 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Anyone read Ender's game?

    Give 50 million teenagers the new US Military game, where you launch a missile with a camera on its nose and tell them they get "points" for hitting targets...

    When does the game become real?