Where Do Game Subjects Cross The Line?

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."

Comments

Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Why? Games like Battlefield 1942 have you fighting against low-level grunts who were poor Germans that were drafted into war as part of Hitler's plan. They weren't directly responsible for executing Jews (and if you are going to start indicting people for making uninformed decisions in a democracy, you're going to have a lot of people to go after) and towards the end of the war, were poorly outfitted and starving.

And if you are happy to fight Nazis, why not fight against those responsible for genocide in Rwanda during the 90's? Or perhaps Pol Pot? Hitler didn't exactly invent genocide.

I wish you had expanded on your thought a little bit - I just don't understand why you limit games to just Nazis. There have been plenty of very cruel military regimes in the history of humankind (the Nazi party ranking right up there at the top) but I don't think that in comparison people like Stalin and Pol Pot are saints.

love it or leave it; this is the way to maturity

[*weasel]

...artistically.

does anyone claim that steven spielberg shouldn't have made Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's list? Was he making light, or 'making a buck' on the idea of americans dying overseas, on the idea of jews being tortured and executed?

yet everyone in the industry aknowledges that the way to grow gaming is to drive for more cinematic, more interactive, more film-like experiences.

Games may very well be considered 'art' the way people consider film 'art' in 10 years.

or, they can be relegated to childish whimsy like comics.

Asking game developers to ignore certain topics, regardless of context, because they might offend someone is very much akin to the self-imposed 'Comic Code' of the 60s-80s. It nearly killed the industry as a legitimate artistic medium. Every american comic became trapped by the restrictive code and fell into a niche as a childish diversion.

within the code american comic creators could only explore child-safe content as defined by the broadest possible american social definition of 'safe'.

compare this with the evolution of anime in japan. Sure, we all make derisive remarks about 'tentacle porn' - but anime in japan is -accepted-. it isn't just for kids. the culture treats it on par with film or literature. why? precisely because only a certain subset of anime is devoted to children and child-safe topics (yu gi oh, pokemon, etc) - the larger segment covers mature subjects one might find in a TV drama or film (ghost in the shell, akira). american comics have no parallel (no mainstream parallel, though the underground is growing, but the social stigma will take time to erode). evern american animated movies suffer from this, and are relegated to insistance on 'child safe'.

visceral emotional response is the key to allowing people to realize that games need not -only- be about mindlessly pulling a trigger. not that there is anything wrong with some twitch play - just as there is nothing wrong with shallow action flicks.

a game simulating the Uday/Qusay vs USAF shootout would certainly have poor timing, if particularly identifying the subjects by name; but shouldn't be labelled in poor taste so because of its content, but rather depending upon its -context-.

if the simulation of that situation was created to educate people about the difficulties and human life risk associated in breach/clear/capture operations against a fully dedicated opponent in an urban setting - that strikes me as possibly reasonable. if the purpose of the game is simply to allow people to pump round after round into from-the-headlines political figures, then that is certainly tasteless.

notice it is the -gameplay-, the context, that indicates tastelessness. people always seem to forget to include context in their discussions of whether it is 'right' or not.

here is where we decide people. are games to be forever treated as an interactive extension of film? or an interactive extension of american comics?

(keep in mind i use 'art', and 'artistic' loosely to indicate mature expression, as in sculpture or painting - not to indicate it as being capital-A Art, being hoity toity or 'correct'.)

newsgaming - decide for yourself

[Draigon]

http://newsgaming.com/

So far they only have one game, but there will be more.

I think the game itself is amusing whether you agree with the point or not. To me games (and programming) are art. Art should have no boundries. Some won't agree with me on that, some will, but that's even another reason I believe it. Because some will disagree and they're entitled to their opinion just as I am.