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Halo In Church Points Out ESRB Flaws
The recent controversy over church groups making use of Halo 3 to attract young men to their services continues to be a subject of debate outside of the fan press. GamePolitics notes that the debate is indicative of flaws in the ESRB's system, and in mainstream culture's understanding of those ratings. "When you look at it like that, it's hard to blame those who criticize bringing Halo into sacred space. For the most part the critics are not gamers and have no concept of the vast difference between Halo and GTA. All they know is that the games share a common M rating, a designation assigned by the game industry itself, theoretically for the protection of impressionable youth. For the uninitiated it's only logical to assume the content must be of a similar character as well. As someone who has played both, I'd argue that there is a world of difference between Halo and GTA."
When you have to pidgeon hole all media into about 5 slots, you're going to have differences between boundary conditions. Like how 2 R rated movies aren't necessarily the same in terms of content.
"Gharbad no Hurt!" -Gharbad
A game based on parts of the Bible could get an M rating as well. The bible is full of violence and sex. People just seem to gloss over that these days. Much like the people who say drinking is a sin, and over look that water to wine section.
Think Deeply.
While I would agree that Halo and GTA are worlds apart, and hope that this controversy catalyzes much-needed revamping of the ESRB's functionality, I still find it out of place that churches are using Halo to bring young men to services. "Thou shalt not kill" does not mesh well with "Thou shalt kill aliens in copious numbers". Also, it just strikes me of bribery - they should be there because they're interested in the religion, not because they wanna get a mad sic deathmatch in after church lets out. But maybe that's just me.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In GTA you run around breaking the law, consorting with whores and fellons, and killing people in bloody episodes.
... MUCH better ... right?
In Halo, you just run around listening to profanity on your headset and trying to get headshots.
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I submitted this to our own pastor and some of the others involved with youth and fellowship in our church. And I suppose being a gamer myself it just makes sense to me. The fellowship committee in our church is there to create activities that are not necessarily 'church' related, but help bring us together as a community, to get to know each other, and just to have fun. The youth groups do the same things. I don't see why it seems like such an alien concept that one or the other should use video games for that purpose. I mean, come on I'm a geek and 31 (and still thinking he's in college at times). Do I look like bingo or knitting are activities that I'm going to sign up for?
And I agree with the summary that it only seems strange to those who don't know about gaming, and while I can understand their initial confusion, I'd hope that after an explanation and (at most) a demonstration, that they'd see that. For the most part, I've run into very little concern about these type of things from anyone (and yes I'm going to stereotype) who was not under 65 or so in our church. But I think it's our part as gamers/geeks/fill-in-your-term-here to explain away the FUD that some people seem to spread.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
"When you look at it like that, it's hard to blame those who criticize bringing Halo into sacred space." Well yes I would have a problem with playing video games in sacred places. I don't think it would be right to play them in chapel of a church.
I will be honest I have never played Halo. I have played Quake and Doom, and the later generations of those games. I am more into the Age of Empire type game and yes all of the above should not be played in the chapel.
For the rest of the Church well. I know that this is a radical idea but isn't that really up to the church and or the congregation of the church? My church tends to be more into the basketball and volley ball type of church activities and I don't think that I would be thrilled with video games in church but then that is my church and my opinion. Other churches have different ideas.
Seems sort of strange to even be discussing it since frankly it is none of our business.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wait wait wait
So it's the ESRB's fault that this church decided to attract the young to a church event using a game that is clearly about violence. Even if you don't know what the rating of the game is the cover picture has a person with a gun in a military looking outfit. What did they think the game was about? Baking cookies with Jesus?
We are talking about groups of people who interpret the obviously mythological content of the Bible as if it were concrete history. While not all sects of Christianity do this, more than a few of them do.
It does not seem rational to me to expect consistency from people who can't differentiate fantasy from reality. They will believe whatever their priest tells them to believe, whether it is logically consistent (and whether it makes any sense at all) or not.
"Kill Bill" and "The Passion of the Christ" were both rated R, weren't they?
There's a wide range of stuff that's considered "mature." Some of it is mindlessly gory, some of it seriously handles mature topics.
That's not to say I buy the premise that Halo 3 is a great fit for church life. Maybe it's "Die Hard" instead of "Grindhouse," but that doesn't make it a good fit.
"Thou shalt not kill" does not mesh well with "Thou shalt kill aliens in copious numbers".
Sometimes when looking at a translation dictionary you get the impression that one word translates precisely into another word. That is not true, the two words may have vastly different connotation. Also, connotations may change over time. I am no biblical scholar, but I believe that it has been well established that a more accurate translation of the ancient Hebrew text refers to "murder". not "kill".
Also, the concept of just or defensive wars is well established in most Christian churches. The Old Testament clearly approves of warfare.
Churches have been using gaming parties for youth events and evangelical drives for decades now. Usually one person in the leadership owns an up-to-date games console and brings it along to friday night events. It used to be Space Invaders, then Mario, then Sonic, then Gran Turismo and so on.
Halo 3 is nothing special in this regard, except for the unwarranted media attention it's been given. My God, it's like the Wii all over again.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
That's always struck me a bit odd... Halo's a fairly clean game. There's very minimal swearing (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure there's a at least one "shit" uttered at dispariaging moments...), and the violence is really on the cartoony side... It's not realistic at all, there's very little blood, absolutely no gore, and when people die they just fall over, as opposed to being ripped apart or dismembered.
Heck, most of the things you're killing are aliens or, online, Spartans who are encased in full-body armor with no skin visible.
Personally, I would have rated Halo 3 as a T, not an M. And personally I think it's even on the tamer side of T.
they should be there because they're interested in the religion, not because they wanna get a mad sic deathmatch in after church lets out.
Keep in mind that congregations do more than worship, there is a heavy social component as well. Historically they have been a major source of off-line social networks, why not on-line as well?
Also, consider the very discussion that we are having in this forum. That game violence exists in many different forms, and that some forms may be more acceptible than others. Isn't that a topic that should be appropriately discussed among parents, and also amongst youth?
The ESRB rating system should be used by parents to review the content of games for what they believe to be acceptable for their children. And yes, different games may get the same rating for completely different reasons. IIRC, SWAT 3 got an M rating as well. However, anyone could look at the 2 or 3 lines of text underneath the rating to find out exactly why the game was rated what it was. Using the example of Halo 3 in a church outreach or fellowship activity to say that the ESRB rating is flawed is exactly wrong.
The ESRB rating tells you what is there. Some parents and church leaders will decide to not allow M rated games. Others will look at the descriptors and prohibit certain games based on that. But this shows that the system, properly understood as a tool that informs parents and responsible adults, is not flawed. What is flawed is the idea that some regulatory body, whether mandated by government or not, is responsible for what children and teenagers see and experience in video games today. That responsibility should always rest on the parents.
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
Can they also explain how the races in the Covenant were 'Intelligently Designed"? I'd like to know.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Do they favor the covenant or the humans? The covenant are depicted as foolish and dangerous religious zealots where the humans are pretty much devoid of any of that and are all science and business. So which side do you think churches would take? :)
Yeah, there's sex, but "Adam knew Eve" isn't exactly graphic, especially when there are no pictures and the text is very light on the details.
Most of the rest is there because it's what happened, not because the authors of the Biblical texts approved of it (indeed, they frequently note their disapproval). It'd be rather hard to disapprove of something if you were alleged to be hypocritical merely for mentioning it, after all. I mean, take Lot. His daughters got him drunk and then slept with him (ewww). But that's all the text says. It doesn't add any detail beyond that because it wasn't necessary to do so to condemn the daughters' misdeeds.
I mean, you look at it like it's somehow binary, black & white. "Oh no! It mentions sex! It's horrible!" But you'd have to be stupid not to be able to see the difference between a mere mention (and condemnation) vs. your average trashy romance novel, which would not fail to mention every single erotic detail, down to the last drop of sweat and the slightest moan. That's why it's called graphic, after all...
Once we dispense with the nonsense, the "worst" you can do as to what the authors actually approved of is the Song of Songs (AKA Song of Solomon). But that merely points out something that seems to get forgotten: that for a married couple, sex is a good thing.
I hope you're not objecting to that? And if you're dealing with people who are, quote them Song of Songs and drop all the other crap. You won't prove any point with that; there isn't one in there to prove.
What? Kids are playing video games in church?! I'm furious, and you should be too. Don't you know how impressionable kids are? They have a hard time seeing the difference between fantasy and reality sometimes. One must be very careful what kind of influences they are exposed to.
Seriously: why would you let these kids go to church?! At least Halo admits it's fiction.
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DesireCampbell.com
has it's fair share of stonings, infanticide, genocide blah blah.
Kill a few space aliens and people get uppity? FFS Have none of them read that book?
I think it's great that churches are encouraging youth to play a game where the main objective is to destroy a bunch of religious nutters who are hell-bent on forcing everyone in the galaxy to convert or be destroyed.
Is that the church going folk are tolerant of games an religion.
You are just like countless bigots before you, spewing hatred for something you know little of.
I myself don't go to church, but find it in my heart to have respect for gamers and for church going folk as I know and am friends with a number of people in both categories.
You really need to broaden your horizions...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the real problem here lies with the game retailers, specifically the ones who refuse to stock AO titles. The AO rating has become a big no-no for games. I think comparisons to movies here are inevitable.
When I go to the video store, they have three distinct movie sections. They have the "kids" section with movies made for children of all ages (G movies, comparable to E and E10 games), then there's the "general" section which includes many subsections but range from family films to gruesome horror movies (PG to R, comparable to E10 to M), and the aptly named "adults only" section which is actually behind a closed door.
Now, I am a father of a young son. I know what he can and can't watch and play, and I control it. He is five, and I took him to see Transformers (a PG-13 movie) in the theater last week. The rating system is meant to be a general guideline as to the content of a movie, not a be-all-end-all indicator of all of the bad things that happen in a film. The game rating system is the same way.
What I'm really trying to get at here is that retailers need to get off the AO stigma and just stock those games. Put them in another room or just keep them behind the shelf and sell them only to grown adults. Retailers already are prepared to explain the ratings to kids and whether or not the games they want to buy are appropriate for their children, AO wouldn't really complicate things any. This way, we can give the games that truly deserve it (e.g. GTA, Manhunt, etc) the AO ratings and avoid a lot of confusion.
When I read that headline, I was wondering why the halo was the problem of the ESRB, and not, say, a corpse on display, tortured to death, being worshipped by people...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My wifes little brother had to write a game for a HS class. It had to be non-violent and semi-original (no straight clones). We came up with the idea of a zombie game where you drive around in an ambulance shooting zombies the 'cure'. The whole point of the game was to save people and yet the teacher thought it was too violent.
He turned it into an ice cream truck that delivers cones to people who get over-heated, which makes them act like zombies but can over-heat other people.
Violence is a crutch for the unimaginative, that is used too often, both in games and in hollywood. In reality, cars don't explode. They do get really hot, but generally, no big fireball. Same with hit-men, there really isn't much of a career to be made in the real world with contract killing.
Bow-ties are cool.
It doesn't always pan out, but the English translations tend to be very rough compared to say, Spanish or Italian.
The King James Version set a rough precedent which even impacted Catholic translations into English. The KJV did a great job with poetics, but a poor job with linguistic accuracy. Frankly, the small committee that worked on it weren't exactly the world's leading authority on the source material languages like Hebrew. Considering the antagonism between the Church of England and the Holy See at the time, it wasn't like they were going to stoop to consulting "Papists" - even if they did have much better translation resources.
Bow-ties are cool.
I think the long and rich history of violence committed at the hands of Christian and Catholic sects alike shows just how this religion feels about violence.
Reading a verse or two in isolation (ie out of context) might lead one to believe that there is a passifistic attitude at work in Christianity...but when you read the Bible as a whole you see plenty of violence at God's command. Followers since then have just stuck to the example, dishing out violence whenever it seemed justified.
I think this violent game introduces no conflict at all.
i think they call it outreach. maybe desperation. who knows, the point is that offering sports as the only activity available for young people is going to leave out those who really don't care much about playing sports. So how do you bring in those who do not care for sports? Exactly. Its too simple.
I'm not a person who says that one can read only the KJV. I'm more of a fan of the NASB because I want as literal a translation as I can get. That said, it's my understanding that the KJV is a very literal translation. While there are certain problems with it, its vocabulary does a better job of accommodating the meanings of the original languages than does that of today's versions, which often sacrifice nuances in meaning in favor of being understandable to your average Joe. Also, the "thee"s and "thou"s as opposed to "you"s and "your"s add the ability to distinguish between singular and plural you, as did ancient Hebrew.
I can imagine it during CTF
When I play a Halo game, I see a largely secular Earth fighting against a religious alliance out to wipe out intelligent life in the galaxy. The big bad guys are the prophets named things like 'Truth'. The humans are holding out because they don't want to convert and join The Covenant.
Am I the only one who sees irony in that *churches* are playing this game?
As an unbeliever, I find the irony both rich and oddly disturbing.
Am I the only one who finds if funny that they decided to use a game which has, as the main enemy, a "Covenant" which is basically an alien religion based on false and misinterpreted mythology, to justify a Crusade? I mean, they are talking about annihilating all life in the universe to open some crazy way to "the Promised Land"...
Thou shalt not team kill.
Thou shalt not steal (your teams vehicles).
Thou shalt not bear false witness and cry cheater without evidence.
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, and the other team even hole-ier.
Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of thy God, dammit. And turn off that stupid robot voice, n00b.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's warthog.
Small changes, here and there.
No big deal.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
You Team Killing Fucktard!
no RvB references, this seemed like a given, given the title.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
You may not have made them originally, but you seem to be supporting the claims in the OP. Thus, if you think there are all these horrible things, I'd like you to cite them. Obviously, I know that you cannot (at least, not with meaningful examples, because there aren't any as I know full well).
As for the history (and myth--which is not 'fiction posing as truth' BTW, but rather something like 'truth told via fiction') in the OT, we're getting far afield. There's plenty of secondary evidence for much of the OT (as well as evidence that portions are sacred myth and ancient polemics) in terms of archeology. My point was not to go over that, but rather to say that the criteria of embarrassment supports the notion that those events are there because they're part of the story or history, not because they're some kind of ancient 'fan service'. If there was anything at all like that, it'd be the Song of Songs, which I've already addressed.