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On the Advent of Controversial Video Games
First I'd like to discuss the basic complaints many people have over these video games. The phrase "too soon" gets thrown around a lot. But what are the specific complaints about these controversial games? I've tried to divide them up from most serious to not-so-serious attributes (which a controversial game may have one or more of, and which is by no means a comprehensive list):
- Human life was lost.
- People who survived the situation or are survivors of victims of the situation still remember it, as it happened less than one generation ago.
- It spins the situation too much as novelty or entertainment and thus disrespects those involved and/or detracts from the gravity of the situation.
- It deals with a very real life issue that some people aren't comfortable discussing, such as: race, religion, sexual orientation, slavery, politics, the law, prostitution, drug use, etc.
- Stuck in a think-of-the-children mentality, the "M" or even "AO" rating does not deter groups and people like Jack Thompson from arguing that it is not appropriate material for minors and therefore should not be distributed. Popularity of a title and great game mechanics may exacerbate this.
I'm going to start with an easy game to discuss: RapeLay — an obscure title by a Japanese publisher that focuses on forced sex situations. There is something special about sexual crimes that make them even worse than murder in the United States. I don't know why, but Hot Coffee in GTA3 drew far more criticism than the normal killing rampage in that game and games before it. This same phenomena occurs at parties where they play games that a murderer is at the party. Yet, if a rapist was at the party, people would probably be mortified. While the sentencing isn't as harsh, sex offenders are registered and tracked for the rest of their lives while murderers can be released or paroled under good behavior. I see RapeLay as nothing more than a game concentrating on a particular crime — a less serious crime than many I commit in some of the games I play. I've no desire to play it, but people who derive entertainment from that have a right to it. RapeLay is merely another adult game like Dangerous Toys for the Dreamcast.
Nothing could be more recent than making a simulation game where you're a Somali pirate invading other ships. You have an impoverished community with people starving to death and people being taken captive. A player is most likely deriving entertainment from horrible situations on other continents today. This isn't Disney making three Pirates of the Caribbean movies based loosely on a very real and life-threatening situation four hundred years ago. This is completely a function of when it happened. On the other hand, piracy on the water has been a classic platform for games, and if the game is historically accurate, how much different is this than an in depth news article? Keep in mind that this is the same game company that partnered with the History channel to bring you WWII and Vietnam games in the past. I think it is very much arguable that games based on war can be informative if done correctly.
A quick note on a more wide spread release for the Playstation 2 is a game that some Hindu groups say is offensive to their religion. Along the same lines, several online games have depicted Mohammad which is a no-no in Islam causing unrest. These situations are offensive to a small part of the population and — unless done in very disrespectful ways — aren't going to gather much more controversy. They're no Muslim Massacre: The Game of Modern Religious Genocide, but they are reportedly offensive to some groups of people. On the other end are religious games that gain controversy by targeting non-members of that faith. Left Behind: Eternal Forces was controversial because of violence against non-Christian characters in the video game. Video games like Ethnic Cleansing express extreme prejudice and hate towards a particular ethnicity or nationality. Murder and violence are still murder and violence whether you are religiously motivated, racially motivated or have no clear motivation (like GTA). It is difficult to argue that these games should be outlawed while claiming that it's our right to enjoy games like GTA. Is it because these games are used for propaganda or recruitment tools and mainstream games are not? Is it because of a controversial message in the game? If so, I would like to know why this is any more dangerous than murder in video games.
None of these games faced the wide distribution that Six Days in Fallujah was looking at. And that game is now canceled, the deciding factor most likely being that it was a big name publisher with wide distribution channels. Not that the content was any more or less controversial than some of the games Kuma has made about Vietnam and WWII, but it would have had a wider release and been about a present day war that is still in progress. Books written about the Iraq war have to be careful; news about the Iraq war has to be sensitive to families. Games — a form of non-necessary entertainment — have to be even more careful if they want to enjoy popularity and avoid criticism. As a society, we are just not ready to accept games as a dignified medium. Other mediums faced this same barrier and overcame it, and it's good to have these games testing the waters.
In the United States, it's easy to claim freedom-of-speech this and freedom-of-speech that, but the lawsuits will flow from interest groups with money — no rating system will satisfy them. Letting the popularity (or lack thereof) of a title speak for its quality and message is not enough for some people. The general populace do not yet accept games as an art form like books and movies. Entertainment and even edutainment are not seen as appropriate ways to portray current events, and they may not be for a long time.
Where do you stand on controversial video games? Should publishers and developers be able to release whatever they want? Super Columbine RPG? RapeLay? Six Days in Fallujah? Are they protected by free speech? Will games forever be entertainment and therefore never be able to cover current topics? How would you effectively regulate content if I should be able to play a game like GTA but not Six Days in Fallujah? Do these titles hurt the social standing of gamers and gaming as a medium?
Ok mods. I've said my piece. Backlash time.
Mod him up. He is a perfect example of the general populace that I failed to embody or present fairly in my piece. This is the current view of games.
Does anyone play an "adult" video game to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenile self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.
And there you have it. That barrier must be overcome for video games to be accepted as a dignified medium worthy of serious topics. It's the perception that must be overcome. I challenge game designers and publishers everywhere to break down this barrier. At one point Lolita and Ulysses were nothing more than "juvenile self-indulgence" ...
My work here is dung.
Not only do I vote with my dollar, the games a publisher publishes or distributes affects its reputation in the eyes of the buying public.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Aren't most of the games that really stir controversy just in it for the short-term popularity? Thus, can't we expect to see games come out "too soon" that are "too violent", only to just fade away since the actual game itself just isn't that great?
A strong history exists of controversial games with good gameplay that have outlasted their detractors by a long shot:
Street Fighter
Wolfenstein 3D
Mortal Kombat
Doom
GTA
etc.
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Been playing GTA: Chinatown Wars. I'm only 1/4 of the way through (hey, I know it's been out for a month, but I'm slow) and I've already had $100K in sales of illegal drugs. Getting there, I've killed 500 people, most of them innocent bystanders and a lot of them cops. Who, far from being vindictive when they catch me, simply confiscate my weapons and stash and accept a bribe for letting me go.
Similarly unrealistic is what happens when I get killed. Quick trip to the hospital and everything's back to normal.
Will this turn anybody into a criminal? Somehow I doubt it. Unlike most consumers of violent fiction and games, I don't buy the idea that there's no connection between media violence and real-world violence. I've certainly seen the effects on my own personality of growing up in a culture where violence is something you see every time you turn on the boob tube. But let's look at it a little more objectively.
What kind of media violence turns people violent? Not the gross-out violence you see in video games or Tarentino movies. That kind of violence is only attractive to people whose lives are so screwed up that becoming a gangsta and being gruesumely dead before you're 30 is an improvement over the alternatives. And I doubt that such a lifestyle is made any more violent by exposure to the cartoonish violence in the media.
The media violence that bothers me is the kind that makes violence innocuous. The hero gets knocked out and wakes up 15 minutes later with nothing worse than a splitting headache — no concussion symptoms such as extreme nausea and neurological impairment. Our plucky band of heroes shoot guns all over the place, and never kill anybody, except maybe the occasional badguy.
That last one disgusted the summer camp dude who taught me to shoot. The thing he was most concerned with drumming into our heads was that guns are dangerous. This was even more important to him that his strong believe that the 2nd amendment was a last safeguard against communist invasion. Which is pretty damn important.
The big problem with violence is people having their heads in the sand. And I don't just mean idiots who want to ban everything that even suggests violence. I mean you mister I've-got-a-shotgun-so-my-home-is-secure.
It's interesting. I didn't think I'd find it so blatant in WoW. However, some of the quests in that game appear to be the basic murder quests.
NPC: Go kill that guy over there.
me: Why?
NPC: He put a rock in my way and made me stub my toe! Idiot! He's [insert race here] and I hate him and he needs to die.
Of course, some of the better quests incorporate ideals of justice a little better.
NPC: Go kill that guy over there because he's raping our sheep, burning our girls, and stealing our houses! And even though we're 20 levels above you, we're helpless to do anything about it.
As you may have guessed, I don't like playing the bad guy. I never want to be in that mindset, it's a dangerous path to start.
Quote:
Compare to videogames.
I don't know about you, but I use MMORPG's to explore parts of my psyche. In essence, they are a shard of some part of my subconscious that has been identified, detached, and given a name of it's own. It can now go out and play and be "itself" without being, or becoming, a neurosis.
And some of it is playing an adult version of "Cowboys and Indians" or "Soldiers" knowing full well the horror of those two ideas is now safely tucked away behind pixels.
(I have noticed that Goldshire is full of people that have not made it past playing "Doctor")
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
If there were one change I'd have made to Fallout 3, I'd have included the ability to have lovers/wives/etc. There are enough subplots in the game involving family, enough families, heck the whole Republic of Dave thing, that it would have added another element to the game. The unfortunate problem with this is that American society is prudish and stunted when it comes to sexuality, to the point where what is considered "normal" is actually quite unhealthily repressed.
The problem here is that the game is in 3D... The previous iteration of Fallout would let you have non-graphical sex with multiple partners as well as homosexual sex, given that the screen go black and there is barely some comments on your "performance" afterwards... nothing much, but at least you knew what happened...
Now that Fallout is in 3D, having anything close to any sexual relasionship is a big no-no.... why? because americans are scared of sex!
You complain about all those sex games coming from Japan... yet you fail to see that they have much harsher laws... the simple fact that they can't legally show any genitals in a game/comic/movie makes them much more harsher than us...
But all you americans see is the sexual content in some games while most of the games with sexual content in Japan actually uses the sex as a reward for your hard-earned gameplay... just look at Katawa Shoujo, the content that is available for now is not even close to pornographic... the part of the game that has been released (for free) contains nothing of sexual nature... yet it WILL contain pornographic images as a reward to the player who will play hours upon hours to form a relationship with a single character or walk the thin line of the "harem" route... but, as for now, you already have multiple hours of story without even a hint of anything sexual... Still, the game is included in the Japanese pornographic dating-sim game genre wich is extremely hard to get in America.. why? because the ESRB rates those games as "Adult Only" like they should be, no retailer will have a single copy available in his store...
America is scared of censored genitals... just because they imply sex... Even if the average gamer is well over the limit of buying his own porn, he can't buy a game that contains porn because the industry prefers showing mass murdering than scrambled genitals...
What a bunch of pussies(should that be censored?)
If I remember correctly, the Hot Coffee mod allowed your character in GTA3 to have sex with prostitutes, which is a completely different thing than raping a woman. That's why I disagree with the assumption that our aversion to rape in entertainment has something to do with our culture being prudish/puritanical/etc. For this to be true, it would seem to also follow that societies with a more liberal view of human sexuality (like in Europe, for example) would also have a more lax view on rape in entertainment. However, I seriously doubt that a German or a Swede would somehow be more relaxed about playing a video game with rape involved than an American.
Rape is a particularly heinous crime because, unlike murder, once the act has been perpetrated the victim's suffering has only just begun. And unlike killing someone, it's never morally justified. There's nothing a woman could do to somehow justify a person raping her. If someone attacks you with a deadly weapon, however, you're well within acceptable moral and legal boundaries to kill that person. We're less averse to violence in games and entertainment because we can take "baby steps" with justifiable violence. Start with "Call of Duty," then move on to GTA and then once you get to Manhunt it doesn't seem all that bad. Hell, even in Manhunt you're only killing people because you're essentially being forced to.
Don't get me wrong; American moral sensibilities about sex are fucked up, no pun intended. For some strange reason, when we go to see a movie about a guy in a mask stabbing people in the woods, nudity and sex are almost expected but when we go to see a love story, anything but the most white-washed sex scene will offend the audience. It's like the time I watched "Amelie" with my mom. She freaked out that a movie about two people falling in love might actually have some sexual content in it. But rape will always be taboo, as it should be. From what I gather, this isn't an exploration into the tortured psyche of a rapist (like a book or movie on the subject might be), but rather a rape simulator of sorts. Therefore, people are justified in their concern that folks would want to play such a game. Of course the developer has a right to publish the game, just as consumers have the right to boycott and criticize it.
(sorry for the rambling post, kind of out of it today)
Yes, currently (till they figure out how to make food inorganicly) life feeds on life. But that doesn't mean all forms of feeding are equal.
Last I checked, plants (especially lone beans) don't have a brain or a central nervous system capable of feeling pain or terror; regardless of the "oh plants like it when we sing to them" bull there is no sentience in plant life. Contrast that the very real terror cattle experience as they are slaughtered, especially when someone fucks up and doesn't get a clean kill.
I'm not a vegitarian but the "oh, plants are living too" BS is just that. If someone prefers to not partake in meat, dairy, or egg products because they feel they don't want to be part of the system that causes that sort of torture to living creatures actually capable of feeling terror and reacting to pain, that's their choice. And it's an honorable one as long as they don't spend the rest of their life rubbing it in our faces.
I wonder how many gungho "I've hunted and killed for food before" bullshiters would still be "carnivores" if they spent a week working in a slaughter house.