


Where Do Game Subjects Cross The Line? 89
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."
Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2, Interesting)
And if you are happy to fight Nazis, why not fight against those responsible for genocide in Rw
Apparently you missed Indiana Jones (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
I think there's an additional reason for going beyond Nazis, as well. In Germany, it's illegal to display any sort of Nazi symbolism, therefore games that utilize this symbolism to mak
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
I can just imagine some high ranking German politician saying, "This book is advocating Nazism! We must burn it!!"
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
How often in Battlefield 1942 do you shoot down non-combatants who are rounding up Jews?
I realize that you're proud of the fact that you read a book but you don't need to brin
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
What, are you kidding me? You're telling me that the majority of WWII games are FPSs where you're battling on the front line? I can count on one hand the number of games like BF1942 where you're only fighting against "soldiers." Are you completely missing the strategy genre? What about tactical games like Commandos 3 whe
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
Compose a list of games themed around WW II. Then tally the number of enemies in those games and break down the percentages of enemies who are actively killing Jews and enemies who are merely combat troops. You will see that my original statement holds - in most WW II games you are fighting enemies who are not "non-combatants" as you brought up.
If you are to respond to this, try not to nit pick but instead back up your original argument. And don't take such a rude tone - I
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
"I realize that you're proud of the fact that you read a book but you don't need to bring it up at every moment." I'm sorry, but apparently I'm not the only one being rude here.
Anyway. I think we're talking at cross-roads here. You say that there aren't very many video games in which the player attacks Germans who kill Jews (or Poles, or Christians, or whatever). However, just because you don't actually see any of these ethnic/religious
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
If anyone is to blame for hitler and his policies it is not the german people, it is the american, fre
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:2)
I agree that Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, etc. were terrible, evil men that deserved to die horrible deaths... the main difference between them and Hitler and the Nazis is that Hitler and the Nazis were certifiably the "bad guy" of WWII. There was no world-wide effort to oust Stalin, Lenin, or Pol Pot
Re:Only one kind of appropriate violence (Score:1)
Re:A game that will never be made (Score:1, Flamebait)
There is no line (Score:5, Insightful)
If I made a flight sim where you try to hit buildings to score points, that's ok. If you think there's something wrong with that, then it's perfectly within your right to be that way. But you can't stop me from playing it or making it.
That's the way it should be.
One title I would like to see (Score:4, Insightful)
You start out as a lowly president's kid, only endowed with a small oil company and a baseball team.
The object of the game is to use deception and underground systems such as skull and bones [parascope.com] to achieve world domination.
Pitfalls could include alcohol addiction [thesmokinggun.com], being bad at Political Science [yaledailynews.com], and getting caught lying to your country. [cnn.com]
Your objective could be a success however if you just talk to the right people [diebold.com]
Re:One title I would like to see (Score:2)
Go rant your political nonsense elsewhere. The topic is video game subjects.
Re:There is no line (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There is no line (Score:2)
Re:There is no line (Score:3)
Until you see tastless games like, "Abortion by coathangar!" or "Rape that chick!"
There's some behaviors you don't even want to demonstrate much less promote.
Re:There is no line (Score:3, Informative)
Kind of like this? [classicgaming.com]
Re:There is no line (Score:3, Insightful)
There's some behaviors you don't even want to demonstrate much less promote.
That's nice. Now, who is going to decide where this line is? Who is going to say "this game is good, not that game." What about BMX XXX and GTA:VC? Are they too crude for you? More importantly, are they too crude for a censor? While it may sound all well and good to censor tastless games, it can be and often is a pitfall into a whole can of worms yo
Re:There is no line (Score:2)
Re:There is no line (Score:1)
That's where the problem lies, not in what the censor lets get by, but rather in what the censor cuts. With a censor on-hand, GTA quickly becomes Crazy Taxi, and RtCW is set in a land populated by robots with most of the symbolism stripped, leaving a game that's decidedly simil
Re:There is no line (Score:2)
If you want to make a game about something, no matter what it is, go right ahead.
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.
Re:There is no line (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:There is no line (Score:2)
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.
Perhaps I didn't fully explain my point. You're talking about the scenario in which a game is created in a place where certain preventative laws do not exist. It can't be shipped to certain areas because such laws do exist in other places. Obviously, acting in accordance with the existence/lack of laws within your area is acceptable. On the other hand, by vi
Re:There is no line (Score:1)
I realize that, but then I was trying to point out that the lines are very blurry in some areas, especially this one. In some states, it's perfectly legal for AmericanSoftwareCompanyX to release "Pre-teen Gangbang Extreme", although it may be placed under certain regulations as pornography. In other states, it may be pe
Re:There is no line (Score:2)
And in the US the Supreme Court upheld the right of developers to make "Pre-teen Gangbang Extreme". It was ruled that a law banning virtual child porn is unconsitutional - porn is definitely speech, child porn is speech as well, and if nobody is direcly harmed (i.e. no real kids are used), the speech is protected. The strange thing is that there ar
Sick, Offensive Games (Score:2)
Re:Sick, Offensive Games (Score:3, Funny)
I think Running With Scissors [gopostal.com] has a job opening for you.
There is no line. (Score:2)
End of message.
love it or leave it; this is the way to maturity (Score:5, Interesting)
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'.)
let's not pretend (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:let's not pretend (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainstream manga explores the theme of rape as often as mainstreem American literature, often times written by women for women. To point out a popular example, The Wings of Honneamise featured a disturbing but mature look at rape as an aspect of hero worship.
I agree with the fundamental precept that the "avatar effect" of gaming is very different from the "voyeur effect" of the written word. I disagree that this creates a fundamental disjunction
Re:Comic books (Score:1)
Same thing with games-- the female game character most recognizable to the public is Lara Croft, just as known as for the size of her breasts as for her skill with guns.
Re:Comic books (Score:1)
Re:Comic books (Score:1)
Maybe comic books and games have a higher percentage of these things than other media, but a great deal of it is due to public perception. In part public perception is fueled by this, but it also perpetuates it, because games and comics that take themselves more seriously don't sell as well (because the more serious audience is less likely to gravitate towards the medium).
It takes a great deal of time to overcome the public perception, and even at that point yo
Re:Comic books (Score:2)
because of the self-imposed prison that the brightest minds and the largest budgets in comic publishing put themselves in, the form stagnated. it features childlike morals and prepubescent attractions precisely because that is the only market left for it.
If someone sees you pawing through Gaiman's work - they'll -still- derisively scoff at it as 'a comic book' on the same level as golden age Superman. And -that- is what i'm talking about.
Right now, you can't convince a person
Re:Comic books (Score:2)
Because even if you did believe that, it still wouldn't be the first example of that.
Re:love it or leave it; this is the way to maturit (Score:2, Insightful)
There was mature comics even a long time ago though. Don't you remember DC's Vertigo line? Titles like Sandman, Preacher, I remember in the back of some Sandman book, Death teaches you how to put on a condom using a banana to demonstrate. I think Marvel had a mature line too, don't recall the name but it had the mature book by Peter David called Sachs & Violens.
Fast forward to today, imagin
Re:love it or leave it; this is the way to maturit (Score:2)
Re:love it or leave it; this is the way to maturit (Score:1)
time (Score:2)
newsgaming - decide for yourself (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Oh no, the slippery slope fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
So pretty soon the only game allowed is Mario Kart... oh no, wait, he's an offensive Italian stereotype and car crashes are violent... I mean Atari 2600 Combat... oh, no, that's offensive to the brave soldiers who flew pixellated bombers maintaining plausible deniability over Cambodia. Pong anyone? (If the paddles aren't too phallic for children, that is.)
I would be interested in knowing how any actual soldiers -- not some Gamespy blowhard who can't do any better than slinging stereotypes of his own ("jackasses in Montana compounds") -- feels about his actions being emulated by thousands.
Inappropriate and tacky? Bringing the hobby down to the level of tabloid newspapers? This IS the same Web site that ranked Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior among the best / most underrated games of all time, right? Did they ever play either of those? No, they weren't "ripped from today's headlines," but they're full of inappropriate and tacky subject matter -- as are a whole lot of games.
Re:Oh no, the slippery slope fallacy (Score:1)
I think it's pretty simple. Most people view video games as childish wastes of time. So the objection was having important world issues enter into a medium for childish, irresponsible, and careless behavior. From their argument it makes sense. To alot of people, games are not a leg
Dangerous Information (Score:1)
Consider the Matrix, both the movies and the game, which are pretty much straight up about anti-state terrorists. But the context tells you you'
From the files of RTFA (Score:1)
September 11: Escape from Twin Towers (Score:1)
Re:September 11: Escape from Twin Towers (Score:1)
It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
I don't like "Beach Landing" games. I don't like it one bit. I believe that the fact that Normandy was made necessary to be one of the biggest failings of the West over the last centry. That all those lives were thrown away over politics...well...
I don't like in MOHAA, I don't like it in UT, I don't like it in DoD. Hell, I don't even like it in Conkers Bad Fur Day. Not saying that they shouldn't make it..just that
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
Do you say "I believe that the fact that Normandy was made necessary to be one of the biggest failings of the West over the last centry," to mean that D-Day was the wrong decision at the time? Or that countries in and out of Eu
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
I'd like to know what the grandparent poster thinks we should have done instead. Coming up through Italy would have been much more ex
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
What i'm saying, is that Hitler's march should have been stopped WAY before France. That "D-Day" should not have been necessary, because a beachhead should have been estabilished, to land troops and supplies.
Maybe I'm incorrect, but all the same, it's how I feel about the subject, on an emotional basis
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
That they wern't...frankly I can't even think about it without tearing up.
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
Re:It's not a matter of law.. (Score:2)
Most of them were, undoubtedly, very accurate. However, I can't play them without crying. Thinking about the lost life, that was basically wasted because of stupid isoloationists and apologists.
I'm not saying that
By all means (Score:1)
The only thing I would have to say in seriousness about this is design whatever you want, but expect some flack no matter what you do. Good taste is like yellow speed limit signs, you can ignore them, but it's not always the best idea.
Lets face it. (Score:1)
What's the BFD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I think imitation was a form of flattery.
I mean, seriously, what's so disrepectful about it? It raises awareness of what soldiers have done to protect our country. If anything, it helps us appreciate their work even more. So what if a game is made of it? Would they rather hear snoring as that event goes by in history class?
Re:What's the BFD? (Score:2)
I hope they make it ultra-realistic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I hope they make it ultra-realistic (Score:2, Flamebait)
Yeah, right. 'glamour in of a Quake style shoot em'up'? Have you even PLAYED Quake? You can blow the
Re:I hope they make it ultra-realistic (Score:1)
I think we left that line a long time ago... (Score:1)
And let's not forget Titus Andronicus. They do some filthy things to each other in the name of theatre.
Yeah. Let's just ignore what's in our genes. In fact, wouldn't it be great if we could come up with a law where chess players were legally obligated to draw every game, then go have a Coke and a smile.
Ender's Game? (Score:2, Informative)
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?
hmmm (Score:2)