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Games Entertainment

Industry Leaders Frustrated With Game Culture 50

Posted by Zonk from the restraint-is-for-producers dept.
Well known designer Warren Spector let his opinions fly in a keynote at the Montreal Game Summit, reports Edge Online. From the article: "While admitting that the largest part of the criticism stemmed from general ignorance and misunderstanding of videogaming by the 'cultural gate-keepers,' he noted that simply staying the course and waiting for mainstream acceptance to catch up could lead not only to political intervention, but a 'coarsening of our culture,' and 'eventual cultural irrelevance.' Instead, he joined a growing chorus in the development community by strongly advocating the diversification of games to be more inclusive of women, older gamers, and traditionally excluded ethnicities." Next Generation is covering a similar statement by ESA President Doug Lowenstein about his views on the gaming industry's image. Unfortunately, societal parasite Jack Thompson took Spector's remarks to be validation of his viewpoint. GamePolitics has that story.
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Industry Leaders Frustrated With Game Culture More

Industry Leaders Frustrated With Game Culture

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  • Jack Thompson (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trepalium ( 109107 ) on Monday November 07, 2005 @05:33PM (#13974124)
    Jack Thompson would take being hit by lightning bolt while playing outside in a thunderstorm waving around a lightning rod as validation of his viewpoint. And he'd probably blame gamers for any harm that came to him. The man is just crazy. I don't think he even knows what he's doing all of the time. One minute Warren Spector is a bitter enemy, the next, he says something useful to Jack, and he morphs into a respected video game developer. Completely, utterly, fully insane.

  • Yknow... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday November 07, 2005 @05:34PM (#13974133) Journal
    ...I'd never heard of Jack Thompson until Zonk stated namechecking him every single day. It's not like you have to give him free publicity every time he opens his mouth.
    • Unfortunately, though, plenty of people who do not oppose Thompson's position would still be hearing his message, even if there was no mention on /.

      It's important that those who would oppose him are aware of his shenanigans, because us ignoring him will not make him go away.
  • Except that's not where the money is, at least at the moment, so bring on cultural irrelevance.

  • They're Spot On (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GaryPatterson ( 852699 ) on Monday November 07, 2005 @05:41PM (#13974222)
    This is a huge issue for the industry, and it's good to see some notable people bringing attention to it.

    We know that games don't cause crime (people cause crime!) and that they can't affect people's mental state more than a movie or book. (As an aside - anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)

    But what *we* know isn't important - it's the wider public's perception of the gaming industry that really matters here. We see the great variety of fun games because we're close to the industry. The wider public see only the games that make the news, and for so long now the sort of games that make the news are associated with school shootings, suicides and on-screen sex (Hot Coffee - I'm looking at you!)

    Does it matter if the general public get the wrong idea? Absolutely! They vote, they vastly outnumber gamers and they can be mobilised by people like Jack Thompson to force games to be banned from sale or to force the government to step in and regulate the industry.

    Governments around the world show great desire to be seen to be tough on crime, and many are now pandering to religion in a cynical effort to woo voters. Think for a moment what an industry regulated by them would be. Imagine (for those of you in the US) if Jack Thompson was on the regulatory board.

    That's what is at stake.

    The perception of video games is awful. The rise in realism, combined with the media's need for a quick image or soundbite means that it's simple to grab a scene that makes just about any game look like a blood-fest. Well, maybe not Pikmin or Golf.

    The way to turn this around is both simple and hard.

    The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage. The visual element is incredibly important and it's often used to make quick judgements about a game. The average age of gamers is rising, so the industry isn't targeting 13-year-old boys any more - it's men and women nearing their 30s. Get realistic and make games that look good *and* appeal to both men and women. This is just a matter of 3D models - trivial stuff.

    The hard part is to promote the more positive aspects of gameplay. It's not all about killing - there's fantasy, escapism, exploration, strategy, problem-solving and so on. There are so many good things in gaming, and it is critical to make the general public see them rather than the continual violence that they're told games are all about.

    Perception is reality.
    • Might as well surrender eh?

      Sad, sad, sad....

      • What?

        Absolutely not! It's not hard to get changes started.

        It's only hard to change the public perception.

        But hey - if you prefer the idea of external regulation, go for it.

        I'd rather keep control inside the industry and see it produce whatever games it likes, so long as the general perception is good.
    • > anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)
      > The way to turn this around is both simple and hard.
      > Perception is reality.

      Classic Slashdot post!
    • "The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage."

      That's one thing I liked about Half Life 2, Gordon Freeman isn't your typical bad ass muscle bound soldier type and Alyx Vance doesn't look like a cover girl from a Heavy Metal magazine. A simple touch, but the whole game would have been cornier if not for little things like that.
      (Ok, so the absent minded professor in the game is certainly a stereotype)
    • We know that games don't cause crime (people cause crime!) and that they can't affect people's mental state more than a movie or book. (As an aside - anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)

      So the sketch of a comparison I'm seeing is that "Catcher" would be among the big novels of the breaking wave of paperbacks from the 1950s -- a new pop phenomenon that scared people. It's had a long history of censorship [euronet.nl] over controversial content, which the people objecting to it say will "prom

      • In "The Sufering" any time you were around an NPC voices in your head (comes as whispers over the soundtrack) tell you to kill them and give reasons why you should do it. I havent gone back through yet but supposedly how you deal with them (I left them alive) affects the game down the road.
        • Cool point about "The Suffering," though I doubt I ever play it. My 12-year-olds are not quite up to shooters yet, and anyway don't have a taste for them.

          I wish people paid money for games that had an idea like that, instead of just for dynamic lighting effects and frame rates and so on...

  • -1 Incoherent (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Monday November 07, 2005 @06:45PM (#13974831)
    That's how I'd mod his statements. They make no sense whatsoever. Well they do...if you've not really played any of the games in question here. But if you've actually played the games, and think about it for a few minutes..you'd be thinking whaa?

    See..what Spector is saying, is that the gameplay of GTA is great...pity about the content however. What Spector SHOULD realize, but doesn't, is that without the content of GTA, the gameplay would either be nosensical, or wouldn't exist in the first place. What Spector is talking about, the greatest part of GTA, is the "sandbox" appeal of it. But in order to remove the content, and really most of the controversy, you remove the sandbox element FIRST.

    I would go a step further, and argue that ALL sandbox games fall into the same trap, and if people were really concerned about the content of video games, and not just about suing for money/scoring cheap and easy political and moral points, then we'd be talking about a much broader swath of gaming.

    Because is the real controversy about GTA is that you're driving around a city, whacking mobsters and the like? Uhhh. No. The real controversy is that GTA gives you a living city that you can drive around in, and do basically whatever you want in. The gameplay that Spector lauds IS the controversy.

    How ironic.

    How quaint.

    How dumb.

    I would argue that any sufficently designed sandbox game comes with some potentially contraversial content. Be it the ability to be a facsist in the Civ games, to have gay relationships in the Sims games, or to create slums in the SimCity games, as a few examples. Spector himself, helped create a game where you can act like a pirate...hardly a socially redeemable activity.

    Either be for or against these games. Period. But to try and play both sides, because playing the side you WANT to play limits your creative options in the future..well tough. Because when you're playing censorship, it usually boomerangs back to hit you in the head.

    • Re:-1 Incoherent (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Right...GTA has no slant which might possibly incline your character to take a bat to a prostitute's head or drive over people with a car.

      Like it or not, GTA doesn't encourage any non-violent ways of resolving conflict in the same manner that it encourages the violent ways. Your character is going to be a murderous thug, with the possible exception of doing solely firefighter missions.

      If you want a good sandbox game, look at the Fallout games. They let you wander aimlessly if you please, they let you reso
      • Firefighter, Ambulance, Taxi, Chopshop, Racing (street, RC, dirtbike), Pizza delivery, Stunts, Vehicle specific challanges, dancing, the various collectables.

        I probably missed a few, but there are plenty of things you can do in the games that will take a decent amount of time.

        Now there are a larger number of violent things you can do (and the missions that advance the plot are mostly involving violence) as well.

    • Re:-1 Incoherent (Score:4, Insightful)

      by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Monday November 07, 2005 @09:45PM (#13975997) Homepage
      ### Because is the real controversy about GTA is that you're driving around a city, whacking mobsters and the like? Uhhh. No. The real controversy is that GTA gives you a living city that you can drive around in, and do basically whatever you want in.

      Whatever you want, as long as it involves a lot of violence, stealing, robbery, etc. that is... Heck, GTA isn't a sandbox game, it has maybe some elements of it and a much wider varity of missions then most games but in the end you still have to do whatever the developers planed for you to do and that involves violence for most part. Maybe I missed something, but last time I locked you couldn't make it very far in the game without using violence, sure you can steal a police car or a firetruck and have fun for a few minutes, but that won't bring you very far anytime soom.

      If GTA really would be a free-form sandbox game and had probally a bit more realistic damage model, so you couldn't go massacre dozens or hundreds of people without getting yourself in basically no throuble at all, I doubt there would be much uproar, but in GTA a play a criminal and have to commit crime. So will the uproar might not be valid, its quite understandable.

    • -1 Flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MMaestro ( 585010 )
      I would argue that any sufficently designed sandbox game comes with some potentially contraversial content.

      Yes, sandbox games come with some POTENTIALLY contraversy the issue is HOW you go about presenting this.

      Yes in the Civilization games you could rule as a fascist and purposely kill of the entire civilian population of a race/culture/city/nation. The difference between the Civilization games and the GTA series is the fact that YOU CANNOT PROGRESS THROUGH THE GAME as a "good guy". There will be missio

      • True, but not all the story advancement missions require you to kill or significantly break the law (any more then the other AI drivers).
  • "I'm on it!"

    Seriously, all the major consoles have been talking about trying to expand gaming into a broader demographic, but I see at least Nintendo trying (not sure how successful it will be, but trying nonetheless) with their Brain Training and Nintendogs DS games, promise of a cheaper system in the Revolution, and a controller modeled after a TV remote for the express purpose of making non-gamers feel comfortable picking it up.

    • To give props to another game company, Three Rings Design [puzzlepirates.com] has a puzzle game which, while it theoretically involves violence (cannon balls and pirates), is tame enough to be enjoyable both by their typical subscriber (thirty/fourty-something female) and also her young child. The take steps to make sure both the game and the community are family-friendly, including policing the games/forums, encouraging positive behavior in their community, and sticking to their guns on the issue of... well... not allowing g
    • Nintendo has been on it for years. The only problem is that the average gamer is quicker to pull out "Nintendo is for kids" card when it comes to the company now.

      Nintendo knows how to appeal to a larger demographic. How many buttons did the NES controller have when it was first released? 4. They could've put any number of butttons on that controller if they wanted to, but they didn't.

      Sadly, this is something M$ only realises in regards to the online connectivty domain. XBox Live is supposedly one of th
  • I find it strange that a visionary like Spector could be so blind to history. Think of somebody like Van Gogh or Picasso, whose works were either ignored or considered ugly and disgusting when they were created, but are considered genius today. The same will be said of GTA, assuming all the CDs don't become scratched.
    • I think it's more comparable to movies like "Goodfellas" or "Scarface" - they are great movies and they ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN. The Game industry needs to educate the public on the diversity of games so parents understand what they are buying and adults can play games made for adults.
  • that the guns in GTA carried non-generic ammo. I mean, honestly, I cant take that guy serious after the catastrophe that was Deus Ex:Invisible War.

    • ZING!

      Although to be fair, wasn't he out of the loop and/or not really in charge? IIRC, it was someone by the name of Harvey Smith who douched up DEIW.

  • Personally I think part of the problem is the mass hysteria that the media cause. If person X plays Y game that involves shooting and then goes on a shooting spree, the media blame the game and not the parents who should have taught person X to know better.

    I've watched all sorts of violent and pornographic scenes in films and you don't see me re-enacting any of that. My parents taught me better then that. I used to play Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive (Genesis to you Americans) and Game Gear. Imagine if

  • Game developer suggests producing product to cater to customers rather than producing customers to cater to product.

    Which part of "business" don't these guys understand?
  • Naturally, Jack fails to understand that Take-Two Interactive isn't just "GTA" this and "Manhunt" that. Think about it for a second...if Take-Two were really to go under (which apparently seems to be Jack's ulterior motive), not only would there be no more Grand Theft Auto, but we'd also lose games like Civilization, Pirates, and a bunch of great sim sports titles from the 2K Sports label. As much as he wants the non-gaming public to think otherwise, Take-Two does publish games that aren't over-the-top vio
    • Go under? Take2 has exclusive rights for a major US sports league... that alone will keep them in the black.
    • In a way, I think I might rather have had a better developer (yes I said that) do Civ IV. It just isn't as polished as the previous three. I'd say maybe it's Firaxis's fault but seeing as the previous 3 Civ games and Alpha-C didn't have these issues...

      You can't queue up moves (by hitting left/left/left rapidly)
      It has a slow-to-a-crawl probable memory leak (or my video/audio drivers do, which only civ hits yet wow/coh/asheron's call did not)
      Dialogs don't "do the right thing" by default. Ctrl-S should save th
    • not only would there be no more Grand Theft Auto, but we'd also lose games like Civilization, Pirates, and a bunch of great sim sports titles from the 2K Sports label. As much as he wants the non-gaming public to think otherwise, Take-Two does publish games that aren't over-the-top violent.

      Not over-the-top violent?

      Civ: Take over the world in one of several ways; violence helps all of them, and bonuses for whipping your subjects to death or enslaving the enemy's subjects
      Pirates: Hello? Pirate? Rape and pilla
  • What? Two major gaming events in Montreal in the same weekend? That's not fair!!!

    So Festival Arcadia was the smoke and mirrors to keep us kids out of an interesting conference, right?

    Sure, I got to trash to Nullsleep and the Minibosses for a while, got to see the Frag Dolls up close (they're cuter in person that in pictures, if you can imagine), got my GBA signed [blogspot.com] by the 8-bit people.. Nullsleep, Bubblyfish, Bit Shifter and david Kristian.. Saw an interview with the voice of the Princess in POP:Sands of time
  • Despite citing the source, it was not hyperlinked. You can find Edge Online at: http://www.edge-online.co.uk/ [edge-online.co.uk]

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