Red Dead Gets its Own Small Controversies

Two quick bits of news on Red Dead Redemption:

In a BBC interview, a Rockstar Games writer and voice actor named Lazlow Jones was asked this question:

Question: How do you feel about accusations that games such as yours are responsible for more violence among young people?

His answer: Our games are not designed for young people. If you're a parent and buy one of our games for your child you're a terrible parent. We design games for adults because we're adults. There's a lot of kids games out there that we're not interested in playing. Just like you enjoy watching movies and TV shows with adult themes and language and violence that's the kind of thing we seek to produce.

It's a pretty reasonable answer, but most gamers would have a little bit of trouble with how strongly he put it, especially the "terrible parent" line. A commenter on a Kotaku post about the story said exactly my first thought: "There goes some kid's dream of getting Rockstar Table Tennis."

A few days earlier, Red Dead Redemption was also accused of some rather old-fashioned prejudice for including the character pictured above, a town drunk named "Irish." An Irish Herald article on Red Dead pointed the stereotype out.

The article has several funny moments: The headline is "Irish 'drunk' sours launch of hit game," yet the article has all of three sentences on the actual character. Clearly, there's not a lot to talk about actually on-topic. The rest of the article breathlessly gives us details of how awesome and popular the game is, and why we should all go buy it right now. The game is "groundbreaking," "expected to sell four million copies this summer," "retail[ing] from €49.99 with enthusiastic gamers pre-booking their copies weeks ahead of the Irish launch tomorrow," with the "appeal [lying] in the huge detail." Very excitable for a news article on a controversy surrounding the game.

Red Dead Redemption and Rockstar's Reception

Only a few years ago, Rockstar Games just could not get a break. The "Grand Theft Auto" and "Manhunt" developers were firmly within politicians' radars, and it took serious effort for them to release a game without controversy being found within it.

For instance, in 2006, Rockstar developed four games: "Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix," an expansion to a mostly harmless racing game, even if it is about illegal street racing; "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories," which received little attention because it was developed solely for the Playstation Portable and didn't try anything new; "Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis," which confused everybody; and "Bully," which applied the basic story and gameplay structure of "Grand Theft Auto" to a theoretically less offensive private school setting.


Despite "Bully" being at its heart a toned-down "GTA," it still received as much if not more scrutiny from the press, politicians, and in particular Jack Thompson. Universally, ratings groups considered the game appropriate for 15 or 16 year-olds, but British politicians fought bitterly to label it for 18 year-olds, Jack Thompson sued to have the game's release blocked in Florida because it was a "public nuisance," and Brazil banned the game altogether.

The game was relentlessly taken out of context, and it just kept snowballing. In the end, a game about slingshot-and-cherry-bomb schoolyard hijinks was said to include sexual harassment, homosexual content, an implicit approval of bullying, implicit approval of violence, and it was even called "a Columbine simulator." It was as if politicians just knew something must be wrong with the game's content, because Rockstar made it, but they couldn't figure out what to object to.

Contrast that with what I found in The New York Times this morning. The Arts section is dominated above-the-fold by a huge screenshot of "Red Dead Redemption," which more or less applies that same "GTA" formula to a western setting. Seth Schiesel gives the game a glowing review, ending his review by saying "In the more than 1,100 articles I have written for this newspaper since 1996, I have never before called anything a tour de force. Yet there is no more succinct and appropriate way to describe Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar rides again."

Whereas "Bully," working from a similar concept in 2006, was intensely scrutinized for controversial scenes to pick apart before it was ever released, leading to endless courtroom battles and debates by people who had never touched a controller, here we are in 2010 with The New York Times praising a Rockstar game's writing and ability to immerse the player in a different world. It's always nice to look back and see how far we've come.