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.

Pushing the Medium Forward

Has any medium's idea of what is acceptable for display moved as quickly as that of video games? Just two years ago, Mass Effect was universally hated (by people who had never played it) for including a "sex scene" which was actually just mild nudity. Now, Bioware's latest titles include the same level of mostly clothed "sex scenes," with virtually no public outrcry, despite these titles' huge mainstream attention. And despite not coming anywhere close to actually portraying sex, they're probably closer than the Hot Coffee mini-game was so long ago. Jack Thompson has disappeared, games are getting reviewed in the New York Times every week, and their perception as a children's medium is dying.

Video games can now have nudity and yet still be sold in Wal-Marts. That's a huge and recent development. Grand Theft Auto IV's DLC expansion The Lost and Damned was a strategically important place to get this done, and I think developer Rockstar North knew that. The Lost and Damned included a cutscene with a visible digital penis (belonging to a congressman), making it the first mainstream North American release to include male nudity. First of all, the game would not be released in stores to begin with, because it was download-only. The only people who could stop it from being sold were inside Microsoft. Second, as merely an expansion, the mainstream media attention wouldn't be overwhelming, so you get less people talking about a scene that they've never actually seen, which is important. Third, the DLC would eventually be sold in a disc format, after the attention had died away. Now we have stores selling a video game with frontal male nudity without controversy. It has now set precedent for all game releases in the future, and the medium has moved forward in the public consciousness.

Heavy Rain is now widely known as a game that's meant to move the medium forward, in many more ways than simply nudity. But, the fact that their nude scene is interactive makes an important distinction in the ongoing argument. One of the major reasons people will argue that video games should not have nudity while movies can is that video games are interactive. Nude scenes in games past have almost all been simple, non-interactive cutscenes, but in Heavy Rain, you can be seen as controlling the scene. The game hasn't yet been released, so I haven't played it, but it will be interesting to see exactly how it's handled. Regardless, the scene just isn't attracting the Fox News-class outrage we've seen in years past.

Maybe certain Japanese games like Rapelay put things in perspective.

Modern Warfare 2: Some Notes

So Modern Warfare 2 is already setting sales records. And it has not shied away from conspiracy for even one second. Before release, Infinity Ward was releasing some advertising material that just baldly seemed built to piss some people off and get their game talked about pre-release. The simple acronym at the end of that linked video "Fight Against Grenade Spam" was worth a couple more Kotaku posts than the game would've gotten, and it seems to have cost them nothing. So, even before the really big news about that one level I'll talk about in a moment, Infinity Ward was deciding to show some balls here, and I don't think it hurt their sales.


*ahem* SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT *ahem*


The game only takes a few hours to beat, so hopefully some day we won't have to add that notice. So, yes, in I believe the fourth level, roughly forty minutes to an hour into the game, we have the infamous level in which the player is sort of a terrorist. They covered it on Fox & Friends this morning, picking a representative for video games who clearly hadn't been on TV before.*

The player is a CIA operative infiltrating a Russian terrorist's organization in order to get information, and take him or some other vague enemy down later on. During the loading screen, the player is told something approximating "You don't want to know how much we paid to get you in this far. You'll have to pay with a piece of yourself, too. Regardless, this way will save far more lives." Then, the player sees himself as part of a group of five Russians wearing bulletproof vests, with automatic weapons, walking slowly into a Russian airport lobby. The other people open fire on a crowded group of civilians, heavily suggesting that the player should follow suit to stay under cover. Most of the rest of the level, you walk slowly through the airport, shooting more civilians and police officers. The player can decide to not shoot anybody, with the only possible consequences being that they could still be shot by the few police officers present. In that case, the player would simply walk through the level as the massacre happens, without killing any civilians.

You are allowed to skip the level in-game. The game specifically asks you as you start it up if you feel you might want to skip parts, and you can do it from the start menu while in the terrorist mission as well.

No matter what you do, once you make it to the end of the level, the Russian terrorist group's leader shoots you in the head and kills you (or one of the characters you play, anyway) which then allows Russian police to discover your body and find that you're American, which becomes a casus belli for Russia to invade the United States in the coming missions. So, you can at least say, in being killed by the terrorist leader, that character is cemented as a bad guy whereas yours is certainly a good guy and a victim, whether or not he had to kill civilians.

So, hey people! It's a moral dilemma! That's good, it's interesting! We're trying to move video games up to other media, in which good guys can be bad at times and bad guys can be good at times! The crime boss protagonist doesn't always have to get what's coming to him! The superhero can save lives while also on crack! Rockstar Games has been doing something like this with virtually every game they release, trying to move video games up to where the same things are accepted in them as in movies, books, etc. Video games can have full nudity. How is that worse than actual moving pictures of full nudity?

I think we're past the point where this becomes a serious drive for violent game legislation again, at least in the U.S. I guess we'll find out.

*I just read this about the poor guy: "There are a few gaming sites out there bashing Jon for losing his train of thought early in the segment and closing his eyes towards the end as he stood his ground defending simulated violence in video games. I’ve known Jon personally for several years now, and what the asshats who are ridiculing him don’t know is that Fox contacted him that same day with just a few hours notice. In addition to Jon never having been on television before, the segment was filmed at 3:30 AM his time, which meant he wasn’t exactly “well rested” before going on air."

Terrorism Can Be Fun With Red Faction: Guerrilla!

I've almost finished playing Red Faction: Guerrilla, and I'm having fun with it. The sledgehammer-swinging pure destruction is just so much fun, all on its own, that the rest of the game would have to be terrible to bring it down. Miyamoto famously asked his team to make a simple game with a cube jumping and make it fun before they could start on Super Mario 64, so I think it's a good design idea to just start with a fun physics element and work up with a game like this.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Red Faction hasn't gotten in any trouble from watchdog groups, given its content. It's not too vulgar, not the absolutely most violent game I've ever played, and the enemies are abstracted into Halo uniforms, so they're not very human. No, the thing is, this game casts you, the player, as a terrorist. Given that until very recently, the US has said they were in a War on Terror (despite the fact that it's just a method, and not a physical object you can definitely destroy), I would think this would be a bit more controversial than it is.

Yes, you're liberating Mars from an oppressive regime. But, the regime is the Earth Defense Force (which doesn't sound too evil) and they're a group that were good guys in the past, so I think that they're somewhat comparable to the US Army, as an army of liberators that have become occupiers, and have to use increasingly drastic measures to keep the terrorists from taking over the country. The game could have explored this in any number of ways, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen, having seen the last twist just now, which dodges the issue entirely.

Though you are a hero, you (somewhat) covertly go around and blow stuff up and tear down buildings, all in the efforts of getting the occupying military force to leave your planet! That's terrorism, just as the American Revolution was, and it shows that terrorism in and of itself does not equal Muslim extremists killing babies for no good reason. If only the makers of the game would actually try to bring up the issue themselves!

Six Days in Fallujah

Konami has announced that they are publishing Six Days in Fallujah, an FPS set in the Second Battle of Fallujah in the (currently ongoing) Iraq War. This has stirred up a bit of a storm, mostly from those who have been in Iraq before, as we all only attempt to guess what the game will be like. Some are worried it will treat the subject too trivially, or glorify it, or even make it more of a documentary, perhaps showing white phosphorous attacks or something. We don't know what it will be like, but it has the potential to be the most important game, um, ever.

If this game does choose the documentary route, it will be a huge deal. Few people actually know the details of the Second Battle of Fallujah, and most would probably be surprised that the Iraq War even has named battles. A portrayal of this conflict with some of the nastier bits left in would actually mean video games would have surpassed other media in spreading awareness like this. I'm sure there are films that have brought this sort of thing to light, but not that showed nationwide in theaters. This is a popular, large publisher video game, and even if it doesn't reach Call of Duty 4 numbers, it will still be widely played and recognized.

With my extremely optimistic hopes for this game, it could be considered the turning point for games as mainstream art, video games' "Birth of a Nation", sort of. But, then again, it will probably just be Call of Duty 4 with similarly inane writing and no real relevance beyond the real setting, which will be totally just to get attention on news networks.

19-Year-Old Protests Against CoD Animal Cruelty

When you take the "desensitize" argument to its logical and extreme conclusion, you get this. The pointlessly small, monochromatic, and fuzzy screenshot above comes from the Lowell Sun's report on a 19-year-old girl's animal cruelty protest over the game Call of Duty: World at War. Because you shoot attack dogs in the game, clearly she should "fear young kids playing these games and thinking it's all right to do this -- because they do it in a video game." In my experience, kids love dogs more than they love people. And, the dogs in the game will literally rip your throat out if you don't shoot them first. And, dogs are varied enough that we can tell between attack dogs and the 19-year-olds Pomeranians (apparently named Winnie the Pooh and Fluffy, no joke). But, kids are killing dogs in the game, so they'll just feel so compelled to get a gun and shoot the nearest dog that they start itching for it, literally unable to sleep at night without shooting innocent dogs.

This is almost a parody of the "violence desensitization" argument. No, young and impressionable kids aren't going to shoot dogs because they had to in Call of Duty. It's not even an "object of the game" as the 19-year-old says, but rather, as Kotaku says, part of the overall goal of staying alive for as long as you can. So, will kids think they have to shoot every dog they see to stay alive? No, because there are also friendly dogs in the game that tear the Nazis' (or Japanese/Americans') throats out (and kids aren't ridiculously stupid sub-human beings. At least not all the time.)

I Don't Feel Comfortable Talking about "RapeLay"

You'll notice that there's no picture at the top of this article, and I'm not going to talk about this game for long, but rather provide links for anyone who actually wants to know about it. But, as a blog about controversial games, this has to be the worst I've heard of yet.

If you remember Sexy Beach 2, from the old X-Play episodes or wherever, this is from the same developers, and it's called RapeLay. It is a Japanese hentai, rape simulator game. Not even just a game that involves rape, oh no. It is a rape simulator. Your character goes through the implausible motions of publicly raping three different Japanese girls, with lots of nasty details that you can read at Something Awful instead of here.

Anyway, the reason this is in the news right now, is because Amazon.com was in trouble for selling it (through a private seller named hentaiguy). They recently kicked the game and hentaiguy off the website, unsurprisingly. If that game got into the United States in any real numbers, that would allow congressmen to be talking about something that isn't Custer's Revenge (1982) when they say "murder, violence, and even rape" are in today's video games.

This Freakin' "Islam is the Light" Thing

Alright, you can read here if you want at GamePolitics, but basically the story is that a mom thought she heard a baby in the DS game Baby Pals say "Islam is the light." I have several numbered points to make about this bovine fecal matter:

1. "Islam is the light" isn't even a real phrase that anyone uses. A quick Google search for the phrase reveals that this story is apparently the only place anyone has thought to say it. I've never heard of this as a real phrase within the Muslim world.

2. It's freakin' baby talk. If you're thinking ahead of time, as you most certainly will be, you can think it sounds like "Islam is the light". That doesn't mean that some company got a baby to say that specifically, as they most certainly wouldn't have tried to coach the baby to say something specific at all.

3. This represents a dangerous and hurtful paranoia in America. "Islam" does not mean "evil" or "terrorist" or even "bad." I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, so whatever.

4. What a stupid evil plot. Yes, all of us doll and video game manufacturers (or perhaps just the sound effects company they licensed it from) are so evil, cunning, and Muslim, that we're going to make people think they're hearing baby talk, when in fact they're hearing praise of the Muslim religion! Then they'll... Be entirely unaffected until they complain about it and boycott the products. Bwa ha ha ha ha!

So, yeah, it's stupid, but you already knew that. For a slightly more entertaining version of the story, you can check out Penny Arcade as well.

The Case of The You Testament

Now, this is a site about controversial games, and if this game were mass-market at all, this would be huge news. The You Testament is a game in which you play as a lost-to-history thirteenth disciple of Jesus, and you can be anything from white male to black female. Jesus also teaches you about meditation, and harnessing the power of chakra. The game also apparently ends with you hanging on a cross for hours, waiting to die (I haven't been able to play it this far). Thankfully, the only people who know about the game are basically open-minded and fair about it.

The game is the final work of the independent solo game developer Mat Dickie, who has been creating games entirely on his own of fairly large scope for years. A quick look at his other games after playing The You Testament will show you that this game uses bits and pieces of all of his other games, including some really interesting wrestling sims. This does give an odd feel to The You Testament that you don't find often, because it is 3D and nearly polished enough to appear to be a well produced game, but certain elements appear weak because you are actually playing the design of one man. The eyes don't really look right, you'll find almost immediately, and Jerusalem is oddly chaotic and weird, but that makes sense when again you consider that one guy had to program the AI, graphics, sound, story, and everything else.

Anyway, it's really a very interesting look at the Jesus story from the perspective of another man at the time, and I'm very glad that there aren't legislators out there citing this as destructive to our children or anything. I'm just very glad this sort of thing exists in gaming and sad to see such a productive game designer quit his post.

Controversial Classics: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

Well, the big release season is basically over this year. Sure, there's still Prince of Persia, but that's about it until 2009, and I don't think it's going to garner a whole lot of controversy just because it says "fer-tile" a lot. That's why I'm going to look at some older games that may have been overlooked by the media watchdogs in the past. These are some sleeper controversies, starting with Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3.

So, it's a JRPG. There are also some little Japanese dating game elements, but nothing nearly as naughty as some awful ones that are out there. That's not the problem. The problem is, the protagonists are, at first blush, teens who gain powers when they shoot themselves in the head. Yeah. Let that sink in before I explain why that's, of course, not at all reasonable for me to say. Go ahead. I'll wait. Write a letter to your congressman demanding that it be banned. Say that it gives you points for committing suicide, and they'll jump on it. Do it.

The thing is, the "gun" they shoot themselves with is an "evoker". There are other, real guns inside the game as well, so the characters aren't actually shooting themselves, it just really looks like it. This GameTrailers video should show you what's going on at about 0:22. So yeah, it's kind of a bust. Of course, these "facts" here don't stop our politicians from saying that Grand Theft Auto gives you points for killing hookers and raping people, so I think this could really make it into the spotlight. That is, if it weren't more than a year old and not at all mainstream.

EDIT: Oh, and Persona 4 is out now. I can't believe I didn't realize that before I wrote this.

The Interesting Case of Black College Football Experience

GamePolitics brought back to the fore an interesting case in the annals of controversial games today, Black College Football Experience. To quickly summarize, the game is a college football game featuring historically black conferences, but it also features rhythm game bits when the marching bands come on at halftime, even using the Rock Band drum kit. The game was previously published almost nowhere in 2007, but is apparently nearing an Xbox 360 release.

From knowing as little as we do about the game, it can be easy to think "Why do black people need their own game?" as many commenters have said. I felt this way at first, but this is a game featuring the region's historically black conferences of colleges that were established to fix education inequality between the races. Highlighting a specific region of football isn't objectionable, but the game also has "Black" right there in the title, which does come off as fairly exclusive.

Also, this game isn't just about the football. The much larger emphasis on marching bands and dancing gives a different cultural perspective that is welcome, I think. The point is, this isn't taking the white/Hispanic/Asian/anybody else out of normal college football and making a game out of it. This is highlighting a real world slice of college football that is majority black and has some different features, like more prominent and active marching bands.

Still, this is an interesting case for people to look at, and comment wars seem to happen on every site the game is mentioned on. For more details on the game, here's their site.

The State of the Union: Gaming 'Round the World

America isn't everything, even though Super Tuesday is tomorrow, but other countries have gaming controversies as well. Some of them have it even worse off, despite the fact there's no Thompson, Clinton, Romney, or Lieberman in their country. I'll quickly summarize the state of gaming in several other countries recently.


China: As GamePolitics reported today on a very old blog post from Henry Jenkins of MIT, China doesn't care so much as the United States about violence in video games so much as "gaming addiction". The notion of gaming addiction is supposed to loosen traditional family and community bonds and decrease productivity, and Jenkins argues that it benefits China to build the concept of an addiction to gaming. This would provide justification for China's increasingly restrictive policies on the internet and video games. China has banned all sorts of things online and modified a few others: China has banned children from internet cafes, imposed time restrictions on visiting those cafes, banned certain games for showing China didn't always belong to the current regime, and forced Google to support the great firewall. As capitalist of a communist country China is, they're still really restrictive about the internet, putting them at about the worst civilized country to be in if you're a gamer.

Germany: Germany has a strange couple of rulings on games as well. First of all, they don't allow any swastikas in their games or anything that's "not art", which is way more trouble than it's worth, but not very important. In a very strange decision, Half-Life was forced to tone the entire game down by a lot, resulting in robots instead of marines, no blood, vanishing enemies, and other nonsense.

Greece: Alright, this is the worst country for a gamer in the world, assuming you're not in a third-world country. In 2002, Greece right-out outlawed gaming. Nothing from solitaire to Brain Age could be played in Greece, even by foreigners just arriving in the nation. There was obviously a tremendous outcry, and the ban was reduced to only apply to internet cafes in December 2003. That was a close one.

Finland: Another recent story from GamePolitics, the Finnish Christian Democrats are asking for an extra screening process on video games to be doubly sure they don't have any hidden bad things. The Finnish Games and Multimedia Association was quick to say that the process is really rather unnecessary and would simply hurt the industry by giving Finnish gamers a reason to buy their games from elsewhere while they face delays and possible censorship, sidestepping the extra process. I wouldn't expect this to go anywhere especially, it's just a party considering the motion, but I'm not exactly up on my Finnish politics, either.

South Korea: Take China's information, and tone it down a lot. South Korea has banned several of the usual violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, but also has a slight issue with games involving the two Koreas. Mercenaries, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have all been banned due to either showing North and South Korea at war or destroying Korean land in the games.