Any Anti-Videogame News Is News
A friend pointed out this article to me:

Combat Simulation at Duluth Air Show Criticized

Apparently, "some" are calling for a boycott of the air show because there's an army recruiting videogame - specifically, America's Army - Virtual Army Experience - available for visitors age 17 and over.

While "some" are referred to in the article, only one person is sited. Maybe her husband agrees with her, making it plural. But I didn't see any confirmation of what is hinted at being an organized protest. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But if I were to guess, I'd say this is simply an artifact of the fact that in any significant sampling size of a population, you are going to get some fringe element of nut-jobs. I mean, aren't there certain folks who ALWAYS protest air shows for various reasons (particularly military air-shows, which are major recruitment drives)?

The interesting thing to me is that the news media continues to manufacture controversy around video games. Now, to be fair, there have also been plenty of positive articles about games in the media too. But news media thrives on shocking and frightening its audience, which is right now only barely a generation ahead of the kids raised on Nintendo who would laugh at this kind of thing.

Mocking may be warranted.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:03 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
We Threw a Class Action Lawsuit, But Nobody Came!
Remember the Hot Coffee case? The big scandal that rocked the games biz? The one that causes the latest uproar that has given politicians and madmen ammunition to snipe at the games industry for years? The New York Times reports that the settlement has been reached for all of the meager 2,676 people (out of millions who bought the game) who joined the class action lawsuit. The total defense fees, including settlement but not including charitable contributions (which the company may have been planning on making anyway), amounted to around $30,000.

That makes it a lot harder for the lawyers to recoup the $1.3 million in expenses they are claiming, doesn't it?

My take on this? Okay, Hot Coffee was a major screw-up, no question about it. And I really have to question the maturity and taste of the people involved in it who actually implemented it and ... until a point ... thought it was a good idea.

But I think this case indicates that for the game's intended audience, it was largely a non-issue. The people who were really freaked out over it were non-gamers who neither played it nor bought it for someone in their family to play. And it seems like a sizeable subset of the people in the class-action thought that the graphic violence that was part of the core gameplay was okay for their underage little darlings... they just objected to the possibility that said angel could log into the Internet, bypass all the porn that's there, and instead download and install a patch that would enable them to see non-anatomically correct sex.

To be honest, I'd have expected a lot more people to have participated in the class action lawsuit, too. But really, the issue itself isn't really over leaving content in that would change the rating from M to AO (I mean, that's a difference of ONE YEAR... meaning 17-year-olds couldn't buy it for themselves). It's really about people - parents and family, mainly - not understanding or caring what the ratings mean, and thus making uninformed decisions, in spite of the best efforts of the ESRB and retailers to make this clear. And I think that's really only something that will be resolved with time and persistence.

Hat Tip to Game Politics for the scoop.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:05 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Buy GTA IV For Your Kid - Go To Jail
At least in New Zealand, if you buy Grand Theft Auto IV for your kid because you personally don't feel it's any worse than what they are exposed to at school or on TV, you could potentially face three months in jail.

New Zealand: Illegal for Parents to Buy GTA IV for Kids

At least here in the U.S., no similar law has come close to passing Constitutional muster. And even in New Zealand, the law under which the Office of Film and Literature Classification has couched its opinion has never been enforced.

Ah, unenforced / unenforceable laws.

I find that, over the last couple of years, I've grown to realize that this kind of political backlash is inevitable against anything that becomes mainstream in the younger generation and threatens cultural change. What control the older generation has, it uses to lash out to preserve the status quo. Yes, even the same "baby boomer" generation that was so anti-establishment and revolutionary in the 60's and early 70's. My generation is starting to do the same, and the kids after us will probably have the same knee-jerk reactions against whatever comes next that changes THEIR children's and grand-children's world.

Well, gamers and game makers: Keep fighting the good fight. Time is on our side... the longer we can hold out and keep games free in the face of mounting opposition and stupid regulation determined to marginalize games as nothing but children's entertainment, the closer we get to victory.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:27 AM (Permalink) 10 comments links to this post

 
Piracy & DRM: Grab a Shovel
As a guy who's livelihood depends upon IP rights, I naturally have a beef with piracy. I realize that, as with any crime, it's never going to go away, though I want to be supportive of measures that reduce it. But the latest round of "anti-piracy" news has left me feeling pretty ... I dunno... defeated? Embarrassed? Frustrated?

Pretty much all of the above.

Sony BMG Gets Caught Pirating
Sony BMG - the guys who thought rootkitting your $1600 computer was okay in the name of protecting their $16 CD - got caught pirating.

Now, okay, this wasn't a formal company policy, I'm sure, and Sony BMG as an organization had no clue that this was going on. Hey, I've been there. We once had a manager pocket the funds to purchase a site license for a software and install a pirated copy instead. We only found out after he had been let go and we contacted the software vendor for product support. Woops! And yeah, the last time I heard about said former manager, he WAS wearing an orange jumpsuit.

But I believe this little "black eye" underscores the fact that piracy is everywhere, and demonstrates that draconian measures sometimes supported by certain media groups and the politicians they fund are completely unwarranted.

Support Piracy, Support Terrorism!
Stiffer laws might be in order, but in a recent speech U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey linked piracy with terrorism. Now this doesn't get me quite so up-in-arms as it does some bloggers, as this was simply part of a side-point in a speech and wasn't trying to present some iron-clad case. But I'm personally getting a little tired of using the "fight against terrorism!" excuse for everything, from illegal demands to turn over customer records to treating baby formula as a weapon by airport security. I don't think I'm the only one. Claiming that software piracy helps terrorism just weakens the whole argument, in my opinion. Does it happen? I'd not be surprised. Guess what? Terrorists can and will make money any which way they can, legal or illegal.

Protection of IP rights is vital to the U.S. economy and interests enough all by itself without saddling it with lame anti-terrorism propaganda, 'k?

Don't Sell This Game, Or Pirates Might Play It For Free!
Apparently, DRM development is delaying Atari's new RPG expansion. Mysteries of Westgate, the new module for Neverwinter Nights 2, is being held back for apparently no other reason than the development of a custom DRM solution. There's been sufficient commentary on this issue by both Shamus Young and Scorpia (among many others, I'm sure) that I don't know if I have much to add.

I wonder if Atari isn't actually working on some kind of competitor for Steam (or at least an attempt to make Atari independent from Steam), and using MoG as bait. We'll have to see.

Dealing With Piracy
Now, actual profiting from trading of pirated software should be treated more harshly, I agree. Jail time and lawsuits to cover damages to the IP holders? Sure. And I personally believe that the laws protecting IP rights need to be revised, and enforcement does need to be stepped up.

But in general I feel that copyright infringement - as a legal violation - has less in common with grand theft and more in common with speeding on the freeway. Nearly everybody does it or acknowledges that It Is Done, and that it is a Bad Thing if it gets excessive. But the threat of fines, points against licenses, and raised insurance premiums - combined with (usually) sufficient spot-checked enforcement - keeps things reasonable.

The goal isn't to stop piracy or punish pirates. The goal is - or should be - to allow creators of intellectual property to profit appropriately from creating these things, so that they might continue to do so, for the benefit of all.

Labels: Biz, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Videogames Made Me a Criminal!
A national British newspaper is bribing criminals to attribute blame for their actions on video games. Offering "hundreds of pounds to the right person," they are soliciting people to "Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back."

Unfortunately, the ad was taken out last week, so it is not an April Fool's joke. Bruce On Games had the scoop.

In the spirit of April Fool's Day, I thought I'd offer my own story. Hopefully they'll get a bajillion of these:


VIDEO GAME MADE ME THE "TRAMPOLINE BANDIT"
I found the arcade game "Mappy" in a pizza restaurant in Maryland. The game appeared innocent and cute - as a mouse police officer, you'd chase criminal cats around a house filled with trampolines, stopping them from stealing tons of expensive electronics equipment and artwork as you and they bounced from floor to floor.

But the thing was - you were a mouse chasing cats. What's wrong with this picture? Inevitably, the cats would catch you, and your career as mouse-cop would come to an end. The cats always won in the end. After hours of playing the game, it all became clear to me. The cops were mice, chumps that always lost. The bad guys were the predators, and always won in the end.

After spending hours and hours trying to beat the second level of the game, something snapped. I couldn't distinguish reality from the lurid fantasy of the game, so great were its graphics and compellingly realistic my actions. The game trained me, over the hours, to look for things worth stealing, teaching me lessons from the cats' actions.

The next thing I know, I found myself at a sporting goods store, buying one of those exercise trampolines. I told myself hat it was just for exercise, but even then I knew subconsciously that there was no reason anybody to have an exercise trampoline except to commit trampoline-crimes. I'll tell you straight up, these devices, like videogames, should be banned outright. Don't fall for the "trampolines don't steal stereos, people steal stereos" crap the trampoline-industry-funded lobby groups try to use as smokescreen for the real issues.

It wasn't a week later that I found myself inside an apartment in my own neighborhood when the owners were gone, jumping on the trampoline and stealing all of their paintings, TVs, and stereos. I admit, it was a little harder to do than I had been taught by the videogame, but the seeds had been planted. After I got away with the apartment, I found myself breaking in and jumping and robbing two other houses, and finally a department store.

It was the department store that ended my life of crime. I thought it was a terrible mistake, but in the end I call myself fortunate I was stopped when I did. It was too hard to jump to the second floor in a single jump, but since they had several of the exercise trampolines in stock, I assembled them on-site and arranged them carefully on the non-running escalator steps using stacks of catalogs to level them out. I tried to jump back down the line of trampolines while carrying a Sony Betamax player (this was the early 80's, after all), when one of the stacks of catalogs collapsed, sending me flying off the tramp over the side of the escalator, landing on a cosmetics cabinet. Neither the cabinet not the betamax survived the ordeal, and I broke my leg and lost consciousness due to the overwhelming oder caused by spilled contents of six broken perfume bottles.

When I came to, I was surrounded by paramedics and police officers. I realized then that the police officers didn't resemble mice at all, and I'd been living a lie. During the next two years in juvenile detention, I wasn't allowed to play videogames. The habit was broken, and the smell of perfume finally faded. I have no doubt in my mind that the creators of this videogame purposely built it to warp young minds to cause crime and mayhem.

I have now served my time and my community to make up for my misdeeds. I only wish these video game creators could be forced to do the same...

Labels: Politics, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:51 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
How Piracy Can Break An Industry - A Case Study
GameProducer.net puts things on the line about the impact of piracy in Brazil, in an article full of sobering anecdotes, statistics, and links. In a nutshell - it's gotten so bad most game companies have given up trying to sell anything there. The vicious cycle is mature there, where people are forced to pirate because they have no legal means to obtain products. It's ugly.

Local game developers, according to the article, "have only four options to survive as developers: subscription-based online games, mobile gaming, advergaming or exporting."

After the rest of the world follows in Brazil's footsteps, the fourth option will be unviable for everyone. Then what? That's the multi-billion-dollar question.

As a gamer, I personally do not relish the idea of having to either pay a monthly fee to play my favorite game (or having the game become unavailable after it gets "too old"), nor do I want to have to endure a bombardment of marketing messages in order to play a game.

There has got to be a better solution.

But as the article indicates, waiting for the government to jump in and help is useless. I think that applies as well to any other government as Brazil. Nobody's going to wave a magic wand to make the problem go away. This one is firmly gonna be in the hands of the game makers and the customers to solve.

GameProducer.net: How Piracy Can Break An Industry - The Brazilian Case


(Vaguely) related shallow thoughts:
* The Real Cost of Piracy?
* A Better Way to Fight Piracy?
* A Pirate Story
* PC Game Publishers: Please Hurt Me Some More!

Labels: Biz, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:00 PM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Utah Gives Disney Video Games the Red Carpet Treatment
It's so nice when my state actually shows that they have a clue:

Utah Wooing Disney Game Biz with Huge Tax Incentive

Though it's no wonder my Day Job has started making people sign a non-compete (though they granted me an exception for Rampant Games, a requirement for me signing on in the first place.)

Labels: Biz, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:25 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Fox News Launching Multi-Front War Against Games
So ... let's see... in the last month Fox News has claimed:

* Mass Effect is a fully interactive, customizeable orgy.

* Video games can trigger flashbacks in injured veterans and cause them to freak out

* Video games are destroying the environment. Yeah, there's been a decrease in outdoor activities while video games have increased in prominence. There must be a causal relationship. During the same time, there's also been a steep decrease in violent crimes. But no, no, there's certainly no correlation!

Lest we think it's only a problem with Fox News here in the U.S., we've got a pop-psychologist TV shrink in the UK effectively writing legislation to restrict video games. And a Times Online article calls the XBox "Crack For Kids."

You know, it's very, very hard to convince myself that this isn't just "old media" lashing out desperately to defend itself against competing new media.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:47 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Out of the Mouth of Babes: A Thirteen-Year Old On Games and Violence
Well, in this case, a very well-spoken thirteen-year-old girl, writing a very articulate post about video games and violence and how it affects her:

Violent Video Games and Kids

I've known the author since she was a newborn, and she's one of my daughter's best friends, so I really enjoyed reading her perspective on the issue. It also amazes me that these kids (who I still have a mental image of which is about six years out of date) can form rational opinions.

And maybe that's the problem too many of our legislators have.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:44 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Cooper Lawrence Admits Mistake Over Mass Effect Sex Scene
According to an interview Friday with the New York Times (link likely to get archived in the near future), Cooper Lawrence - the "expert opinion" used by Fox News Live Desk to speak out against the console RPG Mass Effect, treating it as pornography, has admitted that she was mistaken and misinformed. She states:

"I recognize that I misspoke. I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke. Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit."

Score one for the truth.

And score one for Ms. Lawrence. My opinion of her just shot up several points. Yes, she was stupid to have not done her research on the subject before the show. She let herself be manipulated by Fox News. But at least she took two and a half hours of time to research the subject after the fact, and then made the effort to admit her mistake, publicize her apology, and to do what she could to correct it.

Okay, so she's not said anything yet about her misunderstanding about the game-playing demographic (where she stated her opinion as fact that parents don't play video games, only their children... another blatantly false bit of misinformation that she should have done her research on first). Or anything about her claims that some U of Maryland study proves boys can't tell the difference between video games and reality - what the heck was that about? And maybe her actions were motivated by legions of gamers trashing her book ratings on Amazon.com, in their own non-violent version of mob justice (which I think everyone understood would eventually blow over).

I still think it took both guts and class for her to come out with this apology and correction, and I commend her for it.

Fox News Live Desk, for its part, so far seems to be just waiting for things to blow over. Requests for correction have gone unanswered, though they have invited a representative from Electronic Arts to appear on the show. Considering that they have proven that they will just make up allegations out of the blue and hurl them at people, and then cut them off when they try to deny whatever line of garbage Fox News had invented, I can understand EA being a little bit hesitant to accept the invitation.

I gotta say, it's entertaining to speculate as to what might happen next. And I doubt sales of Mass Effect were noticeably damaged by the rumor of it having pornographic content.

So - why was Fox News so eager to trash one of the best-selling games of the season? Are games just such a convenient, politically powerless target for a random sensationalist piece? Or do they actually feel threatened by this rapidly maturing medium, and are actively looking for opportunities to manipulate public opinion against what they perceive as competition? Or a little of both?

And will gamers reciprocate and retract their attacks against her book?

UPDATE: For further hilarity - when it is obvious to Jack Thompson that the whole thing is a load of manure, saying "This contrived controversy is absolutely ridiculous," you know Fox News has really topped itself.


A tip o' the hat to GamePolitics.com and Kotaku for this update.

Labels: Politics, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:34 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
By Fox News Standards, Top Gun Was Porn
This was all over the web over the last day or so. On Monday, Fox News Live Desk effectively fell for what I'd consider a hoax. The ol' telephone game has taken place, and a short love scene from Mass Effect, regarded by everyone who's actually played the game as more tasteful than what you'd see in many rated "R" movies, has been trumped up by certain ill-informed non-gaming voices into being some gigantic porn simulator.

Fox News took that at face value, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, and produced a pretty embarrassingly bad pretense at journalism. And they roped poor Geoff Keighley into it.

Unfortunately, it looks like Geoff was suckered into the classic "Have Your Quit Beating Your Wife?" question. While he thought the question was about the love scene in question in a rated "M" game, the REAL question they were asking was, "Why do you think this interactive porn game is appropriate for 13-year-old boys?"

So he tried to play a defensive game, the sole person in the segment actually concerned with getting facts straight, while everyone else was laughing off his question as to whether or not they actually played the game and knew what the hell they were talking about.

I haven't played Mass Effect, so I probably don't know any better than the talking heads what I'm talking about. But I have seen the scene in question, which left almost everything to the imagination - quite to the contrary of MacCallum's allegation - and was less steamy and not much more graphic than the love scene in the movie Top Gun. Now unless there's some hidden Hot Coffee-esque secret version that I've missed (and, knowing gamers, if there was we would have heard about it by now in graphic detail...), Fox News was really just making crap up. At a certain point, people, what you call an "exaggeration" is indeed a lie.

And then Cooper Lawrence chimed in with some 1981-era demographic knowledge by claiming that even grown-ups were buying it, they certainly weren't playing it. Right. And before you know it, TV shows are going to show couples sleeping in the same bed and lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it.

Now, I'm not going to defend the appropriateness of the love scene in Mass Effect. As far as I know, it's a gratuitous bit thrown in to stir up exactly this kind of controversy (and to send sales through the roof). But the incredibly shoddy journalism and double standards shown by Fox News Live Desk is just begging to be mocked.

And my sympathy goes out to Geoff Keighley. The battle was unwinnable. Maybe he would have scored more points if he went on the offensive and said, "Are you both on DRUGS? What game are you talking about here? Where can I buy this porn simulator you guys are referring to, because I've played all through Mass Effect and all I got was one two-minute PG-13-ish love scene!" But he might not be invited back, and there are undoubtedly less stupid battles to be fought in the future.

I guess with the writer's strike still ongoing, people are desperate for fiction on TV.

UPDATE (7/24): EA (Now owner of Bioware) has sent a letter to Fox News requesting that they retract their blatant falsehoods, explaining very clearly exactly where they were ... shall we charitably say, "misinformed?"

Story At Kotaku

The silly thing about this is that the Live Desk segment, while increasing the bizarre (but, I hope, increasingly marginal and impotent) anti-videogame hysteria amongst similarly misinformed viewers, probably helped give Mass Effect's sales a nice boost. A public retraction would probably do the same. So EA, Bioware, and Microsoft are probably enjoying a win / win scenario.

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:07 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Guest Post: Artistic Merit... And Manhunt 2
Manhunt 2 has been in the news quite a bit the last few months - which to me smacks suspiciously of very deliberate marketing, and manipulating the ESRB and other ratings bodies as unwitting pawns in their attempt to milk controversy for publicity. And of course, Rockstar (owned by Take Two) - the creators of Manhunt 2, and the equally controversial Grand Theft Auto series - are falling upon a First Amendment / Freedom of Artistic Expression defense. The latest controversy surrounds a player-created hack, vaguely reminiscent of the "Hot Coffee" scandal, which reveals material that had earned it a harsher "Adults Only" rating before it was edited. Today's guest blog comes from JenaRey, a game reviewer, member of the Rampant Games community here, and the author of the Eeps, Meeps, and Ipes gaming blog. She talks about Manhunt 2 specifically, but also more generally about games as art. So here's her lovely rant...

For the past several months there has been a lot of debate and concern over the rating of Manhunt 2, Take Two’s hyper violent horror game. Initial ratings put the game at an AO, which lead to pouting and editing to earn the M rating. The game was released on Halloween, appropriate for a horror flick, and immediately hacks were found that removed filters which had been put in place to create the afore mentioned editing. Now…I could go off on the rating process. Or I could tirade about Take Two’s policies, and the suspicion that they knew gamers were smart enough to hack such a simple edit. But I’m going with the subject of Artistic Merit and sticking to your guns.

Artistic Merit is defined as: an English language term that is used in relation to cultural products when referring to the judgment of their perceived quality or value as works of art. (Definition gleefully yoinked from Wikipedia and online dictionary.) So it’s the value put on something as a work of art. Long has the debate raged over whether video games could be considered works of art or only works of entertainment due to their interactive nature. I personally have no argument that video games are art. Many of them are beautiful in storyline and graphical execution and all represent a creative effort on the part of their creators. I think art can entertain, regardless of form, so it’s not a problem for games to also be entertainment. Argument solved…truth in the middle of the extremes.

From Plato the point of art is what he calls Theios phobos or sacred fear. Art should move something within both the viewer and the artist and it will not always be comfortable. This is why a vast number of artistic works through the centuries have been censored so that they were available to a small audience that was prepared for this sacred fear instead of visiting it on the uninitiated or uninterested. In video games this is done through ratings which provide guidance for consumers and parents as to the nature of the art involved and grounds by which to make informed decisions.

Whether the governing bodies should get involved as far as distribution is a subject that I’m still on the fence about because I understand the intention, but also believe that we should be trusted as people and parents as to the type of art that we bring into out homes and what sacred fear we choose to experience and to allow our children to experience. However, because of distribution restrictions that come with a given rating there is always grumbling in the ranks when a given artistic endeavor is given a rating of AO no matter whether it is an appropriate guideline or not. Well, guess what boys and girls… distribution restrictions aren’t anything new either. The nice thing about the current political climate is that artists that are seen as having gone beyond the ‘safe’ boundaries of social acceptance aren’t beheaded and all copies of their work aren’t put to the fire. They’re just stamped with a restriction and then companies are given the option whether to publish or not.

If you are taking a stance that your work should stand as art then let it stand and suck it up. Stick to your guns. If you’re going to choose to edit, then that is your new stance and the obligation is to create art at that level. It’s juvenile to only half do the job while sticking your tongue out at the establishment - like a child asked to clean his or her room that shoves everything under the bed with full intent of pulling it back out once the adult has left (Particularly when the same child has already done this once before).

So all in all…if Manhunt 2 is about art, then it should be unedited and appropriately rated. Those with interest will find their way through appropriate channels to experience their chosen sacred fear, and the stance of sticking to what you’ve imagined is much more respectable than grudgingly changing, leaving in hacks and whining. If you’re just in it for the cash…well…I hear casual games are doing well. Match three for Take Two?

~J

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:56 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Pliers And Nuts Don't Mix (In An M-Rated Game)
So Rockstar made some changes to Manhunt 2 in order to make the game appropriate for 17-year-olds, and not just 18-year-olds. As reported by IGN: "When we first wrote about Manhunt 2, we referenced a particularly nasty death sequence, in which Danny could use a pair of pliers to literally rip the testicles off a hunter. That murder has been completed [sic] removed from the updated build of the game. Not a big deal for us, as it only amounts to one kill out of dozens."

You know, almost every time I play a game I think, "Wow, you know what would REALLY improve this game? If you could rip off some guy's nuts with a pair of pliers!"

Halo. Zelda. Dance Dance Revolution. Tetris. These games could all use some graphic castration-with-blunt-tools sequences! It's a frickin' gold mine, here, and the ESRB is just being a bunch of meanies about it!

Seriously though: All of us game developers make jokes around the office of what sort of horrendous content we should put into whatever game we're working on. The more tired you are, the funnier the jokes become. And hey, I appreciate a little bit of morbid / black humor as much as the next guy. But at what point did the this thing go from being a bad joke to a "good idea" in the minds of Rockstar developers? Possibly the same point that doing soft-core sex mini-games in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas seemed like a good idea. After one too many beers, I'd guess. Or hits on the ol' crack pipe they undoubtedly pass around over there.

And the really sad thing is, it's probably going to sell at least an order of magnitude more copies than some far more deserving indie titles, like Depths of Peril (which has been a little like crack here at Rampant Games, I'm afraid...)


(Vaguely) related violence performed with fingernail clippers:
* Manhunt 2 Banned In U.K., Rated A.O. in U.S.
* Why Are There So Many Violent Videogames?
* Oblivion: The Flower-Picking Simulator
* Free Adventure Game: Emily Enough
.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Jamie Fristrom on Why Games Are Important
Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games - a man who has had a long and illustrious career stretching back to the old Magic Candle series - has posted a substantial article on why games are important.

His conclusion? Games help you learn about learning. They rarely teach you anything about the subject matter they supposedly represent. A first person shooter will - if anything - teach you horrible habits with respect to using guns in combat, and Guitar Hero won't teach you much about being a rock star. But they will teach you lessons in what he calls "meta-learning." Learning how to learn.

His full article can be found here:

Why Are Games Important? One of Many Reasons

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:54 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Establishing the Legitimacy of Games
Brian "Psychochild" Green of Near Death Studios has published an outstanding article on RPGVault entitled "Taking Games Seriously."

In it, he discusses three types of "legitimacy" for artistic forms, how they impact freedom of expression, and how they are achieved. He takes it a step further and explains why you, the gamer, should care. Tired of games that are mere clones and sequels? That is because while games have achieved financial legitimacy, they have not yet achieved cultural or artistic legitimacy.

He also notes that while the legitimacy of computer and video games as an art form is inevitable and automatic, there are things that can be done to hasten it.

Comparing this to Roger Ebert's little rant from earlier this week was very refreshing.

Check it out here:

RPG Vault Soapbox - Taking Games Seriously



(Vaguely) related ill-advised illegitimate literature:
* Ebert Vs. Barker On "Are Games Art?"
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Do Games Matter?
* How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
* Game Design: Fixing Interactive Storytelling

Join the Discussion Already In Progress on Games As Art in the Forum!

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:07 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Ebert vs. Barker on "Are Games Art?"
Roger Ebert, the notorious film critic who went on record many moons ago as stating that "video games are not art," has written an article countering arguments by famed horror novelist Clive Barker to the contrary.

To his credit, Ebert at least amends his statement by saying, "games cannot be high art."

Whatever the heck that is supposed to mean. I checked Wikipedia, and it seems that high art is pretty much restricted to "traditional" art forms, only recently allowing cinema into the old boys club.

Personally, I think he does have a point about interactivity, but I don't think that in any way prevents games from being art. Sharing the artistic effort with the audience definitely makes for a different experience from traditional media. But face it --- how many games REALLY put that much of the story in the player's control, anyway? I think games suffer from being overly linear in their presentation as it is, borrowing too much from traditional forms of artistic expression.

And how much cinema and literature are really "high art," anyway? Everybody likes to invoke Shakespeare, but that was four centuries ago! How about Stephen Kings' novels and the Harry Potter books - are those "high art?" I don't know, but I suspect that those will be artifacts of this generation's culture that will endure much, much longer than the words of pretentious critics of the day.

Anyway, you can check out Ebert's defense here:

Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker


(Vaguely) related nonsensical revelations:
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Do Games Matter?
* How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
* Game Design: Fixing Interactive Storytelling

Read or Post Comments on the Forum

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 AM (Permalink) links to this post

 
Iranian Game Developers Make Anti-U.S. FPS
So some Iranians made an FPS game with U.S. and Israeli troops as the bad guys called, "Rescue the Nuke Scientist."

Big deal.

Okay, the propaganda angle does annoy. I haven't played the game, and as far as I know it could be very offensive to me. But every single communications medium in history has been used for propaganda purposes. Including games. I think this just validates the contention that games must be protected free speech.

I don't relish the idea of yet one more medium that portrays Americans as "The Enemy" in the Middle East, but who else would you expect them to use to portray as the ultra-powerful enemy? And after all, we Americans have been blowing up our own military forces in our own games for years. Whether it was because they were sent there to "pacify" the Black Mesa facility in Half Life I, or we were locked in aerial combat in various flight sims, nuking ol' Abe Lincoln in Civilization or Rise of Nations, or we find ourselves on opposing side in multiplayer Battlefield games - we take pretty much equal glee in blowing up our own forces as anybody else's. We just need to take a look at our allies' uniforms (or the color of their names) before leading the base, and we're ready to rock.

Is that any different from, say, enjoying the wild naval adventures of Alexander Kent's Richard Bolitho novels, fighting on the "opposite" side of the revolutionary war (from an American point of view)? I think its usually a healthy thing to take a look at events and views from opposing perspectives.

Which brings us to another interesting point. Mohammad Taqi Fakhrian is quoted as saying that this game was created as a "defense against the enemy's cultural onslaught." What does this mean? Are Iranian kids playing Rainbow Six Las Vegas, Gears of War, and America's Army right now (while watching downloaded episodes of The Sopranos, Lost, and The Family Guy)? Is this an attempt by Iranian traditionalists to stop the "Western Drift" of the younger generations? Do they see video games as a means of reinforcing official state dogma? Or is it simply an angry reaction to being portrayed as bad guys in modern military games like Kuma\War?

And then there's the more important question that is undoubtedly on many gamers minds right now: Is this game actually any good?

Probably not, based on the gameplay footage (can U.S. soldiers walk through walls and pillars now? Cool!). That is more likely to earn gamer ire than political offensiveness.


Hat Tip to GamePolitics.com for the link!

(Vaguely) related vacant expressions
* Why Battlefield 2 Sucks
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* I Would Have Made Deathmatch Maps of My School, Too!
* Games As Editorial Content
* Do Games Matter?

Wanna Talk About It? Visit the Forum!

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:41 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Manhunt 2 Banned in the U.K., Receives AO Rating in the U.S.
Manhunt 2 - a game about violent murder - has been effectively banned in the U.K. - because the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) has refused to assign it a legally mandated rating. I guess it has joined such lofty ranks as the movie "A Clockwork Orange" and the song, "Relax", by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

It has also received the dreaded "AO" (Adults Only) rating from the ESRB here in the United States, which is the kiss of death for sales.

My personal opinion? Bravo ESRB, shame on the BBFC. Of course, the initials "BBFC" was originally for "British Board of Film Censors," so maybe they've gone back to their roots with videogames.

Take 2 Interactive and Rockstar Games continue to push the boundaries of taste (okay, in my opinion, they blow way past the boundaries) with respect to violent content. So they should expect to have to deal with the AO rating. In fact, I am sure they anticipated the likelihood. I don't think they are going to release under the "AO" rating for artistic reasons... I think they, like Running With Scissors, are all about controversy, not art. I expect they'll go back and change the game to make it better conform to "M" rating guidelines. Or try to appeal.

But the BBFC's refusal to rate it... I dunno. It smacks of a knee-jerk reaction to media hysteria. A UK murder case was blamed by the media on the first game, in spite of the murderer having never played it, and police claiming no connection in any way. Now, I personally wouldn't really want to play the game. But it's not my job to do so (well, at least I hope not to be assigned that particular task...)

Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding the game will probably only serve to increase its sales and popularity.

How many more years do we have to endure the politicizing of games? Too many more, I'm afraid...


(Vaguely) related rumblings and grumblings:
*I Would Have Made Deathmatch Maps of My School, Too
* BYU Study Links Bible Passages to Aggression
* Why Are There So Many Violent Video Games?
* Australian Book-Burning (er, Game-Banning)

Oh, and a forum discussion on the subject (Thanks Brickman):

Labels: Mainstream Games, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:26 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Games As Editorial Content
Yesterday, Persuasive Games announced (via the Water Cooler Games blog) that their games will begin being featured in the New York Times online edition as editorial content. Effectively filling a similar niche as political cartoons. Their first title, Food Import Folly (subscription required to play the game, but that link has a description and screenshots), concerns the extremely limited FDA inspection of food imports. The website notes that the number of food import shipments increased from 2 million to 9 million over the last decade, but the FDA resources and personnel has remained roughly constant.

You may recall my evangelizing of one of Persuasive Games' previous titles, "Airport Security." I think this is an important step for games --- a new area where game-makers can and should explore. It is another potential market, albeit a small one. I don't know if the online games will help the TimesSelect subscription rates, but I'm pleased to see them embracing more of the potential of being an online news service. But more importantly, this is another small step for computer games in demonstrating their power - and importance - as a medium of communication.

And for rapid development buffs - Food Import Folly was created in Flash in only one week.

Congratulations to Persuasive Games!


(Vaguely) Related Attempts At Being Political...
* Airport Security Parody Game
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Do Games Matter?

Read or Post Comments on the Forum

Labels: Indie Evangelism, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:19 AM (Permalink) links to this post

 
I Would Have Made Deathmatch Maps Of My School, Too
Last week, 17-year-old Paul Hwang was investigated by the police and kicked out of school for the crime of being a creative and talented gamer. He's a victim of the paranoia surrounding the recent Virginia Tech tragedy. He had created a Counterstike map of his own school for he and his buddies to play in, and some concerned parents - undoubtably swayed by FUD campaigns by alarmists profiteering from tragedy, alerted the authorities.

It might have been bad timing on Hwang's part, as he probably finished the map before the VT incident took place. But as he seemed to match the media-image profile of the Virginia Tech killer (who was of asian heritage, but not - as too many believe - a gamer). The police launched an investigation, reportedly grasped at a few straws to justify themselves by labeling him a "terrorist threat", but finding nothing worthy of a criminal case, they recommended disciplinary action on the part of others. You know, something that doesn't require the burden of proof of an actual criminal case.

The school board took up the flag, acting in their best Minority Report fashion, and proactive punished the imagined "pre-crime" by kicking Hwang out of school, transferring him to an "alternative education facility" (part of the Fort Bend County Juvenile Justice Program), and prohibited from attending his own graduation. While some board-members later expressed misgivings that they'd overreacted, others patted themselves on the back for a job well done, and covered their butts by saying that they were only doing their job in this dangerous day and age.

Now I get to don my old geezer hat and say, "You know, when I was a high school student, I never made Counterstrike maps of MY school." The main reason was because we had dinky little 8-bit machines that didn't have enough horsepower or colors to even display a decent-resolution JPEG image of the school, let alone anything resembling a first-person shooter like Counterstrike.

Instead, back in my teenaged era, what was going to ruin society and turn out an entire generation of bloodthirsty, psychotic, devil-worshippers was called "Dungeons and Dragons." And you'd better believe there were battles in D&D taking place between adventurers and monsters bearing the names of principals and least-favorite teachers through imaginary facsimiles of our schools!

The key difference between then and now was that what we were doing wasn't so photorealistically OBVIOUS to low-imagination, paranoid authority figures. Well, that, and the game hadn't hit the mainstream consciousness hard enough to become the default scapegoat for all of society's ills. Many enlightened individuals vociferously predicted the horrors that would befall western civilization should this game, like rock music, continue unchecked. But there were still some people who naively ignoring the D&D connection with certain tragedies, and instead focusing on such embarassingly old-fashioned influences like drug addiction and long histories of mental illness.

Frankly, if we'd had games like Counterstrike back then, you'd better believe I'd have been making maps of my school, my house, and the local mall. And sharing them with my friends. Instead, the closest I came was making a "Space Invaders" game where - with my limited art skills - the invaders all resembled a particularly strict instructor (who I eventually came to like, incidentally). But I had a slight thrill exploding bald-headed aliens for about fifteen minutes after I finished the game. Oh, hey, and I also had a bunch of mostly ornamental weapons in my room too - out in plain sight, after a little parental rebellion streak one evening. Perhaps not unlike Paul Hwang's collection of ornamental knives found by the police in their investigation.

Was I actually an emotional powderkeg ready to blow at any minute? I really don't think so. In spite of my geek tendencies, I think I was a relatively happy, well-adjusted kid. I had good friends, good parents, and even grades that didn't suck. And let's get real here... who DIDN'T fantasize about blowing up their school at some point?

When you are a teenager, you are in this transition stage where kids are craving empowerment, but aren't quite responsible enough (or emotionally grounded enough) to handle it. I know that I would have little bits of rebellion to seize some level of empowerment - some measure of control over my destiny in a world where I felt largely subject to the whims of adults. The draw to videogames (and D&D) was a feeling of that empowerment in a make-believe world. In a D&D game, I could play a calm, cool, always-in-control hero to help counter feelings of being very much the opposite in the real world. I was allowed to pretend to be an idealized version of myself.

Of all the settings a teenager would want to portray himself as the competent superhero (or supervillain, as the case may be) , it is only natural that his high school would be at the top of the list. Where else would they feel in more need of empowerment - even if only in an imaginary alternate reality? High school, as much as I enjoyed it at times, was one of the most threatening, self-esteem-crushing experiences I can recall. It was a nasty social Lord of the Flies experiment, complete with violence (though never the lethal kind - at least in my school - though there were always rumors). For the average middle-class American youth not coming from an abusive or dangerous home life, the halls of their high school is probably where most of their personal demons live.

And in Paul Hwang's case, he was able to apply his talents not only in a way to help him cope with this (and make a pretty decent-looking level, I should add), but also apply in a way that would be enjoyed, appreciated, and respected by his peers.

But now we're on the verge of criminalizing that sort of thing in our hysteria.

Maybe I'm projecting too much. I don't know Paul Hwang from Adam. I haven't heard anything yet to suggest that he's anything other than a decent, pretty normal kid who got caught in a witch-hunt. I wish him well, and I hope this incident doesn't discourage him or other young aspiring game designers and mod-makers from exercising their talents.

I'm just glad I didn't have to grow up in their world.


(Vaguely) related yammerings of an obviously corrupted and yet naive adult...
* Teenager and Dungeons & Dragons
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Why Are There So Many Violent Videogames?
* Rules of Combat According to FPS Games

Read Or Post Comments On the Forum

Labels: Politics, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 PM (Permalink) links to this post

 
Cashing In On Tragedy
Capitalism is a great thing, but it doesn't dictate morality. And you really have to question the morality of a scumbag like Jack Thompson who evidently hears the cash register ring as soon as hears of a tragedy like yesterday's Virginia Tech horror, and then immediately goes on the air explaining (indirectly, of course) why the deaths of dozens of people means he ought to be paid hundreds of millions in cash... angling once again for a class-action lawsuit on the most ludicrous of premises.

Just in case you thought ambulance-chasing couldn't get any lower.


(And yes, I do recognize the hypocrisy of mentioning this on a blog with commercial links, but dang it, I had to say something. Again.)

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:47 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Making Games In A Kinder, Gentler, Politically Sensitive World...
Many Winters Ago, Desslock interviewed Tim Cain (who was one of the founders of Troika, and one of the principle guys responsible for Fallout) about the release of The Temple of Elemental Evil, a turn-based RPG using the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons rules (and based on an ooooold classic module for 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, penned by Gary Gygax himself).

The full text of the interview was never used - only snippets for a PCGamer article. It's now been released on Fallout 3: A Post-Nuclear Blog. It's an oldie, from back when ToEE was first released (four years ago?), but still interesting.

The focus of many of the comments was on the realities of releasing an RPG in a post-ESRB world - the political sensitivities of today, and how different (and how restrictive) they are now as opposed to even as little as a decade ago). I remember all too well where the Avatar (if a male) could get involved in a romantic interest, which could result in a glimpse of a flesh-toned sprite jumping into bed as the screen went dark. And I remember how there were topless females enabled by default in the second Elder Scrolls game (there was an option to turn them off), and while I'm sure it raised a few eyebrows, I don't remember it being a big deal. Nowadays, somebody comes up with a hack to remove the top, and it becomes a big political hooplah.

Once upon a time, Richard Garriott decided to experiment with twisting emotions by putting in monsters with the graphics of children in a room in a dungeon. Wolfenstein 3D was "voluntarily rated PC-13... PC for Profound Carnage!" as a joke about the amount of pixellated blood and guts in the game. Nowadays, its no laughing matter as certain ambulance chasers seek a legal foothold to wipe out the entire industry in a career-climaxing class-action lawsuit over game violence.

Apparently, Troika was dissapointed over removing content in ToEE, but was compelled to do so in order to avoid the "M" rating, which would restrict its audience and its sales.

This included removing children from the game. Because - in a truly interactive game that included violence - there's nothing preventing the player from doing violence to the children. He can do violence to anything else in the game, after all. And if the developers made the children completely invulnerable to damage, a mind-control spell would turn the children into unkillable battle-slaves for the players - an easy way to cheat through the game. They could make the children immune to EVERYTHING (including spells), but then an aggressive act could result in the children ATTACKING the player, and being an unbeatable game-ruining encounter. Or you simply turn the children into little more than props, and remove interactive options from the player entirely around them (as is done in most Japanese console games).

The very fact that a game is a game, and allows the player freedom to choose, and (theoretically) can be different for everyone who plays the game, kinda undermines the whole game rating system idea, doesn't it? Not that it invalidates game ratings... but I think it shows once again that it's merely a tool, a simplified gauge on a much more complicated issue than other media.

An excerpt from the interview:

Desslock: Since you have to account for concerns raised by Publishers; content licensors (WotC); ESRB rating concerns that may affect the availability of games in key distribution chains like WalMart; conversion/localization issues given the stringent requirements of some foreign markets such as Germany; and even civil litigation concerns given the tendency of some individuals and groups to blame criminal acts on violent games — how much do you feel those considerations compromise your creativity, or your ability to create open-ended RPGs?

TC: There’s no question that they do compromise our creativity and reduce our ability to create entirely, open-ended RPG’s. The issue with children is a perfect case in point: our games can either feature no children at all or children that are immune to harm. This means no kidnapped children, no imperiled orphanages, and no possibility for an evil player character to even threaten a child, much less harm one. Since we at Troika enjoy dealing with the gray areas of morality and player choice, such limitations can certainly feel stifling at times.

But, of course, there are a number of very valid reasons why those decisions do in fact need to be made and I think you cited several in your question. As a creative developer we want to ride the bleeding edge and in some cases go well beyond it, but we’re also very aware of the importance of reaching wider audiences with our products. So we understand that sometimes content must be changed.

They also talk about working with Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast, and even with Gary Gygax himself on creating the game. Check it out here:

Desslock Interviews Tim Cain
.

Labels: Game Design, Politics, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:41 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
The Rampant Games Rating System
Courtesy of GamePolitics.com --- apparently a proposed New York Bill will "Provides the Courts the power to confiscate any materials that do not bear a rating and/or label clearly displayed." (Materials referring to video games).

What label? What rating? Brick-and-mortar retailers in New York only, or online storefronts that do business with New York residents as well? I guess we'll wait and see what the actual bill's wording will provide. But most games don't have and can't afford an ESRB rating. There are certainly some FREE, self-proclaimed ratings systems out there. Would those suffice?

Hmmm... maybe we'll have the official "Rampant Games Ratings" (RGR, pronounced "Roger"):

There are only three rating levels in the RGR system:

Rated P: Parental Review Recommended!
It's probably okay for your kids, but sheesh --- do you really trust your kid's safety (and - ahem - education) to some strange media provider and their dumb rating system?

Rated W: We Really Mean It - Parental Review Recommended!
This game is probably okay for a teenager or mature pre-teen, but dang it, Mom and Dad, please freaking pay attention before you give it to your eight-year-old!

Rated Y: You Got Nobody To Blame But Yourself - Parental Review Rcommended!
It's your own business if you think your sixteen-year-old is mature enough to deal with it, but the game is really intended for people who are legally no longer their parent's responsibility.

So there you go. Feel free to use it, at no cost! And worth every penny!

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:05 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
BYU Study Links Bible Passages To Aggression
Apparently, my alma mater, Brigham Young University, conducted a study very similar to one of the studies that linked violent videogames to aggression. In fact, one of the researchers was on the team that did the research most often cited linking real-world aggression with violent videogames. But instead of videogames, they used the Bible as their violent medium of choice.

The findings? Very similar to the videogame studies. Biblical passages about violence and, more specifically, justifying the violence were linked to an increase in aggression.

The story is in today's Deseret Morning News (the same paper that generally took a favorable attitude towards the anti-videogame legislation being promoted by local lawmakers). You can check out the full report here: