GTA’s latest shots in the culture wars
Totally not safe for work.
Not sure what the distinction is between an M and an AO game these days, but one thing seems clear — Rockstar is not hiding stuff on the disc anymore. Presumably if you don’t try to hide it, you can’t be accused of hypocrisy. 🙂
On the one hand, this is clearly puerile and likely counterproductive in that it undermines what by all accounts is a stellar game with a great script and great gameplay. (I say by all accounts because I don’t have it. And I don’t have it because, well, of scenes like this, and my kids).
On the other hand, the industry does need to be able to tackle mature content, and games with this sort of content should be allowed to exist.
I just kind of wish it weren’t so gratuitous.
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Honestly, when I saw the first scene, 2 thoughts crossed my mind: 1) What’s the big deal? 2. This scene, a crowded alley with sexual favors being traded by completely unexotic people, looks excellent. It really looked like it could be a great part of a story, like I was seeing something vibrant that would lead somewhere. But that was the disappointment a minute later. It was the same old GTA with a new skin over it. The player’s existence was just a lot of unrelated events strung together. He’s not seeing women that he shares destructive relationships with, he’s just putting a quarter in a machine and watching a sex animation.
It’s not worth being offended over.
And this is why we can’t have nice things. This is also basically why I won’t get Age of Conan, as I suspect it is doing similar things to be ‘mature’.
Raph; it seems pretty okay all things considered (it’s not bare backed sex is it?), but perhaps that’s the view from over the pond, where it’s a bit of an opposite where some people might post the gratuitous violence and wonder why it didn’t get an equivalent AO rating 😉
Oh, I am not a fan of the gratuitous violence either. 😛
I think the discontinuity and gratuitousness of it (I was going to say gratuity, but that’s not right) complements the nature of the act. I mean, dude, shagging prostitutes in your car is supposed to be gratituous. Why not?
The point isn’t that the content is too gratituous, it’s that the game design isn’t really all that deep when it comes to human relationships. Prostitutes are a theme compromise in that you generally don’t have much interaction with them beyond sex, it’s a cover for the lack of systemic complexity to the game’s AI characters. It would be interested to see a game where befriending prostitutes is an option.
I thought the attitudes/some of the comments of the characters almost sounded like self-parody, but that might just be because I find it pretty ridiculous myself. Whatever floats people’s boats, I guess…
We had games like these in the 1980s… so it’s kinda lame… If it had been original it might have been art, but it isn’t so it aint…
Here’s what I don’t get and I blogged about it as well. ESRB rated M for Mature is essentially equivalent to MPAA rated R. Rockstar brings us GTA IV and Stanley Kubrick brings us Eyes Wide Shut (there’s a million more contemporary examples of movies I know but for some reason this one came to mind.) The former features strippers that never take their clothes off. The latter features voyeuristic multiple partner sex scenes. The former gets politicians all up in a bunch about how our kids are going to die from this. The latter gets a Golden Globe nomination and a host of other awards.
The GTA IV scenes seem gratuitous because the game presents you that kind of freedom, a freedom that movies can’t give you, even though they have tried. (Multiple camera angle DVDs anyone?) The content of the IGN video is no worse than the recent episode of CSI: Miami where the gang has to ask strippers about a crime scene, save the swearing in the GTA scene. The CSI Miami show is rated TV14.
There’s simply no consistency and I’ve tended to believe that the consistency difference has to do with the game industry not tithing to the politicos in the US and abroad, something the MPAA has learned to do many years ago.
Don’t sell the game to children under 17. That’s perfectly fine by me as children under 17 shouldn’t attend R rated movies either. Just remember that the 17 year old you want to restrict from buying the game by legislating a ban can sign up in the US military and die protecting your freedom to restrict his freedom. Funny how all this works, at least in the US.
Re: movie vs computer game:
Arguably, the player character in a game is always the protagonist, is always the hero. In GTA, that ‘hero’ can shoot hookers for fun and profit. The game *rewards* it.
Movies and TV rarely cast the man who hires a prostitute and then shoots her in the head to get his money back as the *hero*.
I think that does make a difference.
Sure but it’s already a 17+ game. That’s where it needs to be along with a good dose of good parenting and it doesn’t get into the hands of children. 17 year olds are by and large adults. If they can die fighting for our freedoms then I think they can handle a video game. Will there be exceptions? Sure. If you follow your interactivity line of thinking, then no games can use adult content because there stands a chance that the player will use the game to act out attrocious acts. GTA IV can be played without engaging in shooting hookers or pedestrians and it’s not like doing these things comes without in-game repercussions. Last I checked, the cops come after you for killing innocents so the game is not totally devoid of morals. It’s cutting edge, edgy, mature content meant for 17+ and it’s clearly labeled as such on the box I’m holding in my hands right now. God help us if the politicians sterilize all that games can be by erradicating games they personally find offensive. We’ll be forced to play Mario Kart/Mario what-ever for years to come. I’m sure Nintendo would love this but as a 35 year old gamer, I’m ready for grown up content even if I have to wade through some bad game content to get to the good content.
Fair enough Raph, heh. Insane amounts of violence for no reason kinda annoys me – recent horror films are meant to be spectacularly bad at this.
It is childish, immature kind of stuff, that most gamers might try once and not bother with again. Patrick is right, it belies the fact that there is no real interactions with NPC’s in the game. Now, if there were repercussions with NPC’s – your girlfriend/boyfriend dumps you, you get a reputation, then we’d be talking! Bring on the True Romance style relationships, the epic arguments and so forth. Faceless prostitutes doing dirty acts doesn’t really make it very deep…
If it was put in stark contrast to a existing relationship, then I think it could easily be part of a larger thriving world of possibilities (of course, the game misses a lot of other important enjoyable activities that could be added). For an adult game to not have such activities where there is a lot of violence is a bit of a strange premise of course, especially since commonly cities do have strip clubs and prostitutes around, despite their dubious legality. In the end, you just have to not bother playing the game (just as I’d not play Barbie games, since I don’t enjoy dress ups and hair games, or poor platformers 😉 ).
Why? Do you really want kids who might be a bit, shall we say, rough around the edges, who go to the same schools as your kids, the same movie theators, the same dances, the same malls, getting a steady diet of this?
As Bartle just pointed out, the numbers are changing. These kinds of influences can grow steadily, and I wonder how he, and you, view social gatherings of youth in another 10 years.
Amaranthar,
I hope you’re only playing devil’s advocate. Otherwise, you seem to be stating that video games have an adverse effect on people.
I’ll save my comments for your answer.
No. But I do think that adults can and should be able to experience it.
You know, I’m a little surprised; not that they did this, but that there wasn’t a ratings board blow up over it. Yes, it’s not something that *should* be getting smacked with censorship because it’s not really any worse than comparable media with 17+ ratings on it, but considering the sorts of things that’ve attracted large amounts of media attention, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a huge blow up over this already. That we’re finding out about this sort of thing via YouTube and not angry tirades from the press is honestly kinda shocking. I’m sure it’ll come later, but they’re usually faster to the punch than this.
I also find it kinda sad that this is about the extent of what we get when we look at “mature” games. We really do need games that deal with mature themes and not just gratuitous imagery.
To the comment about AoC, I can’t really say much, but I think you’ll be more surprised at how tasteful they’ve managed to be. (Not that it’s perfect or anything, just that it’s not at all in GTA’s realm.) They make use of the M rating, but they don’t include stuff just to fit it. There are whores, because it’s bloody *Conan*, but they’re not vending machines for health power ups, they’re actual characters.
Amaranthar wrote:
Raph says no, but me? If I had kids, I’d want them to get a steady diet of reality, not of the fantasy that our overprotective society of puritans wants to give them.
Being “rough around the edges” means being “real” to me. A good friend of mine, who’s also a CEO, is one of those “rough around the edges” guys. If you grew up in a buttoned-down household like I did, merely chatting with him would be enough to shake the very foundation of your sense of propriety.
Your instinctual response would be to hide your identity from public view, whether by tilting your hat, putting on sunglasses, raising your hoodie, or anything else! But then you’d look around and see the other people around simply not paying any attention because they’re familiar with the way people actually behave in the real world.
And, really, what’s all this nonsense about “gratuitous imagery”? Receiving sexual favors from prostitutes is not supposed to be meaningful!
For some reason, this post offended and upset me. I think it’s because I first tried to read as game design commentary when you are really just stating a negative preference.
There’s been some, and I am sure it will grow.
You think that video represents reality?
I have now read a lot of reviews. Most of them don’t even bother mentioning that you can get full-screen & clearly visible blowjobs and clothed intercourse. I think gamers just don’t actually care enough to point it out; it’s seen as just a cute funny sidenote and not relevant to the core gameplay. I think that’s a commentary on several things about gaming culture.
Yeah, it’s interesting how it’s omitted. But then again, most people think it adds little to the game so perhaps isn’t worth mentioning…a film is much shorter, where something like this would be a large part of it, a game however it is both optional and only a tiny tiny part of the gameplay.
I have much greater criticism of game reviews in general then them missing this out. While this is hardly a really justified addition to the game, so are many other things.
Imagine that you have a thousand word review to write. Further imagine that you are writing for a publication read by minors. Other than noting that the game is rated M and has PG-13-shading-into-R depictions of sexual situations what else could you fit in?
And you’re right, the vast majority of gamers don’t care enough to point out the sexual content. Much like the vast majority of tv watchers and movie goers. And in all three cases, I think it is going a bit far to imply that such indifference is a serious moral or aesthetic failing.
You seriously think that stuff is PG-13??
So I end up coming back to this. The stuff I have seen — and mind you, again I reiterate that I have not played the game, though I played GTA3 — is not something I typically see in R-rated movies. I definitely don’t come across it on TV, either.
The question to me isn’t whether it should exist — I have no problem with it existing, and in fact will defend its existence.
I am unsure that it’s actually defensible on the rating grounds. The AO definition is “prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.” I think whether the car scenes are graphic sexual content is a gray area. *shrug*
But what bugs me most of all is that it’s Bad Art. An R rating in a movie would permit showing it — but it’d be contextualized much more, it’d be cut away from, a lot more would be inferred, and so on. Certainly the interactive nature of games means that someone can essentially construct a tawdry non-stop sequence of this, and in a movie, that’d tip over and out of the R rating at some point.
Not having played the game, it’s entirely possible that the fact that you can have dates and girlfriends and all the rest actually makes the context sufficiently deep. I don’t know. But frankly, a large part of the motive for including it in this way seem to just be titillation and thumbing noses at the mainstream media. What in the game’s context demands actually showing the hooker’s head bobbing up and down on your character’s lap, and letting you pan the camera around it? And that’s what feels counterproductive to me.
I guess I wonder, when will we see a serious treatment of sexuality?
My line of thinking had little to do with interactivity; it had mostly to do with pointing out the flaws in a straight tv/game comparison — as Raph points out, movies put context around such things; and I’ll go one further and mention that they’re generally fairly blatant — handing out white and black cowboy hats so you can tell which people it’s safe to root for. (And, let’s be honest, the movie example you gave was also shunned by those sorts who go around shunning things — it just didn’t get as much publicity.)
And, to continue this honesty trend, the sex was at worst eye-roll worthy, to me — obviously put in, not for any gameplay reason or artistic quality, but purely as fodder for Jack Thompson, AKA the Rockstar Marketing Rep. If this doesn’t get them on the evening news, nothing will!
I’m still bothered that in the moral realm* created by the designers, killing a hooker gets you points/cash/whatever. I’m not talking about the interactivity and freedom that ALLOWS you to kill hookers or the like, I’m talking about the game going “ding!” when you kill them and your wallet getting a little thicker. I realize arbitrary murder is a large part of the game mechanics, but … well, I guess that’s why I’ve never been interested in the GTA line of games.
On the flip side, I enjoyed the occasional massacre in Scrapland — but in Scrapland, it’s contextualized as part of the overarching theme of an empty, meaningless world brought from lack of permanent death.
( *The moral realms of game worlds are intriguing, simply because they are often very easily definable: Anything that gives you points is ‘good’, anything that gives you negative points is ‘bad’. Anything the game tells you to do is ‘good’. Anything that gets you killed is ‘bad’. How’s that for a black-and-white morality?)
Raph wrote:
I’ve been to Las Vegas. Jokes aside, I think what you’re criticizing—a representation of meaningless sex—is part of the reality we live in. The GTA “free world” games are really just big dollhouses. What you saw in the video isn’t much different than when kids, male and female alike, force Barbie and Ken to make out or do the nasty behind closed doors. Like movies, games reflect society of the day.
You asked, “You think that video represents reality?” Yes, I think that video represents reality, but like all models, the nitty-gritty details are missing.
The next step up from meaningless sex play with a prostitute is Eastern Promises.
That scene was disturbing to me as well though not nearly as jarring as the bath house scene. *shiver* I’ve been playing GTA for the past two days. The reviews and my real life experience with the game couldn’t be more different. Multiplayer is a tun of fun; no sex involved. The first dozen missions involve a single visit to a strip club and I don’t even have a weapon yet. Lot’s of drive so and so over here and outrun the cops over there.
I’m disappointed that Michelle is pissed off at Niko and won’t date him for some reason I can’t figure out, which is very much like real life. I don’t know what I did wrong. All Niko did was take her on a date twice, once bowling and once to a bar. I guess Niko getting a little drunk at the bar upset her so maybe she didn’t like my driving when Niko took her home. Niko was a gentleman though and didn’t try his luck with her and she gets mad at him. Women! It’s no wonder Roman and Niko had to visit a strip club where relationships are simple and straight forward. As a side note, it would be a better game design if Michelle found out more about what Niko was doing and played the role of the woman-attracted-to-bad-guy-because-she-thinks-she-can-change-him. There’s so much more that could be had from this simple relationship in game but I am not done playing so I also do not know how far that rabbit hole goes.
In the end notice how its not all about hookers, sex and then running them over with your car to get your money back. As other comments here have pointed out, that’s such a small part of the game. If you focus on it, you’ll miss out on what is unfolding to be a pretty good exercise in video game story telling. The get your money back part is also the media putting context into a game mechanic where it doesn’t need to be. Killing anyone, not just hookers, gets you their cash and weapons so its a much more basic gameplay element that gives rise to contextual emergent gameplay like get your money back from a hooker after using her. Juvenile yes but that’s teh thing about emergent gameplay, you don’t have as much control over the final gameplay element as you might like.
I’ll defend “mature” content to the end because the Wii-ification of all games would be a bad thing in my view as it would stifle the growth of what is ulimately proving to be a pretty recession proof industry. Not all rated R movies are quality art but they at least get to exist without the politicos rampaging through the streets crying the sky is falling. Leave the good art/bad art stuff to the consumers/award shows, they’ll say what is what with their wallets/votes.
I can’t speak to “serious”, but I think the playful approach of The Sims 2 towards “woo-hoo” captures the actual dynamics of a sexual relationship better than any of the darker titles out there. As both the target audience and creators of games mature and diversify beyond young males, I expect that superficial “bullets and hos” treatments will lose traction against more sophisticated approaches.
All right, it’s R. I was considering the scene as it stands alone, without a player swooping the camera in for the dirtiest angle possible and without placing it in the greater context of the whole game. But that’s not how movie ratings work.
Sure, it’s Bad Art. I’d like it to be Good Art too. But it is an incredibly young art form. So young that at this point I still think it is unfair to put any weight at all on the fact that it is Bad Art. All games are Bad Art. The few exceptions should be celebrated, studied and emulated. The rest won’t merit a footnote.
Frankly, I’m more offended by the dating and girlfriend simulation than I am by the prostitution. The prostitution is tawdry, mechanical, offensive to the morals of many and a means to an end. I think it’s really pretty spot on. On the other hand, the dating simulation is horrifying. In the cutscenes and scripted dialogs Niko expresses loneliness, distance and a certain charm. The dating gameplay has none of that. It’s just the usual do the right things at the right time and eventually you score enough relationship points to unlock a prize. Is Niko happier in a good relationship? Sadder in a bad one? More engaged with the world? More or less actualized or effective in his other personal relationships? So far as I have played: no, no, no.
You can’t have a serious treatment of sexuality until you have a serious treatment of relationships and emotion. We’re not even there yet. Cutscenes and scripted events aside. I don’ think they count. They’re just movie/tv techniques and they’ve been done.
Imagine a GTA game with a Sims-like need system grafted onto the main and supporting characters. I think that’s one of the directions things could go to get us closer to Good Art.
Derek, don’t use the phrase “Wii-ification of all games” if you want to be taken seriously. Please. The only reason why there aren’t very many M rated games on the Wii is because devs choose not to make them, not because the Wii inherently doesn’t support them. But the ones that are there were well recieved enough. For instance, the RE4 remake sold very well, and I think Umbrella Chronicles did relatively well too, despite the gameplay limitations. There were Scarface and Godfather ports to the Wii as well, and one of them at least was often reviewed as being better than the other versions in certain respects. And No More Heroes, while not selling phenomenally is still very much an M rated game and it’s exclusive to the platform. If you want to say Nintendo-ificiation, that’s one thing, but while Nintendo attempts to maintain a family friendly line up in their own games, they definitely do not force it on their console. The Wii itself does nothing to make games more “kiddy”. That’s all up to third party devs. But you know, I think a lot of the reason why there’s less interest in making M rated games on the Wii is because the type of M rated games that we’re getting are mostly focused on flash and style and not on substance, and the Wii isn’t a good platform for that. It just doesn’t have the graphical horsepower to pull off the other end of that, which is ultra-sharp realistic visuals.
Video games do affect people, that affect can be negative. 17 Year olds are still rather wet cement when it comes to behavioral conditioning. Just because the designer intended a certain purpose or meaning to an aspect of gameplay (or claims it had no purpose beyond amusing filler) doesn’t mean that the player/user won’t come up with a different one of their own. I guess in the debate over pandering for money vs. responsible design, the panderers won.
I’ll retract the Wii comment. I own one and love it for its E for everyone games that are safe for my kids. The point I was making here is more a comment of Nintendo’s stance on everything gaming versus the rest of the industry. Nintendo is very pro-kid content as a culture so it’s easy to draw the comment in the statement above. Nintendo takes the whole argument against mature content to the next logical level and that scares me. All console manufacturers ban AO rated games from their consoles. Nintendo doesn’t ban but highly discourages M rated games for its console. I’m hoping and praying that Nintendo’s attitude does not prevail throughout the industry. Sure there are third party games that are M rated for the Wii but 95% of the library is just like the DS, rated E or T.
I guess I am glad GTA comes out for the 360 and PS3 even if it is Bad Art. It at least let’s me know that “mature” content is still a viable market. I used Wii-ification as a symbol for Nintendo’s stance on gaming and the chilling effect their massively popular platform could have on future game development. You even said so yourself that the developers are choosing to not make M rated games for the Wii. Let’s hope that choice remains isolated to the Wii. The comment was a bit harsh but it’s not far from the truth. I should have used Nintendo-ification to make my point as you suggested.
I really don’t think we really want to start a conversation about the treatment of sexuality in mass media. I think that’s a way, way, *way* bigger topic than this here GTA4 thing.
But, having said that, it’s almost never taken seriously anywhere, and asking when it will be is kinda like asking when we’ll start seeing some classier erotica being made.
Neither do I, one group’s preferences don’t deserve 100% of content development time. I do, however, hope Nintendo stays true to their audience rather than tossing them aside for a ‘more lucrative’ investment (which isn’t really more lucrative when you stop looking at potential audience size and divide that number by offerings catered to them).
Why should it remain isolated to a specific platform? Not having AO or M games is just as valid of a branding identity as having a full selection or even focusing on them exclusively. This applies to the platformers as well as the studios. I don’t see anyone complaining that XYZ, inc. making all children’s educational games should be so narrow minded in their content offerings.
I’m taking a cue from Raph and being very gadfly-ish, today. I’d accept the young art exemption if this weren’t the 4th or so implementation of this same mechanic in the franchise. In fact, all that seems to have been changed with each iteration is more graphic visuals. We went from inane chatter followed by the car bumping a few times to first person view blow jobs. The basic purpose of the whole mechanic is to recieve a buff (get your mind out of the gutter!). If they’re still doing this as of the 4th installment, they don’t get to whine about the backlash, anymore. At this point, because I’m jaded, I’m going with the assumption that it gets put into every new title in the franchise because its instant free marketing.
I don’t think they even discourage games rated M at all, Derek. In fact I’m almost certain that they don’t really care as long as it doesn’t hit AO. They’re never going to personally make a game with an M rating on it, because that’s not what they do, but this isn’t the SNES era anymore where they had ridiculous controls on what sort of content could and couldn’t hit their consoles. That burned them, and they learned from it. It’s the developer perception of the market for Nintendo consoles that’s the problem, not Nintendo itself (A perception, like most other studio head perceptions of the Wii, that is patently false). Because Nintendo’s stance of gaming is *hardly* chilling… Nintendo’s stance on gaming is simply this: Everyone should play games! And so they make games that have wide appeal, because that’s what best suits that philosophy, especially since the third parties fill in the M rated stuff for those niche markets better than they could. They’ve gone on the record many times as saying that they envision the Wii as a system where any type of gamer will find something that they’d like. That includes M games. It’s just not what Nintendo is good at though, so you won’t see much of any First Party effort there.
Again, I honestly think that one of the biggest reasons why it’ll be slow for devs of M rated games to move over is because they don’t have the graphical horsepower to make it flashy enough, and that’s what they’re all about. But if there were only the Wii, those games would still be showing up. And they’d still be selling. Because the Wii is not a threat to anything except the isolationism of the gaming elite. The market for M rated games isn’t going to go away, and it’s still going to be profitable. It’s just not going to be all that’s profitable.
I mean, Raph’s done some blog posts on how the number of games would likely diminish to a degree there, because there are other, cheaper options, but that’s already happening due to rising dev costs. The number of really big AAA games seems to get smaller and smaller for any given set of years (looking at a single year is probably not representative, especially when there’s a generation shift) as we move along. And there’s increasingly less innovation in each title because risk is bad when you’ve got the amount of money on the line that these things are now costing. At least this way the entire industry doesn’t collapse as the AAA games get harder and harder to make. You might end up having to fight for TV time more though :p
@Peter, meh, there’s plenty of classy erotica. We’ve even gotten some movies that handle it in a very serious fashion while still being rather (or extremely in some cases) explicit. Shortbus (file that under extremely) for instance.
But yes, there’s a LOT of silly too, it’s just gaming has none of the classy stuff at all. Yet.
… sorry for the triple post, but as a side note: I just realized how absolutely disturbing the title of this post was if you take it in a certain way. O_o
Obligatory heresy: games are not art. Games are more than art. They’re games.
Having never had sex with a prostitute, I would speculate that it would be about as equally unfulfilling as watching it happen in GTA4. For this reason, I am glad they included this feature into the game. Watching this scene doesn’t make me want to hop in my car and go pay someone for a handjob. If anything I think it discourages it due to the pointlessness of it all. And I would expect a similar reaction from a 17 year old, after the initial giggling of course. There is nothing sexy or exciting about it at all.
It’s media. I’d compare the idea of “game atoms” to “media atoms”. Bottom line, sensory input is involved. While folks are always welcome to agree or disagree with a message, a message is being delivered. The claim could be raised that this sensory input is being given without an intended message. However, the reciever will in nearly all cases apply a meaning to the given input or, if unable to determine a meaning, still insist one must exist.
To me, without the extra dose of volatile the subject #1 automatically brings, I’d just compare this like the difference between your average sit-com and a fine stand-up comedian. One involves the user passively absorbing content with almost no depth or realistic application, and in many cases just poor values. The other must master the ability to reciprocate with their audience and through only the media of speech and clever dialect communicate deep and often multiple ideas. They also understand human behavior and know the precise moments to urge throughts just on the periphery of the conciousness to get derailed with a sense of timing.
I’m sure the game is a thrill, played a few previous installments, but I don’t think there’s enough there for me to bite. Not a console owner anymore, anyways, haha!!! :9
Eolirin (#36) said,
QFT.
Also see Quills, Alexander, and Babel.
When will we get a game (or any pop art) that treats sexuality seriously? Well… first of all, there’s about 500 different views of what would constitute a “serious treatment of sexuality.” Many religions express clear rules against sex outside of marriage. Much popular culture expresses clear pointers towards tons of sex outside of marriage. Many religions have taboos against showing nudity and/or sex acts. Many artists, filmmakers, etc. have reasons to want to show nudity/sex outside of straight titillation.
So… if we’re to treat sex seriously, it means, first off, taking a clear stand on what the point of the treatment is. If it’s educational, then what are you educating towards? An enjoyment of sex? A look at the various neuroses that can accompany it? And are we talking about sex, per se, or relationships?
My point is that no matter what sex act(s) you depict, and how you depict them, someone will accuse you of pornography, because the mere depiction of them, no matter how tame, will piss somebody off. And if the acts depicted themselves are against someone’s moral code, you fail again.
GTAIV (which I’ve just started playing) is urban fantasy. The violence and crime in it are exaggerated and without consequence… as is the case in most games. We (gamers) take it almost for granted that we can kill, kill, kill… feel veins in our teeth… eat burnt, black flesh… and it’s all part of the game. Hell, maybe those space invader ships were humans trying to land a civilian population, and the gun at the bottom (you) was an alien defender.
I’m always amazed when people want to take fantasy sex so much more seriously than fantasy violence. In part, I think it’s because fantasy sex is almost always, to some degree, made up partly of real sex. When you watch a sexual act, it can be argued that you are engaging in a sexual act. Violence, however, is harder to argue that way; I’m not doing myself any violence (by my standards) when I rip through hordes of zombies or Tauren.
As far as the difference between this particular game and other mainstream media… go back and watch the Godfather movies or Scarface or Seven or Silence of the Lambs. Even though they don’t *show* some of the worst stuff they depict, they clearly portray some pretty heinous stuff. In the case of the Godfather and Scarface, the murdering scum are, in fact, the heroes, from beginning to end. Anti-heroes, yes… but clearly the protagonists.
Is Rockstar doing this to get free publicity? Perhaps. I don’t think they need to, at this point, but what the heck; I’m in advertising. I’ll buy that it’s deliberate.
Two last points. One, as someone above said, this is a little thing in a long, long game. If you play the main story and side stuff, I’m hearing that it could be 40 hours of gameplay, even with no multiplayer. If you queued up 60 one-minute hooker episodes, you’d end up with 1/40th of the content being gratuitous, lame sex. In a 2-hour film, that would work out to 3 minutes. I can name 20 R-rated movies off the top of my head that have more than 3 minutes of grossly stupid, sociologically alarming sex in them.
Last… this *is* a game. Which means that you can choose to tap the hooker, kill her, or leave her alone. As a kind of Rorschach Test, that makes it interesting, doesn’t it? Don’t you learn something about yourself (or others) in this situation? In a movie, I may have a reaction to a sex scene, but I sure as hell can’t decide, “Hmmm… I wish Tom would boink Nicole a few more times.”
Choice is one of the main tools in the medium. A choice to be evil, juvenile, stupid, creepy, useless is… well, a choice.
Andy Havens wrote:
I prefer to see Rockstar as one of the studios (although Rockstar is technically several studios rolled under a single label) dedicated to pushing the bounds of what’s acceptable in games. Despite all the flack people give them, Rockstar is undoubtedly one of the key figures in the movement to get people to take games seriously.
@Andy, yeah, no matter what you do with sex, someone will indeed treat you as a pornographer, just like no matter what you do with a game, someone will still think you’re the devil. People still demonize rock and roll in certain circles ffs. But that’s not the point. Taking something seriously in this case doesn’t really require any careful deliberation, it requires only that it’s connected to reality. It’s the lack of connection to the human condition that makes it not serious, it’s the lack of consequence that makes it hollow. The point isn’t that this is a tiny part of a larger game, it’s that in more an expression of the fact that the game, and most other games really, *don’t* take mature themes seriously, they simply have them cause they’re all edgy. No one here is for banning it, or is saying that Rockstar shouldn’t be able to put it in the game, it’s more that there’s a wish that things could, perhaps, rise above the level that they seem trapped in. Consequence, emotional connection, and realistic behavior are kinda key in portraying those sometimes serious themes in the way they deserve. GTA has never really had much of that.
And choice only matters if there’s contrast. With the hookers there’s no real consequence to shooting them (cops are too easy to avoid, that doesn’t count), so even within the context of the game, there’s nothing much to be gained. The hookers are little more than vending machines; choosing to or not to smash the digital vending machine open after getting my soda doesn’t tell me much about anything. The hooker NPC’s “life” was meaningless, shooting it or not is also meaningless. It’s too far divorced from being real to matter. It’s what we do when it matters, what we do when we have to make hard decisions and not trivial ones, that really tells us about ourselves.
@Morgan, if they’re trying to get people to take games *seriously* they’re going about it all wrong. Sophistication and not cheap thrills are vitally necessary for that… and Rockstar’s rarely provided any of the former, no matter how far they push the latter. They do about as much to make people take games seriously as splatter-punk does to make people take movies seriously, or as much as tabloids help people take the newspapers seriously. Pushing boundaries is nice and all, but you have to have a *reason* or it’s just pushing for the sake of seeing a reaction from the other end. Which is fine really, but it’s not helpful to furthering “the cause” or actually improving the state of things any. They’re not heroes. Their name is really fitting actually, they basically act like rock stars, at least toward the public, with all the excess and childishness that goes along with that stereotype. Certainly, as a *gamer* I don’t take them, or their games, seriously at all.
I disagree with you entirely. You see, you post on this blog. You’re not the average Joe who couldn’t tell the difference between World of Warcraft and Twister. You’re familiar with the terminology, the art and science behind games, and the business. You have the capacity to be critical. Other people don’t. They see games as toys for tots, another thing to watch on the boob tube, and trivial in the overall scheme of things.
Other people don’t see games as advanced interactive simulation technology that facilitates learning through complex scientific, mathematical, and philosophical modelling. Other people don’t think the lessons of games have real-world applications. But when they see the press reporting that such and such game allows people to play out erotic or homicidal fantasies, they start to think about the subject more.
Those people become conflicted. They’re now uncertain about their prior beliefs: that games are just another thing to stop kids from running around the house screaming their heads off or tugging at their parents’ shoulders every second during a casual stroll down the mall. They wonder. They become curious. They might jump to conclusions, but not everyone is as arrogant and closed-minded as Jack Thompson. So now they’re aware that games can deal with serious topics. They can have a serious impact on not just kids, but on society as well. Games are important. Games should no longer be taken lightly.
As producers of interactive entertainment, it’s our duty to take that awareness, and shape and mold that awareness into something positive. It’s our duty to make sure that the momentum doesn’t die down. Rockstar is brilliant at keeping everyone on their toes. The people that help Rockstar do what they do are heroes. My heroes, at least.
Oh, I almost forgot. I know some rock stars who would take offense to that description.
@Eolirin, Michael,
That actually is part of my point. There are Good Art games right now, too, entire studios you can point to and say “There It Is”.
As the old saying goes, 90% of everything is crap. Mass media? For every artistic film there’s a Big Momma’s House 3. For every Quills, Alexander and Babel there’s a poorly shot bargain DVD in an adult store and a furry website dedicated to the most poorly thought out and poorly drawn kinks. And games? Well, not far different, is it?
@Morgan, I said stereotypical for a reason. I wasn’t trying to be fair to rock stars. 😛
But my greater point was that Splatterpunk horror movies are also great at saying “We can make films that are “Mature”!” but they’re *still* not taken seriously when you start talking about dramas. Sure, you can get people to see that, okay games aren’t just for little kids, but they’re also not for *real* adults. Pandering towards immaturity (yes, it’s immaturity, even if they’re playing with mature themes) in the ways that Rockstar does *doesn’t* help when you want them to be taken *seriously*. It just means that you don’t think of them as for being appropriate for little kids. But dispelling the concept that games are only for small children doesn’t make people take them more seriously, it simply makes them not want their children to get at them. Splatterpunk doesn’t make people think “damn movies can really tell you something important that’s relevant!”, and really, they shouldn’t. It’s not about that, and Rockstar and GTA are not about that either. They’re there to pander to the more base entertainment goals of their target market, not to be relevant.
Because if you can think of a single common Joe type person who’s going to look at the stuff that GTA talks about and then turn around and go “Yeah, you know what, games are relevant, games can tell me about *my* life, games really do have artistic merit”, then I’m going to call you delusional. If anything, it’s Nintendo that’s been really driving home that games are not just fantasy that has nothing to do with you, the common man. Rockstar’s been pushing away from that, not towards it. But perhaps we’re using the term “take games seriously” to mean very very different things. Under my definiton, where people actually *respect* the medium, Rockstar hurts more than helps, but if all you want is for people to see games as not just being for little kids, I guess they really are doing a lot.
The concept of “real adults” is silly. People act as they always have. As we grow, we accrue more data with which to give our actions context, even if that data is corrupt. Nothing really changes about what we say or do. What changes is our interpretation of those behaviors.
Gee, I wonder why they’d think certain games are inappropriate for their children. I wonder if the rationale has something to do with, oh, them becoming aware that games can have serious themes…
Do you know anyone who works at Rockstar? I know, and have worked with, several.
You’re making the leap from awareness to sales, which is what I told you not to do. Changing attitudes is a difficult process. Simply because one becomes aware of something does not mean that one immediately buys into something. As I said, we have to act on the awareness that Rockstar generates. Awareness alone does not produce results. Awareness without action is pointless.
Steven Spielberg vs. George Lucas vs. Quentin Tarantino vs. Uwe Boll. There are many shades of gray, of seriousness, and of respect.
@Peter,
Please do some pointing then. I’ve been missing out it’d seem. I mean, there’s Pathologic, which seems like it might actually qualify, but I can’t find much else really. And I put Pathologic there because the artistic merits of the game actually benefit from *being* a game, rather than suffering on in spite of that fact. That it does this by being almost entirely unplayable is secondary. The game is supposed to be bleak, the characters are supposed to be feeling desperation and hopeless, and so the mechanics make it so that the player feels that too. Sadly, it means that almost no one is going to bother playing through it, since the gameplay is acutally kinda painful, but there you go. And there’s some indie game stuff too, but as long as it stays in that court, the medium as a whole won’t mature.
Most stuff I see ends up being stuff that would’ve been stronger artistically if it were in another medium (almost every RPG/Adventure game I’ve played) – as an aside, that doesn’t mean it would’ve been more engaging or entertaining, merely that the artistic parts and the gameplay were at odds with each other or at least didn’t help each other at all; the messages and themes of Xenogears don’t benefit from the hours spent playing the combat game, and the Secret of Monkey Island’s themes about coming of age don’t really benefit from the puzzles – and the stuff that doesn’t usually doesn’t have much of a message or point beyond providing entertainment (stuff ranging from the Mario games to Team Fortress 2). I know that there’s always going to be a lot of stuff that doesn’t attempt to raise the bar, it’s just that unlike other mediums, I really *can’t* point at all that much in gaming that I’d consider high elevation into art, even if I can point at lots of stuff that’s really entertaining. And yeah, the medium is still very new, and there’s a lot of growth that needs to happen, and this is typical of almost all new mediums, and I’m not trying to fault gaming here, but we’re not there yet. There’s almost no balance and there needs to be eventually. I really think there will be, but there isn’t right now.
I also want to apologize if I’m being overly snarky lately. I’m a little grumpy for some reason.
@Morgan,
You can say it’s as silly as you want, people still buy into the concept of maturity. GTA isn’t it.
I think, though perhaps I did not express this clearly, that I was talking about public perception of the *organization* that is Rockstar, deliberately attempting to avoid the individual. This is more a matter of marketing and subject matter than it is about individual behavior within the company. I’m sure there are lots of really good people there, but games like GTA and Manhunt are catering towards those things, just like most splatterpunk horror movies are catering towards those things. It’s not bad per se, but it’s not helpful in promoting a medium as being something that should be taken seriously. Again, not saying they shouldn’t do it anyway, but saying that they’re making huge strides in promoting games as something to take seriously is a bit off as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t conflate serious with inappropriate. I’d also think splatterpunk was inappropirate for children, but that doesn’t mean I’d take it seriously either.
I’m saying that if the point we’re trying to “sell” is that games are something that needs to be taken seriously as a medium, then Rockstar, while raising awareness to the fact that games aren’t just for kids, is actually being counterproductive.
Yes, there are, but only because the movie medium is mature enough that people realize there are those different voices. How many of those people that Rockstar is “raising awareness” in also know that there are people like Will Wright? When you don’t have respect as a *medium* yet, you don’t get to claim that the Uwe Bolls are actually driving it forward in getting that respect. (Not to compare Rockstar to Uwe Boll, Rockstar actually makes decent games. 😛 But they’re still not really elevating seriousness, just inappropriateness.)
@Eolirin
No worries for being debatably snarky, but I will say I was including independent studios and amateurs, at least in my own mind.
I think, though, you may be underestimating how hard it is to satisfy the two separate goals of making a game and communicating something significant simultaneously. I think significance is also very much in the eye of the beholder.
A very personal example, for me, is the old SNES game Soul Blazer. Certainly wasn’t trying to be capital-A Art, but it dealt with the theme of mortality and death… and as a young kid, it actually managed to make me feel less afraid of my own mortality. Yes, I’ve played it since (go emulation!), and yes, now it seems clunky and incredibly simple, but to me, at that time, it communicated something that affected me fairly powerfully (if nothing else, it got me to think about and confront something that otherwise I simply wouldn’t have).
So, before I’d point to anyone, I’d have to first ask: is the attempt enough? It sounds, from your comment, like the criteria is not simply that Good Art was attempted but that it succeeded, and that it was not “sullied” by being a game too much, or at least not so much that the Art was harmed (Katamari Damacy? Shadow of the Colossus? Planescape: Torment?).
Of course, at this point it’s trending into a “What is Art” discussion, which if I was trying to avoid the sexuality discussion for being too large, is one heck of an overcorrection. :p
I disagree entirely, Eolirin. We can agree to disagree, too. You can chock my disagreement up to your apparent opinion that I’m absolutely bonkers, if you like. Just recognize that strategic communications is what I do for a living…
If I were to evaluate the effects of Rockstar’s products on the movement to get people thinking about games as something more than toys for tots, I would describe those effects in the positive. As I have done.
I’m not claiming that Rockstar’s product development strategy centers on producing this outcome, and the outcome I’ve suggested might simply be a side effect, but an outcome is still an outcome regardless of the intention to create that outcome.
Rockstar is not the enemy of, dare I say, artistic freedom. Rockstar is the enemy of puritanism. I’m happy that at least I have such an influential ally in that fight.
Morgan, no offense, and I follow what you mean by allot of what you are saying even if I disagree with some of it. But you really need to have some kids. 🙂
@Peter,
Eh, I may have said this poorly, but my problem with the current crop of games with regard to artistic merit wasn’t that they were too much of a game and that this somehow corrupted the process, it was that there was no attention to mechanic as part of the artistic process. So they’re almost schizophrenic in their attempts. Inserting something like a storyline into a game with mechanics that do not support the story on an intrinsic level makes it so that the story really would’ve been better told in a more passive medium.
Your example of Planescape: Torment is one of those, Katamari and Shadow of the Colossus are not. There’s nothing about Torment that is better expressed because it is a game. It would worked as well, if not better, as an animated mini-series. You wouldn’t have had multiple paths that you could choose, but I would argue that those were really unnecessary except for replay value and could be duplicated by doing the mini-series multiple times, making it only better than passive media on a logistic level, and not on an artistic one. Shadow on the other hand, has more artistic merit than most other things, and it definitely benefits from the gameplay, especially with the narrative being as minimal as it is. It’s about the experience, and you’d lose that if it weren’t a game. As for Katamari, I’m not sure that it really tries to be anything other than entertaining. Kataramri goes into that Mario like gameplay is king realm, which makes for an awesome game, but doesn’t make for great art necessarily.
I don’t need complete success in an attempt to create art, but I do at minimum, expect that the attempt takes into account the medium and doesn’t try to shoe-horn in another medium while ignoring the one it’s working in. Pathologic for instance, works better as a game because the mechanics exhaust the player, so it heightens and benefits the message. Shadow of the Colussus manages to be extremely expressive, even if it’s very vague about what it’s expressing, and it does it in a way that would fail completely if it were not a game. So those two count, even if they have their flaws and break down in places. But they count not because they managed to avoid being too much of a game, but because they embraced the fact that they were games while still having something to say. That’s my criteria.
@Morgan,
I never said Rockstar was an enemy of anything important. I merely said that they’re not helping to move the industry forward in those important ways. That’s fine really, they don’t have to, they can do what they want and I wouldn’t ask that they stop. But I’m not going to give them credit for it either. Yeah, they’re an enemy of Puritanism if you want to put it that way, and that’s great, I really do salute that, but they’re not the ones that’ll make the medium of games into a respectable one. I am perhaps not expressing myself clearly here either, I really don’t have a problem with what Rockstar is doing. It’s just that the people who end up trying to make legitimate art with the mature themes that GTA only uses in gratuitous fashions are basically going to be marketing themselves as *not* being like that, rather than being the next step in that. So I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that Rockstar’s doing all this stuff to further the state of gaming, when they’re more likely to be used as a counter example of how not to do things. “We have sex and violence, but unlike GTA we treat those topics with seriousness and respect” is really going to be how someone would go about marketing that movement forward. I’m loathe to give credit for advancements to something that, while not holding gaming back in anyway, really isn’t moving it forward much either. Being able to add the “inappropriate for little kids” on to the back of “a waste of time” doesn’t help. There’s a greater battle than just being able to show that it’s not “toys for tots” as it were. We need to prove relevance to the average person, and stuff like GTA doesn’t help there at all, even if it does show that, yeah, this stuff isn’t just for children. After all, toys for grown ups are still toys.
And I think that’s where we’re having a difference of opinion. It’s not enough for me that people realize that the toys can be for adults too, my problem is that they’re still looking at them as toys. Sensationalism is counter-productive in getting away from that, even if it’s good at making the jump to toys for grown-ups. And that’s really what stuff like GTA is good at. It’s not going to hurt long term, but it really doesn’t do anything to move forward in that respect. This isn’t a linear path, you don’t have to go “toys for kids” -> “toys for adults” -> “not really toys at all”. You can go straight to the “not toys at all” stage from where we are now. And again, I’m not at all suggesting that we should ignore any of those types of games, and I’m not saying that Rockstar shouldn’t keep making whatever games they want to make, merely that they don’t get credit for helping us get to the “not really toys at all” stage of public acceptance.
When you talk to a non-gamer and try to convince them that there’s inherent value in gaming you’re not going to bring up GTA, you’re going to very deliberately avoid it, because it does work against the concept that there’s something of intrinsic value that can be found in gaming. You bring up the fact that they’re excellent teaching tools, you bring up the fact that there are many with thought provoking stories, you bring up the studies that show that they can remove gender differences apparently permanently for things like tracking objects in 3d spaces; you don’t bring up the fact that GTA has hookers that restore your health that you can then shoot to get your money back, or that you can spend 20 hours working through the game by blowing stuff up and killing people. That doesn’t show inherent value, it just reinforces “games are not for me” in people who don’t buy in to that sort of thing. But it’s okay that it’s there, it just needs to not be all that’s there, in the public eye, because then “games are not for me” becomes “this game is not for me” and that’s perfectly fine.
That’s why we need people like Nintendo out there showing that not only are games not just for kids, they’re also not just for people who like blowing stuff up, and not just for people who spend way too much time indoors. Rockstar can keep doing what it’s doing, and I’ll be happy for them, but without that counter-balance, it’d be extremely destructive to public perception of the medium. It’s the difference between elevating gaming to a position of respect, and elevating it only to the position of something that’s not acceptable for, and by extension, but only by extension, not just for kids.
Sounds like you really just don’t like Rockstar.
You do understand what an ignition is, right? A conversation piece? Rockstar is most definitely, and undeniably, helping move the industry forward. They’re not the only people doing that, but they are one of the main contributors.
Rockstar through their products have, at least, brought the relationship of violence and sexuality with games to the public, worldwide stage. They’ve even moved the U.S. Justice and Congress toward recognizing the validity of games as communications media.
I really don’t care about your judgments about the quality of the messages that Rockstar’s games promote. They’re irrelevant, both your judgments and their games’ messages. What matters is that Rockstar fuelled the conversation about the “seriosity” of games and continues to fan the flames.
None of your arguments invalidate the benefits of Rockstar, directly or consequently, promoting awareness of games as communications media that can have serious impact.
That’s not a bad way to differentiate. I can see myself advising clients to do just that.
If changing how people think were so easy and simple, I’d be a billionaire. You can’t jump from point A to point Z unless you’re Superman.
And I know you’re not Superman because he’s fictional!
I can go to anyone who’s unfamiliar with games as communications media and successfully persuade them of the value of games as communications media using “Hot Coffee”, nudity mods for Oblivion, and GTA as explicit examples.
I wouldn’t talk about gameplay mechanics, period. The mechanics of the game are irrelevant. Nobody needs to know those mechanics unless they’re playing the game.
That’s just purely academic nonsense. Dark comes with light. Bad comes with good. Ugly comes with pretty. Slim comes with fat. Nature is balance. There would never be a Rockstar without a Nintendo.
I wonder, can it be left up to me to decide what to teach my kids on “what to think”?
Or does “changing the world” and “changing how people think” intend to take that out of my hands?
Amaranthar pondered:
You’ve no more control over what they think than what a lion’s cubs think when the scent of a fresh kill fills the air. We would be better served without parents who think themselves the grand jurors of living, who are so evidently convinced of their own righteousness to believe they could decide against the free will of their children.
We exist within the bounds of society, within an organization not owned by any particular party that can only be influenced in one direction or another. Together, and not separately, we engage and empower and elevate others to learn.
An agent of change is simply one who suggests a course of action, allowing others to move forward or to go around. A whistle, uniform, and gun are incentives to act in a certain manner, but ultimately our choices are our own.
@Morgan,
My point was that this isn’t a linear progression, and that “toys for grown ups” and “not toys” are not on the same path. You’re not skipping a “step”, you’re targeting something different. So you’re not jumping from A to Z by promoting that, you’re simply not going after the “toys for grown ups” crowd. They are two separate development paths that have very little to do with each other. And honestly, the “toys for grown ups” path is much easier, so I’m not really all that interested in it. There’s a need for a bigger shift to get away from the concept of toys entirely, and turning them into “toys for grown ups” isn’t one of the steps on that path. Nintendo has been attempting this, and the media attention from games like GTA hasn’t had anything to do with those efforts.
Again, we are at cross purposes for what we see as being important here. Because yes, Rockstar is indeed helping to raise awareness that games are not just for kids, and that’s great and all, but that effort doesn’t carry over into the other struggle, which is showing that game’s aren’t just for kids, or just for males age 17-29, but for everyone. It not only stops short of getting out of it’s demographic, but because it’s also tends toward sensationalism it creates knee-jerk reactions in people who don’t know any better. And those knee-jerk reactions then need to be pushed through by people trying to show that games really are for everyone.
But I’m perhaps not using the word serious in the same way you are. I don’t mean that they treat them as something that’s got an impact on society, I mean that they treat them as a valid form of expression, one that has positive relevance to their lives. That they treat games as a medium with value and not just something that they need to pay attention to because it’s potentially dangerous. I see so much more of the latter than I do of the former. It’s the difference between taking something like a social issue seriously, and treating something as a serious form of expression. The word is not being used the same way. So I apologize if that ambiguity is actually the source of much of this conflict. I wouldn’t at all disagree that Rockstar is making people take gaming seriously in the former case, but the former case doesn’t help with the latter one, and the latter one is the one that’s important to me. We’ll know we’ve gotten to the point that the expression is treated seriously when people stop talking about how gaming can be “fixed” (i.e. regulated), or how it can be protected against, because those are the sort of terms you use when you’re talking about social issues that you take seriously. It has to be respected, and not just feared. And fear doesn’t really help develop respect, even if it does raise awareness.
And sorry, your last point is dead wrong. The developments with Nintendo are more recent than the developments with Rockstar, and honestly, they didn’t have to be there (I’m talking about public awareness mind, Nintendo has always been there doing mostly the same thing, but until the DS and Wii, no one really cared. The perception surrounding the GTA series well predates that). So there have been periods where there wasn’t that balance at all, they just fortunately didn’t last long enough to be a problem. And Nintendo took a very large risk with that too, and while it paid off in spades, it was still a risk. Had it failed, and it could have, we would very much be without that balancing force there even now. Light doesn’t always show up if you want to use that analogy, and oft times when it does show up it fails to beat back the darkness too. (As an aside, yes, there are plenty of people who are also acting as “light” in that scenario, but none of them managed to really grab media attention in the same way. The awareness issue would have languished without the DS and Wii showing that, yes, there are things for non-gamers and games can be relevant in positive ways to everyone. We’re still not at full acceptance yet, but we’re a vast deal closer thanks to it.)
@Amaranthar,
Well, why wouldn’t you be able to? The point of that stuff isn’t to take the development of children away from their parents… it’s to hopefully educate, if you allow me the pretension of using that word there, the parents so that they make better choices. If you come to the conclusion through dialogue, or experience, or whatever that something is of value, and that something is beneficial, then that’s great, and I’m sure you’d try to pass that information on to your kids right? There’s no need to try to take that responsibility away from you, especially when you can be engaged directly. And if you don’t, you don’t. And that’s okay too. But perception has to be balanced enough, and clear enough, and free enough of bias that the process is relatively objective or it begins to break down. If you only hear negatives, someone needs to point out the positives. If you only hear positives, someone needs to point out the negatives. That’s all I’m interested in certainly. *shrug*
@Morgan, meh. Parents are not final arbitrators of their children’s decisions no, but they are, if they are actively involved with their children anyway, an important *part* of it. I really think Amaranthar’s statement was more about being removed from the loop entirely, which really is of no use to anyone, though if I’m wrong there, I’m sure he’ll correct me.
No, my statement was about the infringement by others as opposed to being removed. I’ll always have a say to my kids, and it must pain the likes of Morgan and Bartle to realize that parents have much more input than they can ever hope to have.
Morgan, listen to yourself. “We would be better served without parents who think themselves the grand jurors of living, who are so evidently convinced of their own righteousness to believe they could decide against the free will of their children.”
And you call me arrogant? You think you can come into my life and infringe on the raising of my children? And you think I’m self righteous?
You guys are full of yourselves. You’re going to take over where you aren’t welcome. You’re going to force your version of right on the rest of us. You’re going to change the world, “mold” the world, into your beliefs.
Yeaaah. And as the shining example of your ideas of excellence in higher goals and a better world, you show us Grand Theft Auto.
Eolirin, I understand what you’re saying, but the fact remains that what this game presents doesn’t do anything of any value to anyone. It’s not art, it’s not “an experience”, it’s not educational. It’s nothing but crass.
Even so, I’d let the entertainment value to the individual to decide. But there are other problems here too, presented by the sexual content as well as the “benefits”. For one, how many parents know exactly what is in this game? This is hidden (again) to the parents knowledge, and unless someone is tuned into gaming news sites or happens to see/hear about this on the news, they may very well think that the game is all about cops and robbers and nothing else. They may buy the game not knowing that this kind of stuff is in them.
Do you think that the gaming industry or any of these companies would be willing to run advertising explaining exactly how the rating system works, and what kind of content is actually being put into them? No.
Do you think the gaming industry would want to see separate sections for “adult only” sales? No.
But they’ll push this to the limits. So those of us opposed to this will just have to push back.
Eolirin wrote:
This is the crux of our disagreement. We can quibble over the other details, but for the most part, we disagree about Rockstar’s contributions to what you characterize as the “other struggle.” I think Rockstar does contribute to the movement to establish games as having value for everyone in the same way that due diligence contributes to proper execution of an activity. They might not directly create games for everyone, but they certainly promote conversations in which everyone can participate.
Amaranthar wrote:
Yes, of course. The State also reserves the right to do so as well.
If you want to raise your children with physical and verbal abuse, I’ll step in.
If you want to raise your children to believe there’s an alien spaceship behind a comet that’s coming to rescue only the true believers when they drink poison, I’ll step in.
If you want to raise your kids to believe that everyone not a member of the “white race” should be dragged, naked, behind a slow vehicle across rough terrain, I’ll step in.
If you want to raise your children to believe that they are incapable, incompetent, and bound to be constant failures and disappointments, I’ll step in.
If you want to raise your children to think that video games are murder simulators, I’ll step in there, too.
There are also billions of people behind commercial and nonprofit organizations who believe their causes are what you and your children should support. That’s one aspect of being part of the human race. If you don’t like you and your children being bombarded with countless messages that infringe on your imaginary command of the raising of your children, the solution is simple: cancel your membership.
What can I say: simply because you prefer one way doesn’t make your way either legal; right in accordance with the moral standards of society; acceptable to others whose ethics, morals, and worldviews differ; or good and just.
I think most career criminals would prefer to not be returned to prison, and would not welcome any efforts to put them back behind bars, but the justice system and law enforcement will strive to “take over” regardless of whether they’re welcome.
Yes, you might always have a say, an influence, but you do not control them. If you have teenagers, you should know that by now. You do not determine what they think. Your children are not your property. You do not own them. You are their guide.
@Amaranthar,
See, I can’t support that idea unless it involves removal of the parent’s role. I learn just as much from my friends, from media, from reading, from playing games, and from exploring the world around me as I’ve learned from my parents. Well, to be fair, vastly more than I learn from my parents, and not because they’re not involved in my life either, but because they can’t possibly come close to representing or expressing the majority of my world. No one can really. Parents are a part, not the whole. The only way to “infringe” on that status is to remove them entirely. No parent is ever the sole source of information in a child’s life, nor would it be good if they were. Alternate values and alternate viewpoints are *important*, they just need to be filtered and managed in a way that doesn’t result in confusion and brokeness. Otherwise you end up with a situation similar to that parable about the child who’s been sheltered and kept from any disease or germ so that they never become sick, who eventually steps out of his room and immediately dies from a cold. It’s not any better for the mind than it is for the body. I’m not saying that it’s not appropriate to say “You can’t look at that yet, because you’re not ready for it” as long as you’re fair about it, and I’m not saying anyone has the right to override that, but someone providing an alternate veiwpoint that stops short of breaking into your house and forcing your kids to do something isn’t an infringement of anything. Again, unless you’re removed from the equation (and the break-in scenario *does* do that), your role as a parent cannot be infringed upon like that.
And I don’t know why you’re bringing Bartle into this really. He’s never, as far as I’ve seen, professed to want to do anything other than hold up mirrors so that people can look into them and figure stuff out for themselves. Which by the way, has much more of an impact on helping a person grow than just about anything else could, as long as they’re willing to do it. Parents, friends, media, society, can provide values, they cannot provide identity. No one other than the individual can do that, so the mirror is the only way to help the process along.
Actually, the game is very clearly rated M, and the label very clearly says *why*; Sexual Content, Mature themes, Alcohol and Drug use, and graphic violence should be on that label (or something like that, I may not be using the exact phrases). It’s not hard to miss, you just need to be watching for it.
And a simple ban on M rated games in your household takes care of the problem too, so it’s really not that hard to deal with. Ignorance on the part of parents is not the industry’s fault, especially when the stuff is all there out in the open clear to see. Research your product before you allow it to be bought. Not that hard.
@Morgan,
Okay, I guess we’ll just have to remain in disagreement then. Because I really don’t see it, and when I talk to people like my mom, who really have almost no exposure to gaming, they just don’t *get* it, and games like GTA are part of the reason why they don’t. “They’re all about shooting or blowing up something right?” is something I get quite often, and I have to explain, that no, they really aren’t. So maybe it’s just that we deal in different circles and are seeing different parts of the response to that. Because I’m really not seeing it helping when I try to get across that there really is value in games. I’m even seeing it hurting in some cases.
Again, I apologize for a triple post. Here are the ERSB descriptors:
Intense Violence,
Blood,
Strong Language,
Strong Sexual Content,
Partial Nudity,
Use of Drugs and Alcohol
(emphasis mine)
That really doesn’t seem like it leaves much room for doubt as to exactly what sort of game it is. So sorry if you think it’s somehow deceptive in how it’s marketed.
So, you want to paint me as some sort of extreme example of overbearing parent? I have no doubt that’s what you think of me, judging from your previous comments calling people like me arrogant and whatever else, because we don’t agree with your views.
Well, we’re going to find out about all that law business. I’ll have my say just as well as you do, and everyone else. You evidently think that the majority is behind you. I think the opposite. We’ll see. One thing’s for sure, the gaming industry has certainly given me allot of ammunition to send to my congressmen.
You see, that’s the whole point right there. Other influences do come into play. Parents, decent parents like me despite the picture painted by some, have to struggle with outside influences. We follow the 3 T’s, Teach them, Test them, and then you have to Trust them. But that gets a whole lot harder when you get blindsided by unknown outside influences, as this kind of thing attempts to do.
Exactly. And I want to have the right to control that. I don’t want subliminal messages or hidden alternate views creeping in so that I can’t have my input. Of course I can’t control it all. But this is a place, in media, that I can have my say and attempt to filter unwanted thing, things that maybe my kids aren’t ready for, out. I want to know when these things attempt to present themselves. I don’t want someone selling my kids cigarettes, I don’t want someone giving my kids booze, I don’t want my kids going to someones house if they are using drugs, and I don’t want some idiots showing my kids this kind of crap like GTA does.
Because:
Sound familiar? It should. The same attitude towards parents who disagree. Despite the media’s obvious overdone sensationalizing, most parents simply want some better guidelines, something more defined, because these parents can’t play through an entire game all the time to check it out. But these people, Bartle and Morgan and others like those at Rockstar, don’t want that.
And the reason becomes clear when they start talking about “changing the world” as Richard has, and as Morgan is. They want to take it out of our hands as Morgan clearly says in this thread. We, because we don’t agree, are “arrogant”, and all the other things these two have called us and insinuated about us. And they intend to dictate how things are presented and what things are presented to our kids. I think we have some rights here, but they imply we aren’t fit to have those rights, simply because we don’t see it their way and want some control over our kids lives. Not control as in dominating, as Morgan implies, but in what gets presented to them and when.
Ok, quick, tell me what’s in a box of cereal these days. (without looking)
There’s allot of people who simply don’t know that this kind of content is in a shoot’em’up game about stealing fast cars.
And they aren’t advertising it.
And while I’m at it, lets take a look at the ratings for this game.
From the ESRB site:
And the ESRB Content Descriptors:
It seems that something is amiss. This too will be forwarded to my congressmen.
Amaranthar blathered:
You’ve made an awfully quick conversion to Prokofyism… I listed examples of plausible, reasonable, and acceptable causes to “infringe” on your privilege to raise the children you birthed. I didn’t accuse you, specifically, of anything.
All censors are arrogant. They need overinflated egos to think their thoughts and actions, regardless of motive, are inerrant. And again, I have not called you, specifically, any names. You started with that.
You don’t get control. You get influence.
Why are you faulting Rockstar, a well-known producer of M+ rated games, when faulting YouTube would be more appropriate? YouTube does have adult restrictions that disallow guest users, whose ages are unverified, from viewing mature content.
I love being put into Bartle’s camp. My name next to Bartle’s—so cool.
Seriously though, you promote censorship, and control over the lives of other human beings. We promote liberty, and the responsibility to developing and use influence wisely. You already have the tools you need to be a successful parent. You don’t need moral censorship.
Ignoring the fact that neither Bartle nor I have “intended to dictate how things are presented and what things are presented” to anyone’s children, the difference between your two statements is that you want to be able to “dictate how things are presented and what things are presented” to your kids.
Eolirin wrote:
That might be true. My company Heretic’s original logo, when I created the firm six years ago, was “heretic” in a Gothic typeface set next to a silhouette tree from which two silhouette bodies hanged.
Sidenote: The message was basically that heretics, people who think and act against the status quo [within reason], are often severely punished for challenging authority, so if you [the prospect] want to be a heretic and safe from harm, you should hire us because we’ll be your ally and your whipping boy.
When my CCO would hand his business cards to people, they’d practically toss the card back at him in disgust and fear. When I’d hand my business cards to people, they’d praise our boldness and the logo as really cool.
One of my uncles can sell anything to anyone, and he does that by becoming a true believer in the products and ideas he sells. I don’t know what you’re doing when you try to communicate that games can have value for everyone, but it’s all about salesmanship. Even great products don’t sell themselves.
I was going to pick apart Amaranthar’s misrepresentation of my point of view patiently and thoroughly, but I just realised I don’t have to do that any more.
Amaranthar: you’ve ALREADY LOST. It doesn’t matter what you or I think, the battle is ALREADY WON. Sensible parenting over games will be the norm 10 years from now, no matter what you or I or Rockstar do, and no matter what motives you ascribe to me or anyone else. It’s that way for TV, for film, for radio, for books, and it’ll be that way for games, too. It’s GAME OVER for anti-gamers. That’s just HOW IT IS, and accusing me of wanting to steal your children’s minds isn’t going to make ANY DIFFERENCE.
Richard
I couldn’t find this magical formula on Google. Can you point me somewhere that explains it in more detail? Because, quite frankly, that sounds like a blindingly stupid way to raise children, and I’d like to see the source. I’m very worried about the fact that “decent parents” have been conned into using it.
@Morgan,
Oh, I can get the point across, but I have to deliberately downplay stuff like GTA, because that’s the *counter-argument* they give me. I have to work around the fact that that’s *all* they see. And GTA doesn’t make the argument for me, because it’s not suited to do so by itself. But yeah, it definitely does seem that it’s more to our circles than it is to anything else. So I’m willing to accept that it’d be hard for us to see eye to eye here, because our experiences don’t support each other very well.
@Amarathar, uh. No, I don’t know what’s in ceral off the top of my head, but I’m also not complaining about it being potentially dangerous to children. If I *were* I’d damn well know what was in it before I bought it. Anyone that has food allergies will tell you that they do check labels with a level of almost paranoia. I have an MSG allergy, so any snack food and some prepared stuff that can have it is always checked before being purchased because I know it could mess with me if I don’t. Game ratings labels should be treated the same way if you’re concerned about them being in your house. Willful ignorance of clearly available information is not a valid defense. It’s there, you flip the box over it and quickly check the content descriptors, and then put the box back on the shelf if you don’t like what you see. It’s a 2 second check that you can easily do before making any purchases for your household. Being lazy about it isn’t an excuse! And if too many people are ignorant of the fact that those descriptors are on the back, then they need to be educated, because it’s there, and it’s easy to use, and it’s accurate. Games currently have quite possibly the best, most clear, rating system in any media industry in the US right now; this is not something that needs to be complained about.
@Bartle, eh. I don’t think sensible parenting will be the norm 10 years from now, because it’s not the norm even in those other media types you listed *right now*. And those have been around for ages. 😛 But you’re right that we won’t be hearing about it as if gaming were the devil out to destroy society. People will calm down about it, but continue to be just as irresponsible as ever. Just like they always have.
You go ahead and think that, Bartle. But what you are forgetting is that your future voters will someday be raising adolescents and teens themselves.
Eolirin:
Yeah, “buy stocks, and if they don’t go up, don’t buy them”.
Michael Chui, heh, I really don’t know how to reply to such….ignorance. It’s clear you simply mean to insult me, but who cares?
Morgan, you are incredulous. Raising my kids is just a privilege? Granted by whom? You, evidently? Since you are claiming the right to kick me aside and put your goals ahead of mine? Uh, screw you.
By the way, Bartle. You keep trying to paint us as “anti-gamers”. We aren’t, we’re anti-harmful crap. Most of us play games and have kids who play games, otherwise we wouldn’t care or know about any of this. But you want to paint the picture that we’re from the dark ages to help win your battle. Again, this isn’t going to win you anything, because we know differently. We’re there. We’re in it. We’re involved in gaming, either directly or through our kids who we, you know, allow and want to play games.
You’re only fooling yourself and the few you can con.
Amaranthar>You keep trying to paint us as “anti-gamers”. We aren’t, we’re anti-harmful crap.
So don’t buy your kids harmful crap games, just like you don’t buy them harmful crap anything else.
It’s when your definition of what’s “crap” doesn’t coincide what other people think is “crap” and you try to make them follow your rules that I’m railing against. If you don’t mind whether other parents let their kids play crap games, OK, fine, we’re in accord.
>But you want to paint the picture that we’re from the dark ages to help win your battle.
No need – the battle is ALREADY WON.
>Again, this isn’t going to win you anything, because we know differently.
Give it your best shot. I don’t care. I’m not trying to win anything here – the numbers have already determined the winner.
Richard
Amaranthar wrote:
What you are forgetting is that those same future voters will have grown up playing video games, and everyone else who did not will have died off.
Granted by the State. I guess you’ve never heard of Children’s Services—y’know, the same people who will relocate your children to the care of others when you are determined to be unfit to raise your children. That the children were derived from you is irrelevant to whether you are legally allowed to raise them.
How do you determine what’s “harmful”? Who are you to censor what you think is “harmful” and prohibit others from making their own judgments? Oh, you do so off-the-cuff? You’re driven by knee-jerk reactions? You let other laymen tell you what’s what? Nothing scientific at all? Bartle doesn’t need to paint that picture. You’re doing a fine job of creating that masterpiece all by yourself.
S: (adj) incredulous (not disposed or willing to believe; unbelieving)
Why, thank you! I’m an unbeliever. I’ll take that as a compliment.
Eolirin wrote:
You know what else could be helpful? ESRB could require that product manufacturers provide either straightforward, where straightforward is defined as what’s on the ratings labels, video trailers of their games or playable demos. Retailers could be required to provide a system that allows parents to preview games before they buy them.
Some stores already do this, but you usually see kids playing the demos. Parents or guardians should be playing the demos or viewing the trailers, especially if they’re responsible for buying games in the first place.
I thought about posting a more thorough diatribe, but it’s not really on-topic and I really don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’re not inclined to educate me, then fine. I don’t actually need to know this year; I’ll probably hear about it from some other detractor one day, if it’s as widespread as you suggest, so maybe that person will be more reasonable about quoting random lore.
It’s very simple, Amaranthar. If you don’t want your children playing games, independently, rated for adults, don’t purchase those game for them.
In most stores and for most games the rating is clearly printed on the box. You claim to be a good parent, but if you’re incapable of doing any small bit of research, from looking at the back of a box of cereal or at the back of a video game box (AND YOU SEEM TO BE INTERNET SAVVY), for the sake of your child\children, then you’re not a good one.
Write your congressman. Those who value freedom still have the first amendment in this country.
So your argument is that maybe someday Richard will have some teenage children of his own, and then he’ll see just how wrong he was?
Hmm…
You know, strangely, there is an odd parity between the two sides of this new argument and the one from before.
An artistic space or medium, in this case video games, combined with a freedom to create, will lead to art that you will not like or agree with. The debate of High versus Low, Classy versus Crass, Wholesome versus Harmful, Important versus Worthless… they’re all siblings, aren’t they?
I’d say that we have learned from history that individual discretion is a better overall answer than censorship, but to me Eolirin came close to advocating censorship in our earlier discussion where as now he/she(?) fights against the more overt censorship along different criteria as advocated by Amaranthar. (I’m not intending to pick on you, Eolirin, and to explain what I mean, it seemed as though you were saying that games without the right merits should not be made, though I acknowledge that you were more specifically saying that their creators should choose a different medium for their expressions)
As a followup thought to that, I don’t think I would have cared as much about what happened in Planescape: Torment if it were “merely” a book, without that illusion of allowing me to feel responsible for what happens and how. Even knowing it’s an illusion, I’d say the choice of medium (game) added something important to the story even if it meant losing other things like being clunky as a result of that choice. My own feeling is that if the artist chose to make that tradeoff, I can agree where you say you wonder if it wouldn’t have been better in a different medium, but I’m not going to begrudge them their choice for differing from mine nor their discretion in making that choice for themselves.
I’ll admit, though, the clunky factor did keep me from actually beating the game on my own. :p
Morgan, yeah, that’d be a great idea, except I seriously doubt people would bother anyway, they’d be just as distant and uncaring about the media choices that their kids are making except when they want to complain about content that they could very easily have verified and put a stop to purchasing. Because there *are* trailers and everything, and while they could possibly be more representative, they still tend to give a good idea of content. They’re just something you have to actually care to go look for. Gametrailers.com will immediately tell me that I wouldn’t want to be giving GTA4 to a 10 year old even if I somehow managed to completely miss the content labels. For the people not internet savy enough to figure that out, a simple ban on all M rated games should suffice, if they want to be “safe” about it.
It’s not like this is rocket science or anything. You just have to be active and involved enough to actually bother. Instead of, you know, making completely unreasonable demands that if carried out would be in clear violation of the first amendment. You don’t want something in your house, then you keep it out of your house. You don’t get to go into other people’s houses and take it out of there too though.
@Amaranthar,
Don’t be ridiculous. That isn’t even remotely a comparable analogy. The MSG analogy I gave, that you seemed to ignore, is though, even though there’s less reason for msg to be used in food than there is for games like GTA to exist. If there is something that you find harmful, you make sure you don’t come in contact with it. Being willfully ignorant or too lazy to use the systems set up to allow you to do that isn’t a valid counter-argument. MSG is much harder to find in an ingredient list than the M label on a game, and let me tell you, I’m paranoid about making sure it’s not there, because I know it’ll mess me up really bad. If you really feel that games are that big a deal that you need to worry about content like that (which is fair enough), then you have no excuse not to pay attention to the label. And you don’t even need to scan through a long list of ingredients, more than half of which you cannot even pronounce, and multiple times just to make sure that you didn’t miss it. They made it easy! If it says M then it means do not buy for kids under 17. If it says E, then it’s safe for kids. Just like if something has MSG I won’t eat it, and if it doesn’t I can. It’s really not that hard.
@Peter,
If I came across that way I do apologize. Because I think that games like Torment are vastly more entertaining as games, but I think that they lose something as a result of not paying attention to their gamey nature. This is more of a flaw in craft than my attempting to say that they shouldn’t exist. I wasn’t arguing they shouldn’t exist, I was arguing that they failed at being Games as Art. I don’t think games should all be art though, just like I don’t think all movies should aspire to being art. Please don’t take away my Mario and things like Katamari because they don’t aspire to any greater purpose. And I wouldn’t be happy seeing Torment or BioShock disappear either, even though I think they’re horribly schizophrenic in how they approach things, because I’d hate to lose things that do make people think and explore. I just think if you are going to aspire to being a game that is also art, you should at least try to do it right. That means taking into account mechanics as part of the process and not an afterthought, or worse, something that’s completely divorced from the content.
Because that clunky factor is exactly what I was complaining about, and it weakens the expressive ability of the game. I wasn’t trying to begrude them the right to exist, only to say that it those cases, the parts that can be considered art, is art that is trying to shoe-horn itself into a game, and not a game that is art. This is a failure to deal with the medium correctly. A flaw that needs to be corrected before I’m willing to change my phrasing from “Games with art” or “Art in games” if you’d prefer, to “Games as art.”
Please…
It’s not quite that simple though. Yes, I know about this particular game. What I don’t know about is other games, and games yet to be released. And to make myself a bit more clear, the rating of Mature doesn’t cover this. I would never expect this content even for a Mature rating, and as I posted above it seems much more like it should be an Adult rating.
To quote the ESRB rating definitions again for Strong Sexual Content, which should make it “Adult Only” rating…..
This seems pretty clear to me. This should be rated as “Adult Only”, because it’s depictions of sexual behavior, and it’s as frequent as the user desires.
(And let me point out that Adults Only ratings kill the sales of games, and that can only be because there is a massive concern out there, despite the statements that there’s a minority of parents like me.)
So even seeing the rating on the box, I would simply not expect this content in the game. I might allow my kids to play it, and never know they are getting into this when I’m not watching.
Between this in gaming, sex on TV shows and in commercials, and in movies, and other kids natural inclination to explore and socialize about it, my efforts to teach my kids more respect for human beings than this game depicts could easily be undermined. And again, what about other games now and in the future?
And as you said, I am somewhat internet savvy. How many parents aren’t? This isn’t just about me. It’s about society. “Cultural wars” is a good description.
Anticorium, heh, anythings possible. But my experience is that usually, once someone takes such a strong stance, they are very hesitant to change.
But stranger things have happened.
Well, first of all, a parent could play a demo for hours and almost certainly would not find this content. So I don’t see this working.
Trailers would be great, if they included this content, as you suggest, and if the box warns parents to view that trailer. So far I haven’t seen one trailer that shows this kind of content. YouTube is about the only way to find out, or sites like this one. It’s usually after release and first sales though. And as I pointed out previously, many parents aren’t internet savvy enough to catch this sort of thing, at least not when it counts, before buying. They look at the box, have an expectation of what that rating means, and decide.
@Morgan Ramsey, by way of Amaranthar
I can’t resist sounding snarky, and I apologize in advance, but…
It’s like a shark advisory. I can’t help but translate the comments about trailers and demos into saying “Well, people need to be able to see the sharks for themselves, or at least see some videos of these sharks.” No, you already have enough information to stay out of the water. I’m sorry, you do.
Again, my apologies for my self indulgence here. I’ve just heard the “We need more explicit demos and trailers” thought before, and I really disagree.
@ Eolirin
No worries. To me you did come across that way to an extent, but that was likely just the way I read it. I think the only actual difference between our positions is that I’m giving them more credit for trying. I think they are trying to do it right, most of the time (“they” in this case being folks like Bioware).
I say that mainly because I do agree with you on clunkiness. I’m *not* looking forward to Fallout 3 specifically and only because I didn’t find Oblivion enjoyable to play, and that’s really a shame in a lot of ways.
Amaranthar, Mature ratings are 17+. They’re not for kids either! AO ratings are basically the difference of a year, they become 18+ instead of 17+. Honestly AO exists in the same way that X or NC-17 does. A mostly meaningless descriptor that exists mostly to stop adults from wandering into pornography accidentially. Not really any different here.
And, note: an R Rated film can hit Strong Sexual Content under that definition but not cross over into X. That games can hit Strong Sexual Content under that definition and not cross over into AO should not be surprising. The treatment is not any different than films. Unless GTA IV had it so that when you use the hookers as a health vending machine, they take their clothes off and we go into a hardcore porn scene anything higher than the M rating just for that isn’t appropriate. That’s what it’d take for it to get up to AO. And it’s not present. So it’s an M game. It’s potentially frequent enough and is explict enough even if it doesn’t go that far, that it does fit the descriptor. And it’s labeled as such.
I fail to see any problems here.
@Peter,
I dunno, I never really got the sense out of any of the many Bioware games that I’ve played that they were really paying that much attention to the gameplay mechanic as part of the method for expressing the story itself. Some, sure, but not a whole lot. Like most other RPGs, gameplay always felt like filler between story bits. There’s still a lack of attention to the parts that really make it a game. – As an aside: Player choice is not all that important out of those, at least in this context. It’s really only there to aid the one that is, which as you brought up, was increased investment and indentification with the main character. But it’s not required for that, and allowing too much of it can actually cause problems, or at minimum, remove potential tools or methods for expression. – So yeah, in Bioware stuff we get stuff like reputation and our choices have impact on the story in predetermined ways, and that’s an improvement in some ways, but it’s still ignoring what I was getting at, which is that how you *play* the game should amplify what you get out of experiencing it, and not detract. When you’ve got an epic story everything you do should *feel* epic to do, not just your potential roster of choices or the visuals connected to them. That’s why I would put Bioware’s combat at odds with that intent, and combat is always too central in their games to ignore. In this case I think Bioware is indeed trying to do something important, just not to do what I was talking about. They’re more about how to express a story inside the confines of a game, rather than how to make the gameplay actually be part of the story.
It’s a subtle difference, but it’s easier to see if you start looking at what the mechanics in a Bioware game are if you strip them of context. Dialogue trees devoid of the context that informs them basically boil down to press button 1, 2, 3 or 4. Any impact that those options give you are derived from the story, and entirely from the story. The other major component besides dialogue in a Bioware game is usually combat, and the combat tends to be rather tedious in my opinion. KotOR1 was actually one of the worst offenders there, as any Star Wars game that requires you to hit a Tusken Raider with a lightsaber 12 times in a row before it dies is missing the point of what a lightsaber should feel like. Neither of those elements are really well tailored to expressing the stories that they are attempting to. The dialogue choices helps increase the amount of indentification that the player has with the main character, or can at least (doesn’t always work so nicely), but that’s about the extent of what they try to do with the gameplay elements, and they tend to jack stuff up pretty bad in terms of fitting mood with the combat elements. Gameplay ends up more of a filler between story bits, or a way of branching various different story bits, than it is inherently important to the story bits.
I’m not saying this isn’t hard to do, mind, or that I expect them to get right to making games that pull this off, only that I don’t really see them trying much. It’s okay that they don’t even, they make games with relatively strong stories in a medium that has a hard time even getting that part right. Trying to change that up would probably be more damaging than good for them. They’re better at writing stories, especially branching ones, then they are at making gameplay mechanics. They should keep at doing that and improving their storytelling abilities in the game medium. It’s just that that’s different than what I was talking about. Like with the GTA issue, there’s plenty of place for all sorts of games that do all sorts of different things. Some areas just are hideously under-represented.
Disclosure: I personally have a really hard time connecting to the characters and plots in just about every Bioware game I’ve played, and with the gameplay not being there either, I have a really hard time finishing many of them. I’m really not quite sure what it is about them either, it’s almost like the high concept for everything is concerntrated awesome, but then the implementation comes across as lacking something that I can never identify. But I can still recognize that they’re quality, even if something about them fails to provide any sort of hook for me.
Amaranthar blabbed:
Most retailers do not stock AO-rated games or X-rated films. There are extra costs associated with stocking adult media, including additional liability. So, no, AO ratings do not kill sales of games “only” because of some massive, infantile panic; AO ratings kill the sales of games because of, simply, a lack of channels through which these products can be distributed to their target markets.
The activity isn’t central to the game, and therefore does not meet any criteria for frequency. The activity is central to the YouTube video, but not to the game.
Sex is healthy, mmkay.
Peter S. wrote:
Simply because an authority states that illicit drugs are bad doesn’t mean that people will suddenly stop using illicit drugs… What I meant by “helpful” was that a requirement for demos and trailers would be helpful toward strengthening the ratings system.
If demos and trailers were required by the ratings system, every retailer was required by law (not by the ratings system) to provide a workstation from which parents could preview demos and trailers, and a public relations campaign to inform the public about ratings and the “new” tools was executed, there wouldn’t be any room for censors.
The basic idea is to provide parents with the tools they need to better perform their parental responsibilities and to inform them about those tools. If they choose not to use those tools, that’s their fault.
Anticorium wrote:
Yes, that’s Amaranthar’s argument. S/he wrote earlier to me:
Some parents are holier-than-though about parenting. They think others couldn’t possibly understand what being a parent truly entails. They’re partially correct, however, but here’s what they get wrong.
One doesn’t need to be a parent to understand how to raise kids in the same way that one doesn’t need to be a CEO to understand how to grow a business. Everyone was a child at one point and everyone can draw on their experiences growing up under the guidance of their own parents. Being a parent isn’t a unique position that grants some secret knowledge of humanity. One doesn’t need to meet any particular criteria to become a parent and zillions of people have been parents since time immemorial.
Deep down, the “Parents Club” believe child rearing to be a right of passage. In producing children, they believe themselves to be special and privileged to some special gift. In working hard to raise their children, they believe the world owes them something. Being a parent becomes a job title, and a way to boost their ego. They latch onto these beliefs and call into question anyone not like them.
@ Eolirin (and just to say, I’m enjoying our discussion and am replying in that spirit, not one of argument 🙂 )
This may be why we have such differing opinions about Bioware. I agree with the statement, but what amplifies a game and what detracts from it is a very eye-of-the-beholder kind of thing. My own disclosure: in Planescape specifically, the voyeuristic thrill of getting to run around Sigil by proxy was overridingly cool for this D&D geek. How I played the game was by talking my way around and out of combat, so for me and my playstyle the gameplay worked excellently most of the time.
But, let’s talk Japanese Console RPGs for a second. In terms of gameplay being filler between story bits, these have American computer games beat handily. My tolerance for them has dropped to nil over the years for that exact reason, so to me it’s an easily seen point. In both cases we’re talking vestiges of ancient Dungeons and Dragons, overtly in the case of Bioware’s use of their explicit systems, less so in the whole idea of the Random Encounter that is now the backbone of so many console RPGs. Having grown up with it, my personal feelings are that the improvements to these vestigial mechanics in Bioware’s titles are a good effort, while I can also agree with your opinion that these mechanics are not serving the games that use them, and that their willingness to use them anyway (that is, to not try to do things differently) is a strike against them. (You are winning me over, which is why I’m interested in continuing the conversation)
I wonder if we’ll look back on these games at some point as examples of the “D&D movement”, here meant in the exact same way as one could discuss the Impressionist movement in painting. I wonder how much of it does come from its own self-created context, similar to how major movements in art end up defining an idea about what a piece should be, infectious of all pieces made around the same time, not seen even as choice until a new era is entered. (there’s a famous quote I’d like to use here about the classical greeks being influenced by the classical greeks, but I can’t remember the actual phrase or who it’s from)
I should totally write a book titled “Waking Up From D&D”, if only because it’s too good of a title to go to waste. :p
One has to be a parent to understand how not to.
Trying to keep them from everything you don’t approve of is one way to not do it. Trying to keep them into everything you approve of is one way not to do it. They came with instructions but they are written in a script that only they can read.
If you manage to get them through school and into their first job without injury or felony convictions, you’ve done it pretty well. Otherwise, listen carefully for the little clues about what they ARE becoming and attend to that.
@Peter, yeah, I’m really interested in continuing this conversation too, because it’s fascinating, and it’s really helping me clarify things in my own head. So if you don’t mind, I’ll post my thoughts on the whole thing. They’re long, and go into some amount of detail, so I hope you forgive the very large post as a result, hopefully you’ll find it interesting at least.
I’d like to take a look at the statement about talking your way out of things in Planescape: Torment. I think I may need to be more clear about the sort of division I was making in terms of mechanic and story. You’re classifying your ability to talk your way out of combat as a gameplay mechanic, but I’m not sure I’d view it strictly as such. The mechanic is the dialogue tree, being able to avoid combat by using it is actually story related. Again, it’s good that it’s there, and the multiple ways to go through the game are one of the biggest things that Bioware really started doing with the genre, but I’d still classify that as story, and not gameplay. Because what the mechanic really ends up being when you boil it down is this: Select choice A, enter combat. Select Choice B, Don’t enter combat. And as a mechanic, that’s relatively empty. It’s only because there’s a story there that it makes a difference. And yeah, being able to run through Sigil by proxy is awesome, and it’s entertaining, and it’s *fun*, but it’s not quite what I was talking about.
I think you can define pretty much all Bioware games, as well as most other RPGS and adventure games as following the same sort of overriding choice in how they work. I’m going to call these Story is King games. The gameplay, in whatever form it exists, is really there to connect the story bits together in games like these. Choosing which dialogue choice to use isn’t inherently fun for instance, you do it so that the story progresses. If I pulled the dialogue trees out of the game and made a game just about clicking on text responses to stuff without any context, it’d lose it’s appeal immediately. If I had poorly written dialogue in those dialogue trees, the clicking mechanic will not save them, they’ll still be crap, and you’ll still not like them. Because it’s the *story* that’s central, and the story that you’re there for. The gameplay is there just to act as a glue that ties all the little pieces together so that you have a whole that transitions nicely. This can be done overtly, where it’s really obvious that it’s filler, or more subtly, where you barely notice unless you’re looking. And it can be done in an entertaining way, or a painful way. But no matter how subtle or entertaining the glue is, it’s still just filler; it’s not there to make the story better, it’s there to present the story.
This is in stark contrast to games like Super Mario or Zelda, which are more Gameplay is King, where you could strip the characters and the story out, and you’d still have just as much fun playing the individual levels. The story that does exist in those games is similar to the gameplay in the other type. It’s sort of a way of having glue between the gameplay bits, ways to present the gameplay that doesn’t seem jarring. It’s why Nintendo can get away with basically telling the same story over and over again for every Mario or Zelda game, because it’s never really been about the story, but about playing the levels.
These types of games are great, but neither of them manages to actually integrate the other part into them so that they actually benefit each other directly, rather than simply acting as a frame work in which the other acts. You can pull out and/or replace the other part with no real loss, no cheapening of the experience, no one would even notice. Mario could look like anything else, and the games would still be just as fun, KotOR1 could have a better combat system and the game would only benefit from it. It could have a worse combat system and it’d only suffer from it because it uses it for filler too much, but you could remove the combat system entirely and replace it with a bunch of cutscenes and very little would be lost (I might even prefer that, all things considered. 12. Bloody. Hits. With. A Lightsaber! That can cut through just about anything! Except, aparantely, everything that attacks you in KotOR, where it’s about as effective a killing instrument as a butter knife. -_- But I digress).
There are games that do manage to pull this off though. Not too many, but some. You mentioned Shadow of the Colossus earlier, and while that could be counted among them, I found a better example of the way it blends the two, and it’s a very old game. I’m talking about Myst. Myst is a very interesting game. It first seems like it’s a definite “Gameplay is King” type game, there’s almost no visible narrative to start out with, and you’re never lead around in search of a narrative payoff. You spend all your time trying to figure out how and what puzzle you need to solve. But this appearence is very deceptive, because there’s actually a rather deep intricate narrative hiding under those puzzles and that wandering around exploring. Shadow is similar in some ways to this, but Myst’s narrative is much deeper so it makes a better example. Myst is still a Gameplay is King game, you could have a lot of fun just doing the puzzles. But in Myst story informs that gameplay, it deepens it, and there is a tangible, significant loss if it’s removed. If you’re not paying attention to the story bits, then you actually end up losing Myst, as you’d make the wrong decision about how to save the brothers. Myst manages to merge the gameplay component with the story component, but it’s still a Gameplay is King type of game. You could define it by saying Gameplay is King, but Story Matters. You really don’t see too many of these games, and it’s probably not so easy to do it outside of the context of how Myst did, a combination of compelling gameplay, a focus on exploration, and hiding the narrative in a clever way. Which is basically what Shadow of the Colossus does.
That leaves us with one more permutation of the original two types, the one that’s got almost no games in it, and which I’d perhaps put Pathologic. Story is King, but Gameplay Matters. In a game like this, the gameplay elements have to be intrinsicly tied to the game itself, such that there is not a good way to remove or replace it without weakening the overall effect of the game. There are pretty much no games (if we discount indie games for a moment, I don’t mean to be down on them, those guys are doing some amazing work, but I want to talk about the larger industry) other than Pathologic in which this is the case. At least, I can’t think of any. In any RPG, I can pull out the combat systems or the dialogue systems, and they can be replaced with the systems from another game without too much trouble. Some systems may be better for dealing with certain parts of the story trying to be portrayed, like if you have a branching plot, but they’re rarely essential. I could for instance, simply have you select whether or not you wanted to be pacifistic when you entered into a dialogue, and let the game pick the right options for you in order to have you escape the fight. It’d perhaps be less satisfying for some people, because it removes some of the challenge of it, but that would be more about lack of satisfication involving the gameplay element, you’d have no real difference of opinion on the overall plot itself because of it. If the dialogue to get out of the fight were bad, it’d still be bad, and if it were good, it’d still be good, and the fact that you had to wind your way through 5 dialogue choices in order to get to that resolution instead of zero would have little impact on your sense of that resolution.
But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to use a dialogue tree system in a way that does matter, and isn’t easily removable, because it is. An example would be having to deal with a bureaucrat and having to suffer a very large tree of dialogue choices just to get an answer out of him, that then leads to you running to another NPC somewhere else to get the same and so on. It, in otherwords, would need to be inherently frustrating to mirror the fact that it’s frustrating for the character too. This makes the gameplay mechanic something that informs the story, something that puts what the character is going through into context for the player by generating the same feelings and sensations that the character has. This is not something we see very much, probably because it’s a bit of a truism that “frustrating the player is a bad thing”, and it is true, if you’re trying to provide entertainment or run a business. It cuts off options if you’re trying to do more than that of course. And frustration isn’t the only option for making a mechanic that’s important of course, it’s just the ones we seem to have the best grasp of are the ones that we have a good grasp of because we’re trying to avoid them. Things like tedium, frustration, exhaustion, tension and then by extension, relief and accomplishment (though those two are very hard to develop a metric for, since they have to pay off at the right time and “the right time” tends to vary from player to player), are some of the things that we really know how to make happen through the use of a mechanic. Other things, not so much. So getting more Story is King, but Gameplay Matters type games are going to require two things: the first is developing more tools to use, something that I’m sure the indie developers will be great at the forefront of, and the second is knowing when and how to use those tools and daring to actually try.
I also want to note that, at least in the case of simple Story is King, and Gameplay is King methods of game design, these are not mutually exclusive in a single game, though they are mutually exclusive at any given moment while you’re playing it. GTA is actually a good example of a game which manages to be both Story is King and Gameplay is King, the key is that it can’t be them at the same time. The sandbox area that you’ve got to play in is very much a Gameplay is King type of set up, but the mission system is definitely Story is King. The thing here is that if you’re doing the missions, the gameplay becomes that window dressing glue that exists mostly to bridge each mission together, while if you’re focusing on the sandbox parts, the story falls back into that same window dressing glue instead. I really don’t think there’s anything to be done about that. I’m not sure we could pay proper attention if something tried to be both at once; it’d likely become too distracting for us to really get a sense of what we needed to do or what was going on. One foot has to lead in all cases as it were. I’m also uncertain if the other two types can flip flop in and out with something else, and there are so few of them that it’s really hard to tell.
So anyway, I hope this wasn’t too painfully long to read through, and that it’s at least mildly interesting. Certainly, looking at games using these sorts of categories does begin to highlight where the mechanics are out of place with the narrative, though I’m not entirely sure they do the opposite. But I think that’s more to do with the fact that I’ve got a better handle on mechanic than I do on narrative. Figuring out how to make a game like Myst work would be harder for me to do without falling back on the example that it itself provides (make it a world, make it as close to real as you can, and then tell the player little to nothing), but I can see more ways to start moving towards Gameplay Matters in Story is King games even if there’s a lot still missing before we can get to there being a lot of range with that sort of thing. It’s like trying to do a painting with only two colors of paint; you can do some interesting things, but you are very limited in how far you can deviate with the colors themselves.
Hey Peter, I did post a reply to you, but it doesn’t seem to be showing up yet. It was very long, so I hope the blog didn’t decide to eat it and it’s simply awaiting moderation for whatever reason. I seem to remember posts awaiting moderation tending to say that though, and it’s not right now. Trying to resend it says that I’ve already posted it though. I’ve got it backed up just in case anyway, and it can be split into parts if need be, but unless Raph says there was a problem, I’ll just let it wait for a while.
Isn’t it this one?
There are no posts awaiting moderation right now as I write this (though this thread generates them at a rapid rate!).
Not all sex is healthy. 😛 In particular, not sure the sex specifically as depicted in the video, is particularly healthy. Especially not the bit with shooting the hooker afterwards.
@Raph, nope, so I’ll repost. It was about 3 times LONGER than that one, maybe more. It really wasa beast. Is there a character limit?
How odd, it’s saying the comment is a duplicate, but it’s very definitely not here.
It’s about 2 and a half pages long single spaced though, could the comment thread be choking on the length?
Hey, there it is! That was odd.
Raph wrote:
I might be Scottish but I swear I wasn’t thinking of bestiality. ;p
Seriously, I could point to a dozen different studies that suggest sex is indeed healthy. I remember one 10-year study from 2001 that suggested men who engaged in sexual activity at least three times a week are 50% less likely to die from heart disease.
The researchers further suggested that other factors, such as healthy living, could be contributing to the results. This would make sense given that people often work on their bodies when they are confronted with the prospect of sexual activity.
I don’t think that counts as sex…
Morgan, sex with random prostitutes is prolly a good way to get an STD. That aside, it’s probably not that great of a way of presenting sex either.
‘Cause it really comes down more to the fact that you’re buying sex like that is so that you can get a “power-up!” out of it. As a concept, if you actually buy into it (which no proper thinking adult should) it’s basically saying that sex is about using people to get what you want and then tossing them out after you’ve gotten it (or in the case of GTA, shooting them and getting your money back). It trivializes the act and turns it into something that could cause severe relationship problems if you were unbalanced enough to carry the concept over into real life (and kids tend to be more unbalanced than adults, simply by virtue of being kids. I support the M rating because of this and wouldn’t even remotely consider giving it to anyone too young to deal with it). Sex itself may be healthy, but the relationships between the character and the prostitute in those sequences probably aren’t “healthy” ways of looking at what would otherwise being a healthy act.
It would honestly be less of an issue if it didn’t act as a health restorative, but was simply something in the game that served absolutely no purpose for doing. Making it mechanically beneficial does change the context of what you’re seeing a great deal though. There’s also almost no incentive for not killing the hooker after you’re done either, unless GTA IV makes it a LOT harder to run from the cops that prior installments did. While I’ll defend the right for that content to exist till my last breath, I’m sure as hell not going to say that it’s a healthy way of presenting the concept of sex. That’d legitimize behaving that way for real. Fortunately, most people *can* tell the difference between the game and the real world.
Anticorium>So your argument is that maybe someday Richard will have some teenage children of his own, and then he’ll see just how wrong he was?
Amaranthar>heh, anythings possible. But my experience is that usually, once someone takes such a strong stance, they are very hesitant to change. But stranger things have happened.
Oh the other hand, it may be that I actually have two teenage children right now and therefore am not speaking entirely speculatively on this topic?
Richard
As someone who’s out of school and in his first job without injury or felony convictions, and as someone who’s intensely and obsessively aware of the machinations of his own mind, I strongly, strongly beg to differ.
In our cherished grading system, that would be a C. That is, it means you didn’t fail. That’s a far, far cry from doing it “pretty well”. Well, perhaps not, considering the lofty and exacting standards in our schools.
But you are aware. You don’t just accept them, you examine them.
That’s pretty good. There is a limit to what a parent can do. Human minds are plastic but not programmable in the abstract. Stimulus-Response training has limits.
The test is proven by the answer required. All I ask of my children is that they are productive, self-sufficient and most of all happy. If those are not enough to keep them out of trouble, something is wrong that no amount of change in parenting style or goals can change.
I was sort of making a point about mental health. Violence and sex ARE linked in the minds of many, for example. Leaving aside the purely aerobic component of it, or the benefits to the prostate, etc, there’s a lot more to think about.
I think that basically sums up every argument on this comment thread into a simple three word phrase: Context is important.
Which is why Amaranthar’s formula is so stupid, unless it means something nonobvious to me.
People keep out of trouble without those things. Again, “out of trouble” is an incredibly low standard. I really don’t see how you can be satisfied with a society of reasonably empty jails. Is that really the goal of parenting, to you? To keep one’s children from doing any harm?
@Michael, what is the goal then? If the answer is “To make them more like how I think they should be” is that really a *good* goal? Because re-read the second line you quoted. His standard was happy, independent, and successful, not out of trouble.
But If they’re happy, self-sufficient, productive, *and* in trouble with the law (for bad reasons anyway, getting arrested at a protest may not qualify), something’s pretty broken. That’s why an important metric is whether or not they’re okay in society in addition to those things.
Evidently. I guess I’ll explain, but it really surprises me that I have to.
The 3 T’s:
Teach them, this is pretty obvious (or maybe I’m assuming too much again?), Play nice, share, help others, etc. As they get older, it gets more involved. Don’t smoke, stay away from drugs, don’t steal, respect others property and rights, etc.
Test them. Again, pretty simple. Ask them what they’d do when situations present themselves, double check on what you’ve tried to teach them previously, watch for missing things like money and booze, basically look for signs that they’ve taken a wrong turn.
Trust them. Eventually you have to. You have to let them go. If something happens, they get in some trouble, you go back and try to re-teach them.
All of this is very fluid. You can’t teach them everything at once, then test them all at once, then just turn them loose. You teach a little, test as you go, and trust a little bit here and there, and hope it all works so that by the time they are older, getting ready to leave the nest, they can cope with an ever more troubling world.
You want them do do well, so you make them do their homework, and help as you can… you teach them. You test that they have by talking to their teachers, watching what’s going on, and you at some point start trusting them that they are doing it without question. If it proves out that they are skipping their homework at that point, you go back and teach some more, maybe some grounding as punishment, and move forwards.
Now I’m going to give you some unsolicited experiences as a parent and concerned citizen. I have almost no experience with anything major with my kids. The only thing that did happen was that my son, 14 at the time, had been false bird at some bullies (sticking his index finger at them). He admitted that he did this simply because he didn’t like them. (So I did some more teaching.) As a result, they were comming after him. One attacked him outside a teen rec center, and he fought him off. Two later chased him down streets after school until he turned and faced them off. He lost his backpack that time and I had a talk with one’s mother. Broken home situation, and this kid, the biggest and meanest of the bunch, actually laughed at his mother when she told him “this stops now.”
Then it culminated when 7 of them cornered my son inside of a friends home. They came in to the home despite being told by the friend to stay out, twice, and my son locked himself in the bathroom both time. He called me the second time, and I was on my over. In the meantime, they had left and the friend had locked the door to keep them out. But they got in somehow, before I got there. (The stories of how were confusing, also there was the friends little brothers and sisters and girlfriend and another kid.)
When I arrived, the friends girlfriend opened the door in a panic and yelled “they’ve got him on the floor”, so I was inside in a flash while they took off. They were kicking my son in the head! Police reports were filed, complaints made, and miraculously, my son also was charged. We got it dropped, of course. Talking to the police, they were already investigating these bullies in relation to the house next door. The guy, looked around 30 to me, was giving them booze.
When my son was very little, he had a best friend who lived just down the street. This kid lived with his grandmother and mother, both extreme drunks, and I suspect pot smokers too. But they did care about this kid. I watched one time as the mother was outside screaming obscenities at the neighbors across the street. The boys were little more than toddlers at the time. While this mother screamed a long list of foul words and threats, you’d think she wasn’t aware. But as soon as her kid started walking towards the street, she was right there. It was almost funny to listen to her, in one breath screaming obscenities, and the next talking quietly to her child “no, James, you don’t go in the street”, then screaming more obscenities, then talking mildly to the little kid, back and forth. They always had super for him at 6:00, no matter how drunk they were. He never had a mark on him, always had clean clothes. Still child services were always threatening to take him away from them. They should have, as it turned out.
As they grew up and went to elementary school together, they remained closest friends. I took this kid under my wing as best I could. Tried to teach him that his mom and grandmother cared for him, but they just have a problem with alcohol. He turned in a drug peddler selling drugs near the school, was later threatened by that pusher, turned him in for that too. He was awarded a citizens award by the Police chief and mayor at a school function for his bravery. They moved across town and I lost track of him, my son and he went in separate directions as far as friends. Today, at the age of 17, he’s on drugs.
The “friend” in the first story, whose house was invaded by the bullies, living with only his father, who spent more time at bars than at home, is also on drugs, and he looks very sick to me.
My son had stopped hanging around with each before I knew anything about it, and I only knew of the one because I asked, while the other became obvious from his looks, but I asked anyways to be sure.
Outside of kids, I spent the wee hours of the morning last weekend outside patrolling our neighborhood along with some of the other men. We’ve been getting vandalized. There’s a college just down the street, and they walk past here to go downtown to the bars. It’s been very quiet for years, but this past year they hit us all hard. 4 Times they’ve kicked the side mirrors off every car parked on the street (one time some of the neighbors say them and even had a description, yelled at them to chase them off.) They’ve stolen lawn furniture, destroyed Chistmas decorations, etc. Despite the numbers of college kids going by, do you think even one witness other than ourselves have stepped forward? Hell no. The police always arrive at least 15 minutes later, usually more like a half hour. They’re just too busy with other reports, usually downtown. So we’ve taken to patrolling ourselves.
But worst of all, far worse than all the other things. My daughter was raped by a 17 year old in a classic date rape situation.
So, if any of you think I don’t have a right to get involved and have a say about violence and sex in media, I don’t give a flying …
The fact is that psychiatrists and other academia have long ago proven beyond doubt that violence in TV does affect aggressive and anti-social behavior. They have beginning evidence that games are even worse. They are calling for more in depth studies. It’s not any different than drugs in the home or on the streets. But some of you want me and everyone else to instead believe you that there is no harm. You, illustrious gaming people, want me and the rest of us to believe you over the true experts. And you want to promote this unhealthy outlook of disrespect and violence towards other people because you have the right?
I really don’t think so.
@Eolirin
Wow, that is long. :p Just to say, I’ll have to wait until I get home from work to read and reply to that. Just saying since I know I, myself, get anxious to see replies sometimes, especially with posts like that. 🙂
Eolirin wrote:
Prostitution is as old as sin. It’s part of our history, and it’s part of our humanity. I’m not a puritan. Henry VIII had harems as did many kings and emperors before him. Prostitution was legal in ancient Rome. For some reason, the people of the past were much better at handling, emotionally, meaningless sex.
We do that anyway. We just rationalize our way out of guilt. Or call those people part of our “social network” and never speak to them again. You’re fighting against nature. Our genes (and memes) are inherently selfish.
Sex can be meaningless. Prostitution is a perfect example.
Yeah, so consider the context. The game is called GRAND THEFT AUTO. The game is about the criminal underground, organized crime, etc. You play the role of a gangster—with a rap sheet that includes murder and human trafficking—not a suburban teenager with overprotective parents. Geez, watch The Sopranos. Prostitution, drugs, murder, theft—even destructive relationships.
You are not your character. You are you playing the role of a character.
Raph wrote:
So was I. There are even more studies that suggest regular sexual activity positively benefits mental health. Sex is a huge topic in psychology circles.
Michael Chui wrote:
The jails could be reasonably empty because the criminals are smarter and therefore more capable of avoiding convictions and hiding their crimes. Simply because there are less people in prison does not directly correlate to less crime.
I entered all the data on crime in local communities into Excel and almost made the conclusion that there was more crime in certain areas, but then I realized that the data comes from reported crimes.
It has little to do with the fact that it’s prostitution Morgan, but with the fact that it’s beneficial as a gameplay mechanic and the player is rewarded more if they then kill the prostitute. And understand, I’m not for it’s removal, I’m merely against claiming that the views being portrayed in the games, if applied to real life, would be good ones to have. And stating that stuff has been around for ever and that humans do unhealthy things all the time doesn’t make them healthy. Yeah, sex can be meaningless, that doesn’t speak as to whether or not it *should* be. People also kill each other all the time for no reason, but that doesn’t mean they *should*.
But I guess you missed the part where I said that only an unbalanced person would carry the stuff over into real life, since you seem to feel the need to restate things I’ve already said as some sort of counter-argument. The reason why you need to be off kilter though, is because it’s *not* a healthy portrayal of the concepts. If the character were real, and doing those things, no one would ever make the satetement that it was healthy behavior. But there’s nothing wrong with GTA having it, it’s just that trying to paint it in a light such that the actions depicted in the game are even remotely displayed as good ways of portraying those things legitimizes those actions in the real world. They’re not, it wouldn’t be okay to really behave like that.
It’s okay in the context of a game though. In fact you’ll note I *never* said that it should be removed, quite the contrary! I even went as far as to say I’d defend it’s right to be there quite fiercly. But you can’t call it something it’s not even if you have no intent to change it, or even if you support it being there. It’s the difference between a serious portrayal, and being gratuitous. It’s okay if something’s gratuitous, it serves a market need, and it’s not really harmful. But you don’t get to act as if it’s not gratuitous when it is.
The stuff on the Sopranos is not what you would consider healthy either, if it were real. It may be fun to watch, but anyone trying to act it out has problems. Same thing here. Doesn’t need to go away, doesn’t need to be censored, simply needs to be recognized as not a way to act, even if it’s fun to watch or play.
For some reason, the people of the past were much better at handling, emotionally, meaningless sex.
Yes, they embraced slavery and patriarchy and in many cases women were property… Your argument somehow fails to be convincing…
You are not your character. You are you playing the role of a character.
Really? Most people I’ve interviewed in MMOS claim that they are not!!!
Oh, and one more thing Morgan, it’s not that we’re selfish, it’s that we’re shortsighted. Most of the things we do actually aren’t in our best interest. Most of them are stupid, risky, and gain us nothing. We do them because we can’t really identify what the risks are, what our problems are, or what we actually want. Humans need emotional connections, and meaningful ones. We’re hard coded to be social creatures. So I won’t buy that we’re hard coded to be selfish in the way that you’re implying, because you’re using it to justify callousness and indifference, and those aren’t at all beneficial to the person being them. At best they’re a sign of an inner emptiness and a lack of contentment. At worst they’re a sign of a sociopathic or psychopathic disorder.
Eolirin wrote:
Whether sex should be meaningless, or whether people should kill other people, is a moral judgment. It’s not your place or anyone else’s to make that moral judgment for everyone else.
Yet another silly argument. I’m afraid you’re forgetting Newton’s laws. You’re also forgetting the difference between short-term and long-term returns. Killing a prostitute after receiving services from the prostitute would yield short-term returns, even in the real world; however, the long-term returns would be diminishing to the extent of police action, jail time, and even death. GTA does portray these things correctly.
I’m going to be blunt: calling such portrayals of sex and violence gratuitous is less than a developed argument. I might agree with Raph on a lot, but I also find a lot of his characterizations worthy of disagreement. He wants to call games “art” and yet criticizes that “art” for thematical propriety. I don’t call games “art” because I recognize that games are more than “art”—they’re games and as such, they’re capable of allowing users to interactively model causes and effects.
GTA might not simulate the real world to a perfect degree, but games, like movies, reflect society. They model the real world, abstractly and basically.
You speak as though the short-term rewards for utilizing and killing a prostitute is a significant element of the game. It’s not. You could do the same thing in GTA: Vice City, which I played and enjoyed. The returns gained from such actions are too little to be done frequently, especially with any strategic intent.
Yes, you can perform those actions anytime you want and as frequently as you want, but most players who engage in those actions will only do so once to see what happens and every other time when they’re bored, drunk, high, or just not paying attention. GTA3 and GTA4 are sandbox worlds. What is a sandbox? It’s a place where people can experiment.
It is real. Not the Sopranos, specifically. But there are crime families and there are underworld elements. There is also such a thing as a hard-knock life.
We live in a world that’s not suburban happy-happy fun times, a world where people would readily kill you for your skin color or your religion. We live in a world where people are impoverished far below American standards of poverty, where they struggle just to live to the next day. The real world is a scary place. Instead of trying to shield you and your childrens’ eyes from reality, show them, and guide them towards making decisions that help change this real world for the better. Stop fooling yourself into thinking that everything’s all good.
Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
You’re right. My argument does fail to be convincing, but only when the listener believes their values, morals, and ethics to be the right and only way. Ethnocentrism is ignorance.
That’s why you don’t interview people in-game.
Eolirin wrote:
Again, this is a short-term vs. long-term return issue. Successful people do what’s in their best interest over the long term. Along the way, they can justify serving their own interests by using altruism as a rationale. Selfishness doesn’t necessarily imply that others are negatively affected.
Read The Selfish Gene and The Selfish Meme. Read up on egoism while you’re at it.
That’s like saying fear isn’t beneficial. Human behavior isn’t so black-and-white.
Eolirin said (a lot):
This is insight. I’ve noticed this exact same thing…
…when playing 3rd Edition D&D.
No, seriously, I’m going somewhere with this. I think you’re dead right. Discussions about what is a mechanic and what is a game aside (but only slightly aside, I will get back to them), it does seem generally mutually exclusive that you’re either playing, or listening/reading/watching. But, more basically, control is passed back and forth. Sometimes the player is in control, and it’s Gameplay, and sometimes the author is in control, and it’s Story. I’d wager that the reason you don’t consider dialogue choices to be Gameplay is because the author is still in control.
So, in some games, it’s about what the player gets to do, and in others it’s about what the author gets to do. Both can’t be in control at once (though I’ll stop short of saying it’s impossible, as I don’t believe in impossibility).
Oh, and while I’m reminded, on the topic of frustration, ever hear of an Infocom game called Bureaucracy? >:P
So, ahem, I’ve noticed similarly that 3rd Ed. seems to have the part of the rules you use in combat (most of them), and the part you use when not in combat (all of the skills save Tumble, if I can indulge in hyperbole. DMs don’t remember to make players make Balance checks, let’s be honest here.) I’ve become disgruntled with 3rd Ed over time, and I eventually pinned down that this was why. You have, just like with computer games, the Gameplay part (the combat) and the Story part (the RPing and the making of Gather Information and Knowledge: Obscura rolls). And, similarly, you have some groups where it’s all about combat, some where it’s all about Roleplay, and some that focus on one while trying to give the other their due.
During Combat, the players are as in control as they can possibly be. In Story, it’s the aforementioned dialogue option time. Does anyone disagree?
So, personally, I hold the broadest possible view of game mechanics as possible. The dialogue option part is still a game mechanic, just like you’re still playing the game of D&D when you’re making those Diplomacy rolls (and if you haven’t seen the April Fools errata WotC did this year, you have to go read it :p ). I take practically everything that can be done while the program is running as a mechanic that is, for better or worse, part of the game. But, I can also see that if the player doesn’t have control and it’s Story time, that it could just as easily be said that it’s not a game at that point (Gameplay is suspended) and thus what you do isn’t part of that (if you’re seriously RPing you rarely actually roll the dice; they’re just there if you feel you need them. In my experience.).
Does this sound right to the professional game people so far? 🙂
One other thought occurred to me, reading Eolirin’s post. I think why I like the Story is King games enough to “defend” them is that they’re the high-tech version of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books I used to love. The play is, effectively, identical, with game saves in place of cramped fingers and folded corners of pages. It’s them with visuals and sound and mature themes and exponentially more substance and story. Orders of magnitude more.
My question then is: am I really playing a game, or am I putting up with a game to read a story *type* that can only really be done well (or, alternatively, can be done really well) in the format and medium of a game? And if I’m enjoying myself, how much does the distinction matter?
Oh yeah, and Eolirin? No need to apologize at all for such an interesting and insightful post. 🙂
@Amaranthar
Just a note, the tricky thing with the studies that seem to show a link between presentation of behavior in media and behavior in the observer is the distinction between correlation and causation.
From everything I’ve seen, there is correlation, but there is not causation. The studies that test causality nearly always come back negative, while the studies that only look for correlation sometimes come back positive.
For example, is there a link between Grand Theft Auto and violent crime, or is there a link between the kinds of parents that let 12-year-olds play GTA, their parenting, and violent crime *of which GTA is only an arbitrary manifestation*? Or, is the link directionally between people seeking violent behavior and GTA, where the latter is again an arbitrary manifestation of the former? These are pretty “classic” examples, so apologies if you’ve heard them before.
(To ask, perhaps, a better question: is there a link between escapism and acting out? Are people that are highly driven to escapist pastimes more liable to also manifest the frustrations outwardly, such that an introspective manifestation would be the consumption of media that conforms to their own escapist fantasies and an extroverted one would involve acting out against the world in some way?
Are frustratons with the world always bad?
And, wouldn’t the above depend entirely on what drives someone to begin with, making the entire thing moot? After all, if you know what’s driving someone, you’ve already solved the puzzle, haven’t you?)
Technically, it’s society’s place, which is the collective expression of everyone’s moral judgements. It’s not like it arises out of the blue.
If you explain to me in what way anything in GTA is made better by the ability to pan the camera closely around a blowjob, then I’ll concede the argument. But I kind of doubt you can.
This is what I was saying was puerile and bad art. There’s plenty of ways to get points across without resorting to this. If we saw it in a book, we’d say it was bad writing. If we saw it in a movie, we would call it bad filmmaking. That is why I call it gratuitous. Gratuitous means that it’s there to push boundaries for no good reason. If there’s a good reason, then it isn’t gratuitous.
CAN there be good reasons for graphically showing a blowjob? Yes. Of course. But I don’t see those reasons in evidence here.
So your distinction between games and art doesn’t feel very reasoned to me — and yes, I have read your blog post on it. Plenty of theory of art supports the notion that all forms of media are interactive.
GTA, like all models, has implicit slants to the models it allows you to manipulate. You cannot be successful in GTA without modeling criminal behavior. In that sense it is not a true sandbox, it’s a limited one. This bothers people right off the bat, because a model that leaves out choices is usually done that way because a) it doesn’t think those other choices are valid or b) it’s interested solely in the subset of possible behaviors. I think GTA is a B, but it’s easy to see why people are worried about it being read as an A.
Then there is the question of how they model the behaviors they want to explore. You could make a case that they want to do all of them to the maximum detail possible, and that therefore that’s why they are doing the blowjobs to the same detail as they do radio stations and dating. But the fact is that in practice, the blowjobs ARE peripheral to the game. Therefore they choice was made to invest this peripheral part of the game was this level of detail when it’s an easy candidate to leave vaguer. They chose not to. That is a design choice with motives — and I guess I question those motives.
@Peter,
Your points on control of the player versus control of the author are pretty interesting… but I think my point loses more than a little if you do that, because it’s not always so clear cut as it being a matter of control. I’m defining Gameplay as King here in that the action is inherently enjoyable without the context of a narrative. I could reskin any Mario game with new graphics, new characters, and new dialogue and the game itself would not even remotely suffer for it. I could pull a level out of a Zelda game, or a boss fight, and it’d still be fun to do, even without the overarching narrative that ties all those levels together. But despite the fact that I can reskin all of that, those mechanics are often actually highly scripted. The player has just as little control over how to beat the boss in a Zelda game as the player does in how they choose to go through a dialogue tree if they’re trying to avoid combat. Maybe less. There’s probably more freedom of choice in how to play through a Bioware game than there is in a Zelda game. If you actually want to finish the Zelda game, you need to do everything that the designer tells you do in exactly the way the designer told you to. The Bioware games let you play through multiple narrative paths depending on what choices you make. And sorry if I was unclear here, the dialogue choices are gameplay mechanics, they’re just “weak” ones. They don’t Matter, as it were since they aren’t intrinsically interesting to do. But you still go through the same scripted paths that the Zelda player gets, but you get to choose from several instead of just one. Yet they’re both very different in how they approach gameplay mechanics, and how the player experiences them. So the difference isn’t really about control, it’s about how the content is experienced. It’s about being active or being passive. Gameplay is King games are active, Story is King games are passive. Rather, they lead with that foot. There are active and passive parts to both of course, but they’re about being one or the other to a greater degree.
For Gameplay is King games, the passive parts tend to actually be level design. But the experience of the game is based on what you do in those levels, rather than simply the levels themselves. Choice is the active component of Story is King games, but the experience is based on what you’re making the choice about, rather than the act of making the choice itself.
The thing is, you can’t categorize any given concept as being inherently passive or inherently active, or at least, there are very few that you can. You say that combat has the player in the most control, but it doesn’t have to, it’s just common that it does. I could make a choose your own combat cutscene method of combat for a game, something that works kind of like a dialogue tree where you pick from some options, and it throws out a result. This would be really passive, despite being about combat. It’s basically turning active comabt (gameplay based combat) into passive combat (narrative based combat).
But you brought up table top rpgs, and that gives me another good example of this. In a table top RPG, dialogue is, or rather can be, an *active* gameplay element. Trying to convince an NPC character to help your party, can be done without any dice at all, but it still is an inherently interesting act, something that people do all the time regardless of the type of content that’s involved. We’re doing it right now actually. So table top RPGs show a very interesting synthesis between narrative and gameplay in how they manage to make narrative directly active, rather than mostly passive. Table top rpgs would actually break my labels, because even a heavily narrative driven game could very easily be a Gameplay is King stlye game. If I want to take them into account I really need to use the terms active and passive. But sadly (for gaming anyway, but not for my labels since it means they get to stay as they are), I don’t think there’s any way to really translate that into a video game short of AI that’s capable of being as good of a conversationalist as a human. I’m not sure how you’d dynamically and actively generate a narrative in a video game and have it work, so using Story and Gameplay still works okay for that realm.
I remember those choose your own adventure books too, I think I was going to bring them up at some earlier on point as being an example of how the Bioware games weren’t doing much that wasn’t possible outside the game medium, just that games remove some of the logistic issues of doing in to the same level easily. Hypertext Choose Your Own Adventures would work almost as well at pulling it off though. You’d lose the Audio/Visual components and the active combat elements, but of those two, only the active combat elements really cross into that almost impossible to do outside of a game realm, and well, Bioware combat is rarely anything to write home about. All that aside, they were fun and they were part of my childhood too. I think part of the reason that I don’t really get much out of the Bioware stuff is because of the aforementioned issues I have connecting to any of it. I loved KotOR2 though, up until the end anyway. I’m not sure what the difference was per se, other than that it was outsourced to Obsidian, but I connected to those characters and that plot, and it held me right up to the rushed ending that should never have happened. There are even audio recordings for what the ending was planned to be like in the game files… and they were amazing. But they never got to finish the game properly, and the ending was quite possibly the worst drop in quality I’ve ever seen. I do love the concept of choose your own adventure though, but I’d still want to see Gameplay Matter, even then. Otherwise it’ll always seem half complete to me, no matter how enjoyable it actually is. Just like Mario and Zelda are half complete, even if they’re still some of the most fun things there are out there and I love them very much.
@Eolirin,
You answered yourself. The defining rubric being used is, “Are they in trouble or making trouble for society?” By that measure, happiness, competence, and productivity are merely means to an end.
As to what I think are good goals, I would quote Einstein: do they seek truth, do they appreciate beauty, and are they kind? But that was off the top of my head; I’d need another ten years before I’m ready to declare martial law as emperor of the universe. Hopefully not more than 10 years.
@Amaranthar,
This is because you’re taking for granted that you’re espousing a basic and self-evident fact. That’s not true. In my world, everything has to be explained to me in painstaking detail, because I’m a little bit of a moron. That’s my curse in life. It makes conversations in-person very, very difficult.
However, in reading what you’ve written, it turns out that I did understand you, and I maintain that it’s a terrible formula. I have this atrocious habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, even when I’m dead certain they’re wrong, which usually results in my being accused of using lawyer tactics, insincerity, and, occasionally, even logic.
I feel it’s more fair. Most people interpret this as an insult. But I’m used to that.
When I told len that “this” is why the formula was stupid, I meant that it’s an impossible method doomed to failure and frustration. Unsurprisingly, that’s what many parents end up thinking parenting is all about, plus the wonderful revelation that your kid ended up OK after all. I wonder about my parents, sometimes: I think they believe they did a good job: I pay for everything I own, nowadays, but they don’t know that thinking about them is a trigger for depression, which is why I moved away in the first place.
I mean, look at how you describe it.
First, there is the incredible presumption that you can teach them at all. This isn’t true. No one can be taught anything, especially not the things you’ve listed. They can have behaviors ingrained, sure. They can recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but that doesn’t mean they’re remotely loyal or that they have any idea what an oath is. Your list is a list of things that children learn, not what they’re taught.
For instance, people don’t play nice because they were taught to. People play nice because it’s interesting and enjoyable to. I mean… really: did every griefer have an incompetent parent, by your lights? I doubt it.
Second, it’s a logical step to take to verify that what you’ve asked them to memorize can be regurgitated properly. That’s within reason, to be sure. Again, the Pledge of Allegiance. But the rest of it? A parent isn’t a policeman.
Third, the trust bullet point is just… bleh. In short, you don’t actually trust them. But you’re forced into it because you can’t sit on them your entire life (or theirs). And you let them go until you need to check into a retirement home, at which point you rope them back in? Or do you do that when it looks like they’re marrying a girl you’re not so sure about?
I’ve given this criticism unconstructively, and I submit that I do so because I’m in a position only to criticize, not to tell you how to do it better. I’ve spent the past few years working to come up with something, but I don’t have anything solid yet.
I would point out that you’re not reciting any justification for why or how you parent the way you do: you’re upholding a tradition without thought or critique, based on what you’ve said. And like any tradition, I would assert that it bears the same kind of scrutiny.
So, to leave this with a little bit of constructiveness, I’d re-define your 3 T’s and rearrange them.
Trust them first: Children are neither stupid nor incompetent; they are limited and incomplete. (In a 30-year-old adult, dependence and incompleteness are signs of retardation. In a child, they’re normal.) Which means that a child is perfectly capable of figuring things out without being explicitly taught.
Then test them: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on them. Through conversation and observation, you can tell what they’ve figured out and what they haven’t.
And teach them: If they haven’t figured something out, and you think they should be, then try to arrange things so that they’ll have to deal with it soon. If they still can’t figure it out, they’ll recognize you as someone who knows the answer and they’ll ask you for help.
One final point of criticism.
If you’ve successfully taught them, and they’ve passed your tests, is there anything left to trust, except that your lessons were effective and their passage was real? Are you trusting your child, or yourself, in that last T? I would opine that the only person being trusted is yourself.
Peter, on the correlation and causation issue, here’s what this guy says:
Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
B.A. 1976 Butler University
M.A. 1978 Stanford University
(advisor: Lee Ross)
Ph.D. 1980 Stanford University
(advisor: J. Merrill Carlsmith)
Craig A. Anderson received his PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 1980. He has been a faculty member at Rice University (1980-1988), Ohio State University (visiting,1984-1985), and the University of Missouri-Columbia (1988-1999). He joined Iowa State University in 1999 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology. He has received teaching awards at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and has been awarded “Fellow” status by the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. He is currently on the Executive Council of the International Society for Research on Aggression. His research on attribution theory, depression, social judgment, covariation detection, biases, and human aggression has been published in top social, personality, and cognitive, journals. His recent focus on violent video games has led to U.S. Senate testimony, addresses to and consultations with numerous scientific, governmental, and public policy groups worldwide, public policy research awards, and articles and stories in top science news outlets.
Myth 5. Correlational studies are irrelevant.
Facts: The overly simplistic mantra, “Correlation is not causation,” is useful when teaching introductory students the risks in too-readily drawing causal conclusions from a simple empirical correlation between two measured variables. However, correlational studies are routinely used in modern science to test theories that are inherently causal. Whole scientific fields are based on correlational data (e.g., astronomy). Well conducted correlational studies provide opportunities for theory falsification. They allow examination of serious acts of aggression that would be unethical to study in experimental contexts. They allow for statistical controls of plausible alternative explanations.
Post got eaten, and I can’t repost it because “it looks like I already said that”. But it’s not showing as awaiting mod either.
Raph wrote:
You’re not really rotating the camera around the activity, Raph. You’re rotating the camera around the character, which is what you can do throughout the game whether the character is shooting another gangster, racing down the street, or being run down by a police car. It’s not gratuitous; it’s emergent. I seriously doubt the Rockstar programmers wrote a specific function just for rotating around that specific activity. The function is likely generalized, applicable to a variety of circumstances, and used all over.
I’ve never formalized my thoughts on the matter, but you can bet I will when the association is up-and-running. Art:Games::TV:Events.
I agree here. Models, even scientific models, can be constrained. A sandbox can be a walled garden in which the players are free to do what they wish with the flowers.
I disagree here though. Prostitution is thematically appropriate to the game, whose plot and characters and story revolve around the seedy criminal underworld. Prostitution adds value to that environment just as a strip club would as well. When you consider that the prostitution bit as part of a whole experience, the prostitution bit isn’t gratuitous; it’s useful, valuable, interesting, and expected.
In earlier GTA games, you could only see the car rocking. This time, a choice was clearly made to do these more graphic sexual animations, and to allow the camera to move in closer. *shrug*
If you go back to the original post — I am not talking about the prostitution per se. I am talking about how it is rendered in the game.
@Morgan,
I perhaps said that badly, but I wasn’t trying to say that we’re not selfish (you’ll note the words “in the way you’re implying”), but that your use of the word selfish to justify callousness and indifference is actually wrong, because that’s from us also being shortsighted, which is the *real* problem. The point that selfishness can include altruism was actually part of it. If we were less short-sighted, that selfishness would probably manifest in much better ways than it does, and more often. I edited it down because I was repeating myself too much, but I do get that. But I’ve yet to meet, or hear about even, a callous and indifferent person that was genuinely happy and content that wasn’t also a sociopath. I’ve heard of, and met, people that were callous and indifferent as a way of dealing with a great deal of suffering, but I’ve also never heard of any of them that managed to actually overcome those issues by being that way. Usually they stop being that way as part of dealing with the problems they’ve got actually. It’s a short term thing, if you want to frame it that way. There’s no long term benefit to it, even if it does get used over a long term.
Because healthy has nothing to do with what choices we actually make, and it has nothing to do with minute to minute behavior or actions. I can eat a diet of nothing but cheeseburgers, and that’s my choice, and I wouldn’t take away someone’s right to make that choice per se (I’m not for punishing victim-less crimes really), but it’s still not healthy to do it. I can become callous and indifferent as a way of coping, but it’s still not a healthy way to cope. And it’s certainly not in the person’s best interest to be so, since we are almost all striving for some sense of happiness and satisfaction, even if we all define that somewhat differently, and that pretty much never actually brings it. Only being able to see short term gains and ignoring long term status is *not* healthy behavior, nor is it in the best interest of the person. You yourself say that the ones who succeed are the ones best able to see the long term.
On to some direct points.
First off, applying laws of motion to human behavior, and I have to assume that’s what you’re talking about, like all other applications of physical science, is at best an analogy, and at worst dangerous social agenda. Physics and psychology may have things in common, but they’re not the same thing.
But it’s mostly irrelevant, because you can make the stars go away. It’s not that hard to run away from the cops long enough for your star rating to drop back down to nothing. This means that while it is not actually useful to use the prostitutes as money bags, any time you actually legitimately need to use them for the health up, it usually makes more sense to shoot them afterwards than to not. You get your money back and then some, and you also get the health benefit, and there are no long term effects since it’s really easy to reset the counter in this case. So no, it really doesn’t model the real world very well. The counter resets to zero and the cops forget you or your victim even existed. The biggest problem with the model that’s being provided is that there really aren’t any long term consequences, only short term ones. But I’m not talking about a crime spree involving the mass murder of prostitutes either. I’m talking about shooting them after you’ve actually needed them, which really isn’t that often to begin with anyway. It’s trivial part of the game, but that’s not the point. Because it’s not about the game.
This actually pisses me off a lot Morgan, because you can’t even seem to keep my positions straight. I’m not, nor was I ever, arguing for hiding from any of this content in any way whatsoever. I explictly, and repeatedly, stated that I don’t feel it should necessarily be changed or that I’d be okay with it going away. You talk about guiding my children (who are not only non-existant, but which is also weird of you to say, since I never brought up protecting the children except in a single offhand remark about not giving a 10-12 year old a game that’s rated 17+, something I don’t think I should need to explain) towards making decisions that help change the world for the better, but no one can even get there if there’s no acceptance that it’s not *good* for real people to be in those situations or to act that way, or to *have* to act that way. You keep missing my point, and I really don’t know why, I don’t think I can be much more explict than I have been about it not being about censoring this stuff, which is what you seem to be implying when you say I’m trying to “shield my eyes” against the content. It’s nonsense, I’m not. But the characters on the Sopranos, and anyone in similiar real world situations, should never be mistaken for being in good situations, healthy situations, situations that allow them to grow in positive ways, situations that provide them with happiness and contentment. They are in often tragic situations. No one categorizes a “hard-knock life” as being a good one.
But never once have I made any statements that attempt to minimize this fact. My arguing that the content – not the game itself, not even the content in the context of the game, but the content taken alone – being portrayed is inherently unhealthy is *because* I realize that they’re rooted in real world situations that are also inherently unhealthy, and you can’t help make them better if you accept them as okay and in no need of help. It’s not because I want to censor the game, not because I feel that the content doesn’t need to exist (even if I’d like to see it presented in a better way at times), but because accepting it as nothing important, or worse, as something that’s perfectly fine means that in the real world it’s also nothing that needs to be examined, and that is patently false. And you even seem to be bloody agreeing with me over that point by suggesting that there should be guiding of some sort with an eye towards making the world better over these situations.
If everything is not all good, then we need to identify what’s *not* good and try to make it better, right? That’s the pragmatic approach to attempting to solve a problem, no? Highlight trouble areas, figure out the root causes, and attempt to deal with those causes. The game itself has nothing to do with this though, and it’s never been part of what I’ve been trying to say. It’s been about attempting to label the content being portrayed by the game as being something that needs to be looked at and improved in the real world, something that can’t be done if there’s no acceptance that the content, the content and again, not the bloody game, is based on things that are not for the best. And this isn’t about sex, or even meaningless sex really, but sex combined with violence combined with the trivialization of life, which is why you bringing up that sex is healthy made little sense, and you being defensive about Raph’s “not all sex is healthy” comment made even less. It’s fine within the context of the game, but it’s not fine out of the context of the game, and there is nothing gained here by not applying that qualified label. GTA is not a good guide to life. Raph even points out that a big part of the reason why is because it’s not a true sandbox, but deliberately slanted toward depicting criminal life, something that’s again, okay in the context of the game, but that shouldn’t really be condoned as being a good way to act. It’s not supposed to be though, and that’s fine, because it’s not telling you to go out and be that way.
The only reason why you should be aruging this point so defensively is if you really believe that it’s okay to act like you do in GTA in the real world (and I really really hope you don’t). Because how the content relates to the real world is all I’ve ever been trying to talk about. Not the game, not the content in context of the game, but the content in the context of the real world, and how it mirrors it.
I cannot be any more explict about my stance than I have been here. I’ve reiterated the key points so often that hopefully you actually read them this time. But if you still don’t get what I’m trying to say and continue to make statements that seem to be applying other people’s arguments to mine instead of actually paying attention to what I’m saying, there’s no point in me continuing. And I’m sorry if I’m coming across as really frustrated, but I am. I’ve tried really hard to be explict about what I’m saying, and you’re still not picking up my point, which is instead being replaced with a position that I actually argued against.
@Michael, wrong. Out of trouble is there as a metric to make sure that they’re not sociopaths. The others are the goal, the out of trouble is to make sure that they’re stable too.
Amaranthar, sorry, correlation studies are not irrelevant, but any such given study is rarely useful by itself. Especially when studies attempting to actually show causation are failing to demonstrate it. The concept that correlation is not causation is vitally important in making sure that a topic is examined properly. But yes, sufficient amounts of correlation coupled with enough studies that isolate out factors that could be causing the effect that’s being seen can be used to demonstrate that the thing being studied is indeed likely the cause.
Thing is, studies on gaming are no where at all near the burden of proof necessary to be taken seriously. And there’s been little attempt to isolate out factors in most of them either, which makes the entire process less than useful at this point.
Raph wrote:
I remember that the camera could rotate around the character then, too. The animation is a bit more specific now, but I suppose the animations and graphics are more detailed throughout the game as well.
Since you’re a designer, I’d like to see you give some examples of what could have been done better. Better, mind you, not vaguer. Avoiding explicitness is the easy way out.
That’s a really good question.
So to make it better, I’d have to ask, what is the explicitness in service of? In GTA4, I honestly have no idea. There’s no real story reason to be that explicit, and there’s no real gameplay reason to be that explicit.
So I would have to come up with a reason. In fact, I would usually start with the reason, and let the explicitness arise out of it, not the other way around. Explicitness wouldn’t be the goal, it would be the result.
So, a reason to be that explicit in the specific case of the prostitutes — to reveal something about the characters; to make a commentary on the act itself of going to a hooker; to examine the life of a hooker more. To make it better, I’d need to know way more about the hookers — they’d have to be real characters. I don’t need to know more about the player; after all, *I* am the player. And I as the player don’t actually need the explicitness to get the point about myself — the explicitness only needs to be there to get a particular point across.
Yah, I’m failing. You ask “what could have been done better?” And I guess that’s the issue. Better than what? I don’t see the point it’s driving towards, so I don’t see how to improve on it. I’m saying “justify the explicitness” and you’re saying “assume there’s a reason.” Well, I don’t have to assume there’s a reason — it’s the designer’s job to have the reason.
Because I don’t see a reason, I end up concluding that the reason is explicitness for explicitness’ sake, which I consider tawdry and exploitative.
@Amaranthar,
If you want to take this to my Livejournal, say so and I’ll drop a link here. Might be easier than tangling with WordPress.
@Eolirin,
So, let me get this straight. You’re saying that len said that his actual goals are A, B, and C, even though his next sentence goes on to say, “If they have A, B, and C, and that’s not enough to keep them out of trouble,” which reads, to me, like an actual goal set.
Now, if you’re talking about your own goals for parenting, then that’s a different argument. But in that case, I would have expected you to react to my proposition of a better set of goals, rather than continue your insistence that “out of trouble” isn’t len’s defining criterion.
Raph wrote:
At SCEA FPQA, we were trained to differentiate between the player and the player’s object of control. In fact, issue reports that did not distinguish between the player and the player’s object of control were rejected. You do need to know more about the object of control, but not the player.
Let me know when you’ve seen Eastern Promises. Even Roger Ebert praised the film. It’s definitely not safe for viewing at your house. Try your lunch breaks. ;p
Going back to what you said earlier, I don’t see why you’d want to keep sexuality tucked under a blanket. “Explicit” sexuality is taboo. Not long ago, any degree of sexuality was taboo. The human body and sexuality aren’t things of which to be ashamed. I’d like to know what Brenda Brathwaite thinks about this scene.
Actually, I’m not saying that you should assume there’s a reason. I can identify the rationale, however, and that’s strong enough for me. But you probably need more, so what would you do to justify the explicitness? You’d create a rationale, but what would that be?
“Is that really the goal of parenting, to you? To keep one’s children from doing any harm?”
It’s one goal among many. Teaching them by example that they can do good rather than fall into the trap of moral relativism that leads to cynical dismissal of the will to good is another goal. But this is enabling, not force. I have to disagree; we do learn and that goes both ways. It is problematic to ask a child to accept oneself as the infallible source. I learn from my children too.
“Whether sex should be meaningless, or whether people should kill other people, is a moral judgment. It’s not your place or anyone else’s to make that moral judgment for everyone else.”
It is important to make the judgement for yourself then let that judgement determine your relationship to others. It is important to teach and enable the child to do precisely that. GTA isn’t on the shelf at home and won’t be. If it is on the shelf of my children when they have their own home, they have decided and will learn from that decision. At that point, I’ve done what I can do and they are learning from their own choices. Within the environment of my home, I can control the choice of choices. Again, second order and third order systems with feedback.
The illusion of unbroken linear progress is cruel. The delusion that no progress is possible is heartbreak without cause. Neither is true.
On sex: if you have them, do you leave you and your partner’s sex toys out for your children to find and play with? What privacy do you maintain from your kids? What privacy do you enable?
Sex isn’t meaningless. It is wonderful. On the other hand, it isn’t the final consolation or the proof of a good relationship. It is sometimes the best relief and often the ultimate thrill. But if it isn’t consensual and it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth bothering about, IMO. Not accepting “no” or not being able to say “yes” are equally desolate.
My brother got the game when it was released.
He readily kills.. murders, runs people over, steals cars. Launches rockets into crowds of drug dealers and their compatriots.
Doesn’t visit hookers though.
That evidences a huge shift in the moral compass in my mind. Where murder and wanton bloodshed is regarded as less explicit than paying for sexual favors.
It’s really not a huge gameplay element, and many gamers might not do it just because it is, in fact, not enjoyable or rewarding.
It is unneeded, but I think the discussion that erupts from it is reason enough to have it in the game.
I think murder is worse than prostitution.
This question is backwards. You’re asking me “what sort of artistic statement or gameplay area would you choose to explore that could conceivably lead to needing explicit content?” Heck if I know. Could be any number of things.
And that’s Mr Anderson’s point. But more, he says that these studies related to TV are so overwhelming that the causation is definite, and it’s not just correlation. TV violence does cause aggressive and anti-social behavior, not just in kids but adults too.
How can you say this, Eolirin? Studies on gaming are no where near the burden of proof, yes. But they must be taken seriously because they are so far all show correlation, leading to expectations of Causation, especially in light of the similarities in the media of TV and gaming. It’s only the lack of quantity in studies on games that allow for any question at all. Yes, more studies are required for proof, but these studies are very useful in determining that more are definitely needed.
You want factors isolated out, but that’s just not possible, just as in the TV studies, due to the vast array of possible factors. That’s why the quantities of studies were required in the TV studies, and are required in the game studies.
To just dismiss this and assume it’s alright to proceed full ahead while arguing that it can’t be taken seriously is an irresponsible practice, in my opinion.
Whoe! Are you guys agreeing with me that this is “explicit content”? So you don’t argue the fact that this should be rated Adults Only, under the guidelines of the ESRB?
Michael, thanks for the invite, but my plate is too full now. Sadly.
@Amaranthar, he was responding to Morgan, not you.
And the studies are not nearly proof or even enough to generate expectation of causation, because they make no effort to isolate factors that could be affecting their numbers. Violent games also generate tension and a sense of competetion, and there’s no attempt to isolate out whether or not violence is our predicator, or competition is our predicator, or the tension of the gameplay is our predicator. And there aren’t even any studies that manage to show long term effects either, so there’s no useful metric to say anything about the effects on society or even the individual as a whole.
And it *is* possible to isolate those factors; you can create a game that has competition and tension without violence and do the same studies, and see if there is also an increase in aggression. Raph has mentioned elsewhere that you can create a game that’s basically a reskinned FPS that’s about putting out people that are on fire with a firehose, and it’d play exactly the same. This would allow you to isolate out the violence factor. As far as I know no one has done this, though I think there may be evidence that demonstrates that competative sports also shows similar aggression spikes, and that would actually work against the content of the game being the cause, or at least sole cause here. And you still need to show long term effects and not a temporary spike in aggressive feelings too, at least if you want to say that it’s actually damaging to people, something that no study has demonstrated.
I’m dismissing it because it’s inherently flawed. It’s a good starting point perhaps, but they are no where near anything remotely useful yet. You’re looking at multi-variable situations and assuming that the one you want to target is the cause. And not a one of the studies attempts to narrow down the variables at all, so you’re seeing the same ones over and over again. The methodology is horribly flawed and needs to be fixed before I take it seriously.
But I never argued that studies were irrelevant, just that they were currently useless (if you want to make a point anyway) and horribly inconclusive, at the current moment. Yes, please, do more studies, we need them, but you can say nothing until they *are* done, and done right. It’s not that I’m not taking the concept of the studies seriously, it’s that I think anyone taking the the current results all that seriously is not making a valid argument, because they’re using it to defend a point, not highlight what needs to be looked at further. “Games are bad because these currently inconclusive and often flawed studies may point that way”, is not a valid argument.
One last note: Explict does not equal AO. Explict simply means explict and there are degrees of explictness. It’s no more explict than something you’d see in an R rated movie, and R rated movies can carry explict content without becoming X. It’s all a matter of degree.
@ Amaranthar
Given, yes, correlation is relevant. Correlation often points toward
causal relationships. When you discover a correlation, you then follow
up by testing for causation; I know I’m oversimplifying a whole big
bunch, but it’s enough to make my point, which is this:
Correlation was found, but the tests looking for causal relationships
have consistently shown they are not there. Generally, this often means
there is some larger thing influencing both items in a concurrent way.
If there is a link between media exposure and behavior, it is not
direct, and it is not causal.
I say if because there is still the possibility it’s a
hemlines-vs-price-of-gold thing (and old example of accidental
correlation).
I want to put down my agreement for this statement.
At least, in prostitution, you both get something out of it, even if it’s usually meaningless. (I think my favorite story was Ray Bradbury’s coming of age, when he and his buddy decided they needed to learn what this sex thing was, so they paid a pair of hookers. Bradbury Chronicles.)
In murder, you waste energy, or a bullet, and the dead person got absolutely nothing.
Please direct us to all studies that conclusively prove, or even suggest, causation from video games or television to aggressive behavior. A difficult point to prove since the rate of violence in this country has consistently dropped since the advent of T.V. and video games.
These studies don’t exist or are unscientific shams.
Peter, you try to tell:
Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
B.A. 1976 Butler University
M.A. 1978 Stanford University
(advisor: Lee Ross)
Ph.D. 1980 Stanford University
(advisor: J. Merrill Carlsmith)
And try arguing with Newton’s Law too, because all of the proof of gravity was purely correlative. (It’s proven causal now due to scientific advances, but that’s a relatively recent development.) It was proven causal then too, by the weight of correlative evidence, just as TV violence to aggressive behavior has been, and game violence is certain to show too.
Here’s Mr. Anderson’s entire list of myths vs. facts.
Link
@Eolirin
I get what you’re saying, and the difference you’re expressing between Gameplay and Story and the thought I had about control. I do try to break things down and deconstruct them into base elements, so I tend to think first in terms of how a concept can be disassembled. Your point does lose a little if expressed only in those terms, you’re right.
Perhaps I should clarify how I intended to mean the word “control”. My thought was more along the lines of who had the microphone. Say, a club owner is hosting an open mike night. Sure, he owns the place, he’s set up the stage, tuned the PA, and decided what food and drinks are for sale; the performers don’t get a say, they just show up. During the event itself, though, there are times when the performers have the mike, and times where the owner does. The experiential illusion of control during play more than actual captial-C Control, since as you say, everything is ultimately channeled rather tightly in actual practice (in terms of the analogy, the menu only contains what the owner chose, not the entirety of Earth cuisine, the stage is only so big, and the club’s still gonna close at 2:00 AM).
Also, in my mind it’s not about passive versus active. I think the main strength of video games is that they make otherwise passive activities, such as listening to someone tell a story (or reading one in hypertext), feel like a much more active experience. Certainly, they can’t rise to the level of active involvement of a pencil-and-paper RPG, but that is the vector the Story is King games are on. I’d even posit that it’s that vector, that directional striving, that defines a game as Story as King. Gameplay as King games take action as a given and try to refine it into something great, like a chef refining base foodstuffs into extravagant banquets.
So, I agree that things aren’t inherently passive or active, and didn’t really intend to make a distinction along those lines. Also, the exchange of control is probably best described as a continuum, one that fluctuates throughout play (but one that probably does tend to produce binary-looking results if sampled at discrete points in time). It also probably doesn’t fit what you are meaning as well as I first thought it did, certainly.
I’d disagree that table top RPGs break your model (though certainly, it’s going to stretch it a bit… actually, make that a lot, but it won’t break!). In 3rd Ed. D&D, the combat part and the narrative part are very separate, given how it intends for you to break out the mat and miniatures for the former of the two (talking here about how it’s designed, not how us players bastardize it as soon as we have the chance 😛 ). For that reason I think a distinction exists between two qualitatively different kinds of active play that’s analogous to the qualitative distinction between Story as King and Gameplay as King games.
Mainly, I think there is an intuitive element to the distinction between Story and Gameplay that’s been around a long, long time (now that we’ve been discussing them). Qualitatively, people will overlook one of the two aspects being done poorly if the other is done well. “Story sucks, but it’s fun to play” versus “I’m only playing it for the story”. Also, I think the Gameplay is King games know that having no story is better than having a bad one, and thus often choose specifically to minimize there. A Story that minimizes Gameplay, well, starts turning into a movie or a novel (think Indigo Prophesy).
I actually *do* find the selection of dialogue options to be inherently interesting. Let me put it in different terms, to see if that helps: collectibe card games. You mentioned turning combat into a choose-your-own-cutscene thing, so think about someone playing a CCG, limited to selecting an option from their hand and making use of the results of options previously chosen. Think of dialogue options being similar, getting to pick a card and see what happens when you play it. You can even think of the choice of character attributes as selecting cards for a deck. You’re determining what dialogue options are going to pop up, and what you’ll have a good chance of succeeding at. For this reason they can be intrinsically interesting and they can matter, I’d say.
Thing is, you do acknowledge that dialogue and narrative can be an active thing in a tabletop setting. If I’m reading you right, your main argument is that the dialogue and narrative and Story is King stuff is generally executed with very poor gameplay, and that the reverse is often true, that Gamplay is King games often mean poorly thought out or executed stories. Maybe it’s as simple as a case of tending to start at one of those points (“I have a great story” or “I have a great gameplay idea”), such that by the time one idea has crystallized it’s hard to find ways to integrate the other? What would you have to do, how would you have to think, to start in the middle between the two? If it’s not possible to make dialogue and narrative interactive in an independantly fun way and make it Matter short of going back to the table top settings, does it mean we’ve already lost?
Oof, that sounded pessimistic. Lemme balance that. *ahem*
Is this specifically why Portal is so astonishing? Is that how we have to blend narrative into gameplay? Is it at least an example of how we can? The game certainly tells a compelling story, and it certainly has great gameplay…
Oh, and on KotoR, I have to say I stopped caring about Star Wars as a setting when they officially made the Light and Dark sides something external rather than metaphorical and internal. With the power to influence minds there’d be an ever-present temptation to do just that, even for noble purposes… treating the Dark Side as an actual thing instead of metaphor, well, made me lose interest. I tried to play the first, and the same complaints you have about the combat drove me off before I got far enough to change my mind about the setting.
@Amaranthar
Adding an address block does not add more weight to one professor’s opinion (even expert opinion) than any other’s. 😛 Here’s a link to his work instead: http://www.amazon.com/Violent-Video-Effects-Children-Adolescents/dp/0195309839/ref=pd_sim_b_title_2 Amazon was helpful enough to suggest a few other books on the same topic, including some holding the opposing position.
And, also, don’t make a crossover between hard sciences and soft ones unless you want the current debate to get even more messy. Otherwise we’d have to get into what is meant by Theory and what constitutes proof. The short, short version is, in your case there is evidence to the contrary of your theory (even if there is also evidence for it). If there was a complete absence of evidence to the contrary, I’d concede the point.
(If one wanted to bring your example into it too, one could easily mention Einstein and how incomplete Newton’s understanding of the universe proved to be)
Finally, your professor is playing some subtle word games in order to build straw man arguments. Myth 6: does “linked” mean correlated or causal? Myth 8: “completely” safe? Is breathing completely safe? Myth 9: What is this “effect”? I doubt visualizing violence leads to lower calcium uptake, but I’ll concede that sitting on one’s butt playing video games might. Myth 10: how is “aggression” being defined? Not to mention it’s still talking about correlation studies.
This is turning into a flamewar, though. I’m starting to suspect I should know better than to keep posting.
Amaranthar asked:
No.
explicit, expressed (precisely and clearly expressed or readily observable; leaving nothing to implication) “explicit instructions”; “she made her wishes explicit”; “explicit sexual scenes”
Some people use words that use plain definitions. Others, like you, use words that come attached with an agenda. As someone who has read the actual ESRB submission guidelines—you’ve never read these because these are only available to publishers—I don’t think the scene in the video qualifies as “Adults Only” content. Moreover, ESRB does not single out elements of a game when determining the rating.
Technically, the scene in GTA4 is not explicit. The activity is still suggestive; it’s just more detailed than its predecessor. No body parts are actually shown. Who knows, she could be looking for her contact lenses…
Please wrote:
Wrong. Media violence does effect aggression and violence. The problem is that psychologists treat the words “aggression” and “violence” as terminology, and the layman does not. There’s a disconnect in language use.
Whereas the layman thinks that violence is exclusively represented by the incidents at Columbine and Virginia Tech, psychologists apply degrees to violence and so the mere act of pinching someone is violence.
Whereas the layman thinks aggression involves physically violent behavior, psychologists again apply degrees to aggression and so the mere act of calling someone a “newbie” is aggression.
Raph wrote:
Boo… 🙁
Well, that’s interesting. So how are parents supposed to understand these definitions and make an informed decision?
Morgan, here is what the ESRB rating says:
“Strong Sexual Content – Explicit and/or frequent depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including nudity.”
Where does it say that it has to depict nudity?
Where does it say that it has to be other than an “explicit depiction”?
Peter, alright, I don’t like the anger and flames either. Actually what I wanted was for someone to post an alternate view “expert” so that we could compare qualifications.
And something interesting as I just checked at the video store. The box for GTA4 clearly says strong sexual content, but it’s under the descriptions of the Mature rating.
Yet the web site says that Strong Sexual Content is Adults Only, while Sexual Content is for a Mature rating. Both are clearly defined. Something seems wrong with all this.
Amaranthar wrote:
The audience doesn’t need to understand magic to be entertained by a magician.
ESRB provides information for consumers. That’s what you use to understand what the ratings mean, but only part of what you can use to make an informed decision.
There are demos, trailers, reviews, previews, screenshots, and other resources that you can use as part of your decision-making process. You should never rely on ratings alone. If you’re really as concerned as you claim you are about violence and sexuality, then you should be serious enough to find and use the resources that are provided out there.
@Morgan
Please give links to the accepted peer reviewed studies that state this.
Thanks
Please wrote:
Nevermind that “accepted” and “peer reviewed” are mutually exclusive attributes…
Here’s a book, and seven studies conducted between 1994 and 2005.
“I would have expected you to react to my proposition of a better set of goals, rather than continue your insistence that “out of trouble” isn’t len’s defining criterion.”
It is the criterion where I *might* have some success.
Someone on a talking head program made a cogent statement: “People without children are full of advice about how to raise them. People with children find such inexperienced advice irritating.”
Children aren’t pets, games, or code. They aren’t even speaking the same language much of the time. On the other hand, they aren’t new, different, stronger or wiser. Just young. You’ll discover that unless they care about you a helluva lot, your goals are meaningless to them.
On the other other hand, sex is. Values by example make a big impression. Caveat vendor.
@Peter
That’s probably about right, but the fact that it has to strive toward being active is more because they’re trying to be a game, and games are inherently active, but they’re still coming from a passive starting point. I think it’s okay to call it passive because of this, as the intent is still rooted in passivity. They’re just trying to work around that fact. As I said before, neither type is completely one or the other. The level design is still passive in a Gameplay is King game for example, it’s just that it’s as you say, a given that there is going to be action rather than that there’s an attempt to create that action. When you design a game starting at gameplay, you design it in terms of what the player is going to be doing, rather than what the player should be seeing or how the plot is going to progress.
Oh, the model wouldn’t break… the labels sure as hell would though. 🙂 Story means something very different in table top land, or at least it can depending on the GM, in a sense it *is* gameplay.
What I was trying to say, perhaps inelegantly, is that the mechanic for making those decisions is *itself* a weak mechanic. Not the actual decision making process, but the mechanic for performing the decision. The mechanic I was talking about isn’t the part where you make a choice as to which action to take, it’s the part where you select a “number” and press a button. As a mechanic it doesn’t go any deeper than that, because without the context of the story around it, it isn’t inherently interesting. I want to go here, or I want to go there, isn’t compelling unless here and there are compelling. This really isn’t any different than removing the level design of a Gameplay is King game and expecting the jumping mechanics to make sense really, but in the case of dialogue it’s there to serve the plot rather than to serve gameplay.
Your example of the CCG is also interesting, as it provides a counter example where there’s no actual narrative in the typical sense, but the meta-game is actually more compelling than the actual gameplay mechanics themselves. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the compelling gameplay isn’t actually part of the game’s rules, but rather how you use that understanding of the rules. Magic’s gameplay(to use just one CCG example) is more about the intersection and manipulation of the card text, and not so much actually using the cards on the table. If the dialogue trees were equally strategic, and they would need to actually be more overt about what they do if that were the case, this would actually make them much more compelling as gameplay. They’d still be there to drive plot along, but they’d be closer to Mattering under the definition I laid out, but, and this is important, only if that sort of strategic back and forth was actually in line with what the plot was trying to get across. For the gameplay to Matter, it’s not enough that the gameplay is compelling, it also has to be relevant to the story. That’s why even though the combat in an RPG can be very compelling even removed from the plot (even if it isn’t always that way), it still doesn’t Matter, because the game is a Story is King game, and the gameplay is not supporting the story. The ability to branch the story is important to your enjoyment of the game, but not inherently important to the *plot*. So I guess my use of the word “matter” may be somewhat confusing. It’s perfectly possible for a gameplay element to matter to the player, but still not Matter to the game.
You’re right up until your conclusion. The trick is to stop at “I have a great story idea” and “I have a great gameplay idea” and then immediately go, “What can I use to support this in either gameplay or narrative?” Because if you do that, then it is quite possible to integrate the other, and people *have* pulled it off. You mention Portal a little later, and that’s actually a good example, but I already mentioned Myst, and that’s an even better example, in the sense that it basically does what Portal did in how it blended the two elements, except it makes the narrative even deeper and more meaningful, even if it also makes it much more hidden. It has more gameplay faults than Portal granted, what with the whole tendency to be very unclear as to what you’re supposed to be doing, but even that part of it works within the intended themes of the game. In a way, Myst blends the narrative back into the gameplay even though the game is about the gameplay. They support each other and each is stronger for the other’s existence. Portal does do this too, just not (imo) as well. That being said, Portal is probably more fun, again imo. 😛
But the parts don’t need to be independent, in fact they can’t be; that’s why one is always going to be King. But it’s the difference between the other part being little more than a Pawn, or acting as the Queen. It can Matter, it just can’t rule. (Yeah, I know pawns matter too, sometimes even a very great deal, but they usually don’t. The Story is King games couldn’t even exist without the glue being provided by the gameplay that they do have. They just don’t do very much with it, so the analogy is, I think, apt even if imperfect.)
US Department of Justice Statistics
I think I’ll accept that correlation is causation for the current effects on real world violence. 😉
Wired’s superimposition on the above charts
Re: ratings
What we really need is for them to stop hiding the ratings and put them somewhere easy to find by a consumer — like, say, the back of the box, with a summarized rating and a brief listing of the contents that caused that rating. (Obviously, anyone reading the rating could then go google before buying the game). Or some sort of hint in the title that the game isn’t just harmless sandbox fun, but is actually about people committing serious crimes. When I buy “Grand Theft Auto” I expect it to be morally uplifting! (Incidentally, “Discount Murder Simulator” would be a great name for a rock band. Or a computer game.)
The idea of gathering up all the questionable behaviour as a game demo/trailer and making it available somehow is questionable itself; this may allow children to just watch the trailer and save them from having to play the game at all.
@len,
Which is why I’ve rejected most educational theories as foolish.
Children do not speak your language because they’re, as I said before, limited and incomplete. Simply because you’re unwilling or not equipped to learn their language does not mean you’re incapable of it.
I did not propose advice. I am dead set against allowing myself into a parental position precisely because I know that I don’t know how, and I firmly believe that there are many other things I need to learn about raising a child before I even think about it. Would that other people were so interested in doing a decent job. No, everyone else just picks up some common wisdom from neighbors and parents and wings it.
If you can’t learn how to use a computer like that, what makes a person think something even more difficult, learning how to raise a child, should be undertaken on such a shaky foundation?
Pop quiz: Name the method by which Will Wright was educated. I’m studying from the same source.
Btw Michael, you can learn how to use a computer like that. I’ve figured out how to use a computer in every day life exactly by “picking up some common wisdom from neighbors” and then “winging it”. That’s how you learn to do EVERYTHING. You can be more or less prepared to do it (and certainly trying to be as prepared as you can for anything is a good idea, to a degree), but it ultimately comes down to “winging it” in any situation. You learn by doing, not by preparing constantly. Preperation is incomplete, experience is the only way to fill those gaps. My CompSci courses all involved projects and lab time precisely because of that fact. It’s no good if they stand and lecture you for hours, you don’t really get the information the same way until you’ve there with the code, trying to get it to work right.
Will Wright learned by a system, when he was young anyway, it scarcely made up even the majority of his education, that I’m not even going to attempt to spell because I’ll just mess it up, that involved play as part of the teaching process. The point was to allow the student to explore the concepts on a direct level, rather than trying to explain it to them without allowing them a form of context. At least, that’s how he explains it when he does interviews; I haven’t personally researched it. But that sort of teaching method revolves entirely around “winging it”, and then learning from your mistakes when your attempts to wing it break down. If you’re really studying from the same source, you’d need to actually have children and experience what that’s like so that you really understood it from an experential level. I’m not suggesting that’s necessarily a good idea though, but what you’re saying seems somewhat contradictory.
len wrote:
I had a longer a reply written until I found that one rhetorical question expresses what I wanted to say. Would those arrogant and self-righteous fools be just as dismissive of third-party insight and advice when given by a childless child psychologist?
To retort: How intelligent would you consider someone who hired a skiing instructor who had never skied before? Practical experience is a VERY useful thing to have before giving advice. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding — but your choice of chefs seems to have never made pudding before, or for the matter cooked before.
What kind of arrogant and self-righteous fool considers himself an expert on something he’s never tried?
(Answer: Me!)
I know. That’s why I’ve stopped studying it now that I’m convinced it’s not crackpot. The next step is to find a school and observe, which is why I told Amaranthar that I don’t need to be told this year.
I don’t think he would agree with you. If it was so negligible, why does he make a point of talking about it as a source of inspiration? That you connected it at all is enough.
I fully agree.
In CompSci, we chuck the bad programs into the recycle bin. These programs are written and thrown out, and would never get implemented in a banking system. In parenting, we put those first tries in charge of the family business. Or the government (yay for dynasties).
A Montessori teacher is required to have a year of apprenticeship before she may act as a directress. How many parents spend a year helping someone else parent children, before they wing it on their own? How many parents, like programmers with different paradigms and languages, are taught child development theory and education theory?
Trevel wrote:
That’s the wrong comparison in this situation. What does the ski student have to teach the ski instructor about teaching skiing? Similarly, what do people, who were once children but do not have any, have to teach parents about parenting children? Lots.
Every parent draws on their experiences as a child, whether they had one or two parents or grew up under foster care or in the system. The notion that the “student” can’t offer the “instructor” insight into the “learning” process because the student has never been the instructor is simply stupid. Like I said before, the audience doesn’t need to know how to perform magic tricks to be entertained by a magician, and they certainly don’t need to have been magicians to know when a magician sucks.
Eolirin wrote:
Planning and implementation share a symbiotic relationship.
As Ben Franklin once wrote, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
@Eolirin
From here, I think I have to now come full circle, as it were, and agree with your original premise that not enough people do this. I’m still more willing to cut developers and their games some slack, but wow, I don’t think there’s more I can add.
I’m just glad our discussion *didn’t* become an argument. This has to be some sort of internet forum record for holding out against that tendency. 😛
I think, if there was something else to explore, it’d be delving into what makes a mechanic weak, since I suspect the same basic mechanic can be strong or weak based partly on context. Strong and weak mechanics seem self evident, but imagine a plain old card game like Rummy. Is picking a card from your hand a weak mechanic? Assuming it is, how would something like that be augmented without harming the overall game? Even if it is a weak mechanic, hey, people play these much more basic games a *ton*, so there’s got to be something there to discuss. 🙂
Either way, I’ll see you next thread!
Probably Morgan. They are a little too busy raising children to listen to unsolicited advice. If it is solicited, they made the choice to listen to an inexperienced advisor.
No matter how you try to parse or spin this, and that is your profession, parenting is not about maverick relationship building. It is the toughest and most rewarding relationship you can have. If you don’t have that, you don’t know. If you do, you don’t doubt.
Try it. You will like it.
“How many parents spend a year helping someone else parent children, before they wing it on their own?”
Quite a few. It’s called ‘extended family’. It might be younger siblings, cousins, friends, baby-sitting, heck even polygamy.
But practice is what it is and it compares to the real event somewhat like jamming at home with friends does to playing a live concert in front of thousands of people. No one who hasn’t done it can understand what that sudden adrenalin rush is and what kind of mental skill it takes to control it. I was Nichelle Nichols (Uhuru from the original Trek) accompanist. She gave me a shot of brandy before we went on stage. I said I didn’t drink when performing, she looked at me like I was her son and said, “Len you are stepping out in fron of hundreds of people with me. Adrenalin will hit you like a bomb and you will start to shake. This stops that.”
And she was right.
In the extended family, I learned to go ask my parents for advice or my grandparents. I never ask the spinster or the bachelor no matter what their profession. Someone who does not have children of their own simply doesn’t know squat about the experience, and it is that. Remember, this is not just about the children, it is about the experience of having children. There are two entangled parties and the experiential knowledge is the knowledge of the relationship.
Can anyone explain to me the difference with this GTA4 content and the “Hot Coffee” content that was rated AO, once it was discovered?
@Amaranathar, that one’s easy.
Hot Coffee was a stupid punative measure and not a legitimate rating. It didn’t make sense there either. Beyond the fact that it required hacking the game files, it wasn’t particularly explicit either. If you want to look at a legitimate AO rating, you’d have to look at the pre-edit version of Manhunt 2, where there was fairly explicit mutilation of part of a male’s reproductive organs. The balls in a vice killing animation was removed, and they filtered the other graphic mutilation based killings in order to get back down to an M rating. That’s worthy of AO. Neither this, nor Hot Coffee was.
I’d have to say that that’s your opinion. And that’s your right. But if the game was rated AO in that instance, and in agreement with many people, why isn’t this? I mean regardless of personal opinion.
From today:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers.
Link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0725760620080509?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
@Peter, I’m glad too, it was fun.
I’d simply answer your question by saying, yes, context is everything. In the case of rummy, that’s not a weak mechanic at all, in the sense that it directly supports and improves the point of the game. Rummy is all about gameplay, there isn’t even the remotest sense of any sort of narrative, and the mechanic supports the gameplay in a non-dispensible way. This is like having your A button cause you to jump. It may seem like a weak mechanic in the sense that it doesn’t inherently do much, but if your game is about jumping, it’s also indispensible. It’s only when your game is, in fact, about talking to people and not about jumping that it’s a truly weak mechanic. Also remember, just because something’s truly a weak mechanic doesn’t necessarily mean it can be augmented or gotten rid of either, it may be necessary in order to present either gameplay or narrative. Dialogue choices, or rather they way that you choose them in the game (actually having choice is kind of a grey area. It’s almost always rooted in story and not mechanic, but it can be *important* and is sort of unique to gaming. You can argue that the choose your own adventure books are in fact games, and not novels), are a weak mechanic in the sense that they only present, they don’t inform the narrative. But they’re still important, again, because choice can be important. It’s a narrative tool, even if it’s a unique one to the medium, and if used to good effect, it vastly improves the experience. But is it possible to present the choices in a way that makes the process of choosing them supportive too? Maybe. Is it always appropriate? Maybe not. When we strive towards getting things to a point where the mechanics matter for the narrative, or vice versa, it’s still going to be impossible for them ALL to. Some still need to act as glue, and that’s fine. It’s that there’s an almost complete absence of *any* mechanics that really Matter in most Story is King games that’s the problem, not that there are some that don’t.
But other than that, yeah, we’ve pretty much exhausted this for now.
@Amaranthar, it was also to the disagreement of a great many people. GTAIV isn’t because it would be wrong to put it in AO based on the metrics that the ESRB itself set up, and it’d be wrong even if you simply compared it to the film rating system. And if you apply that same metric, rationally, to the Hot Coffee thing, that would also be at fault. It’s not about personal opinion in this case, it’s more about the fact that this, and by extension, that, didn’t really cross the line. Nothing in either case extends beyond an R rated film, so AO is simply not appropriate. If you can show me an X rated film that’s as tame as the scenes from GTAIV, I will cede this point. If you can’t, then can you agree that the rating of M is appropriate?
The thread that won’t die.
I still want an example of the R-rated movie that is an explicit as this — or as Hot Coffee, for that matter. Maybe I just don’t watch the right movies!
Yes, that’s my point too, Eolirin. We have something from each side of these two GTA games as a reference here, but where the line is exactly seems to be one place for one game and another for the the other. The only thing I can think of, and I might be wrong, is the humping action in the first and missing in the second. (I might be wrong here.) My opinion is that that’s not enough difference, yours might be that it is. But the question is, is that the difference? Or is there another?
Raph, I can come up with some. Highlander 3 for example (I could use the first one too, but this one is both longer and more revealing). I’d actually say it’s MORE explicit, despite the lighting becoming darker. The only parts that get obscured are the genitals, which hey, you can’t really even see here, since they don’t exist. Matrix Reloaded’s orgy scene too, is also more explicit than these scenes. They’re less gratuitous but that’s not the same thing.
Btw, those sequences I just mentioned would be considered soft core porn if there weren’t other elements to the film. This is even more soft core than those were. Those were rated R. This is rated M. I do not see disaparity.
… sorry, triple posting again. oy.
@Aramanthar, I’d agree in saying there’s no signficiant difference between them. Where we differ is that I honestly think that the AO rating was what was broken, not the current M rating on GTAIV. The disparity is due to bad decision making likely fueled by public relations not actually applying the standards of the rating system. Why are they rated different? The ESRB decided not to repeat a mistake, that’s why they’re rated differently.
And if you want more R rated film examples with sex I can probably come up with some. Those last two were completely off the top of my head and took me about 30 seconds to come up with. I might have some hard time finding head bobbing though. Mostly because when you do see sex, it’s full on intercourse and not oral. I’m sure I can find something though if I look hard enough though 😛
Raph wrote:
Eastern Promises. You don’t watch the right movies. You can’t, right? You have kids.
I never saw Highlander 3, I don’t think… My memory of the orgy scene in Matrix is less than what was in GTA, though about a hundred times more powerfully presented. So that may be the difference. I would have to go rewatch it.
Trinity and Neo are completely naked, and there’s bumping, grinding, and moaning. The stuff in the Zion cave is a little less explict in terms of sex, but you can see just about everything on some of the women, even if they’re wearing clothing. It’s very transparent clothing. And much as I don’t like thinking about it, you see Keanu’s butt, all of it. I don’t think the GTA stuff really exceeds that much.
The problem here is that the Hot Coffee rating is supposed to define the content. There was disagreement, these things settle the disagreement to more clearly define how it’s supposed to work, for future reference. With all due respect Eolirin, neither of our opinions matter. The rating system was supposed to be more clearly defined at that point.
So now we have buyers not expecting such content, because it’s supposed to be rated AO according to the example set, but wasn’t.
As far as the movie scenes, I didn’t see any of them. So I can’t comment much. But I can say I see a distinct difference between this and body grinding. This is just more explicit because it’s more detailed in action, despite the, uh, object removal(?) which still leaves the impressed image.