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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Taboo-busting in video games - moral decisions and media panics

  
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:59 / 30.09.06
Gah! Just lost this post - will write it elsewhere this time rather than being a fool and putting it in the Barbelith screen.

So. Recapped. There's a thread here about the upcoming game Bioshock, which is causing a lot of people to get very excited. I've never played System Shock 2, and I'm excited just based on what I have heard people say _about_ it in pubs. However, the latest game trailer has shown the POV character, presumably representing the player? being about to kill one of the "little sisters" - harvesting creatures who either are or resemble preadolescent girls. Quoth R&R:

Killing prostitutes in GTA is a moral choice too, entirely in the users hands etc etc. However, this doesn't change

1) The USA making an enourmous fuss about it (and, incidently, making it a whole bunch harder for the rest of us to make games that address adult themes)

2) These interactions do not arise from emergent properties. They're designed into the game, and the game provides rewards (cash or ADAM) for performing the actions. Claiming "It's merely the users choice, we didn't do nuffin," was bollocks with GTA, and it's bollocks here.

The shit will hit the fan, and in a major way - I guarentees it. Although the sci-fi setting will help to dismantle the tension a little.

E. Randy has already asked in the thread why kiling children is worse than killing adultys, and that is certainly one of the things about the morality constructed by computer games that I think it's worth exploring. Also, I'm trying now to think of whether Bioshock is in fact the first mainstream game in which the player appears to be able to kill children.There's a child in Deus Ex - the informer at the start of the Battery Park sequence - and another in Hong Kong, I think, but I don't recall ever trying to kill either, which may be significant. However, DX was no averse to having indestructable characters where killing them would have severely disrupted the narrative, so it's perfectly possible that the possibility of killing them was not built in. There are children being tortured in American McGee's Alice, but they are landscape objects - you cannot interact with them in any way, and they are also imaginary, inasmuch as the whole game is. They are also in a non-realistic setting, which I think is another way one can defray the impact.

To retunr briefly to GTA - I've never played it, but I assume that it differs from other games in which you can kill noncombatant women, for example DX and DX2, because you are rewarded for it, whereas in other games it might lead to your own death at the hands of law enforcement (having said which, if you tank up in DX, going mental on the dancefloor will bring police, who can be killed and who will then provide you with extra weaponry... that's a bit trickier).

Violence tends to be accepted as the common coin of interaction in computer games - and I suppose that greater complexity in games can but need not lead to greater complexity being placed on acts of violence. However, not only is there the cultural bias towards violence beiung accpetable, or more acceptable than sex (the whole ratings system of entertainment), but that violence is normally situated. How do you make the violence less controversial?

Removing it from "reality" is one clear way - so, Manhunt, GTA and Bully - which has now had its title changed - arae more controversial, as are games like Hooligans: Storm over Europe, which are essentially designed to get attention and rely for sales on having some sort of tie-in to actual acts of real-life violence. If you put the viokence in an unrealistic (fantasy, sci-fi) environment, that becomes less of an issue. In Half-Life 2, for example, you are placed in a situation that is unreplicable in everyday life.

Half-Life 2 also brings up the question of the nature of one's targets. The Metrocops may be human, the Overwatch have been altered to the point where they are arguably not - although they are still able to express emotion and communicate with language, so YMMV. The zombies, headcrabs and so on are not generally considered sentient, so probably don't have the same issues, although personally I find the pathos of the zombies quite wrenching. And I bet you feel bad about all those Vortigaunts you killed in HL1 now. Also, you are fighting for a greater good. I am reminded of Final Fight - the environment is at least notionally realistic (although we can presumably also factor in quote-unquote realism as a factor in what might make a game more or less controversial or more or less disturbing), but it is made clear that the subjects of your violence are villains, and that the violence is being done in a good cause - the resolution of a kidnapping. Oddly, the most morally curious bit for me as a child was the bonus round, where you smash up a car that as far as I could tell just belonged to a regular Joe... but I may have missed a bit. It might have been full of drugs or something.

So, I suppose I'm looking for information and opinions on what subjects have been approached in games that spark moral outrage, how and why? Are these respnses justifiable? Is it hypocritical to feel qualms about killing a child (or child-equivalent) after wading through a hundred adult victims, all of them less well-armed abnd equipped than you?

And, as a side-topic, sex. Famously harder to represent in games anyway, how does that factor in to the list of taboos, treatments and media responses. Since Custer's Revenge, have there been any treatments of sex in games that have caused the same outrage as the violence in GTA or Manhunt?

Bit unformed, this - the original post was better. Essentially, I'd like info and commnetary from those better informed than I.
 
 
Sylvia
20:32 / 30.09.06
I'll get into this more in-depth on this topic later (and it's a good topic! I was thinking about starting something similar myself) I just want to address one thing quickly:

However, the latest game trailer has shown the POV character, presumably representing the player? being about to kill one of the "little sisters" - harvesting creatures who either are or resemble preadolescent girls.

The clip from Bioshock was a prerendered trailer - I think he's meant to represent a citizen of Rapture instead of the PC (Especially noting the period clothes he's wearing. I believe your character is from the modern era, or at least a more recent one than the late 40s).

And an addition to the question of morality in Half-Life: there's the alternate ending to HL1 where you choose not to side with the G-man and he teleports you in front of the last remaining horde of an alien race that wants to talk to you about your genocide. I can't quire remember, but I believe he also implies you've killed enough of them to drive them to extinction.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:51 / 30.09.06
Really? Those are Vortigaunts, aren't they? I hadn't really thought about that, but of course in HL2, which presupposes that you took the deep-freeze option, the Vortigaunts revere you as their liberator. All I recall of the G-man's speech is "No regrets, Dr. Freeman"... I assumed that Valve had not worked out the Vortigaunt slavery plot at that point...

Hmmm. I may have to revisit that. Might take a while, though.
 
 
Sylvia
02:37 / 01.10.06
Really? Those are Vortigaunts, aren't they?

Not all of them. I THINK the Vortigaunts aren't native to Xen either. They were definitely enslaved by the Nihilanth who, according to some interpretations of his speeches to you as you close in on him in Xen, had been enslaved by then escaped from the Combine itself. They could be Vortigaunts sympathetic to the Nihilanth, but there are other species there that were native to Xen.

Those were the ones that displeased by events.

I hadn't really thought about that, but of course in HL2, which presupposes that you took the deep-freeze option, the Vortigaunts revere you as their liberator.

I felt sorry for the ones I was forced to kill in HL1 once I realized they hadn't been attacking humanity voluntarily.

All I recall of the G-man's speech is "No regrets, Dr. Freeman"... I assumed that Valve had not worked out the Vortigaunt slavery plot at that point...

I think they may have. There's a lot of interesting story parts that Valve just never fit in (due to time or what, I'm not sure) talked about in the Half-Life artbook "Raising the Bar". I really recommend it if you're even slightly curious about what HL2 could have been (some changes location wise), how they approached HL1, and some scrapped projects.
 
 
The Strobe
08:17 / 01.10.06
The Vortigaunts were definitely not native to Xen. Similarly, the Combine - its name is the clue - is more of a vague alliance/collective than a single race.

Killing children: Fallout 1/2 let you do that. I mean, Fallout let you do practically anything. But killing even a single child gave you the "Child Killer" status, which was bad. Some people just wouldn't talk to you any more; they knew you were evil, trouble. And the evil/bad characters were all way more enthusiastic about talking to you, because they knew you were a mean motherfucker - I mean, the dude has no mercy, he even kills kids! It was quite possible to keep playing the game with this status attached, but it changed a great many things.

So you weren't punished by some nominal law enforcement - you were punished by social stigma. Which is an interesting approach.

Another thing I'd like to bring to the table: Introversion software's Defcon. Defcon simulates Global Thermonuclear War, much like in WarGames. It's very clincial, with its blue radar-like display and ambient soundtrack. And then, as the missiles land, in the endgame, the name of the target and the killcount flash up. "Moscow, 5m dead". "Detroit, 10.2m dead". It feels really... unpleasant, sickening. Of course, it turns out that "winning" the game is very, very hard; you usually end up in mutually assured destruction. Now, I'm really looking forward to playing Defcon. But I must admit, it leaves a curious taste in one's mouth, and wondered what other people think.

I'm not at home right now, but I'll come back to this thread soon, when I have a little more time; I think there are some good points raised.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
09:29 / 01.10.06
With Defcon there's a definite 'message' to the way the game is structured so that it's literally impossible to win without the loss of several million lives- the message is: people actually plan to do this sort of thing, for forty years there were people training on simulators probably not dissimilar to Defcon. It's saying 'look how easily we've made you into the worst murderer in human history- and always remember there are people, real people, who are trained to do the same thing in real life'.
As far as child-killing in Bioshock goes, there's also a message in there. In the gameplay video the developer talks about creating a constant state of scarcity, something System Shock did very well. The Little Sisters harvest and carry ADAM, the game's currency and power supply. Without it you cannot progress. It's a weirdo-restating of the old question: 'If you were starving would you steal food?'. Would you kill someone? Would you kill a little girl?
The morality of killing is something that videogames are uniquely set up to discuss (see the discussion on the metafictional themes in Metal Gear Solid 2 here). The trouble is games have an audience of adolescent males which, though it is shrinking in proportion to other audiences, is still the largest and most devoted segment of the market. It's also the segment, if my experiences with online games tell me anything, that doesn't think or care about important questions that games might raise, only beating or breaking the game. They're the people who type in ALL CAPS on Counterstrike or scream down their Xbox Live headset to call somebody a f*g or n*gger (their two favorite words) when somebody kills them or doesn't kill them enough, who reach Level 60 in World of Warcraft or get a Battleship in EVE just to wait somewhere with a steady flow of new players to prove their manliness by picking on people weaker than them in a videogame. Their forums have Sigs and Avatars and collectively they've made the Wikipedia article on Knuckles the Echidna longer than the one on Finnegans Wake (and it was even longer before somebody vandalised it). When they play Bioshock they'll enjoy the killing of Little Sisters, and probably make Youtube videos of themselves doing so in as many comical ways as they can think of.
Will they become child killers? No, but that's not the point. Personally, I don't like the idea of people getting their jollies from beating up little girls with pipe wrenches, and I think a design team as talented as Bioshock's could have come up with something that could advance their themes without allowing the less accountable portion of the game buying public to simulate some pretty nasty stuff.
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
09:58 / 01.10.06
I take it none of you ever played Carmageddon, then.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:53 / 01.10.06
Actually, yes, I did, but I'm afraid I don't recall it very well. If I do recall correctly, all the people you killed were zombies, weren't they? To wit, already dead?

Thermonuclear war's an interesting one: I had a Spectrum game calle Theatre: Europe -a very basic, hundred-by-hundred grid wargame simulating a NATO/WarPac engagment on the rhine. You had the option of using chemical and nuclear weapons to attack battlefield units or strike supply bases. You could choose to or not, but either way it had an impact on the DefCon, and if you overused nuclear strikes, or in fact advanced too far into Europe or Russia, it triggered a full-on nuclear exchange. For a 48k program, it actually did a lot to give the decision to use chemical weapons, for example, a sense of moral significance - using a teletype that told you that civilian casualties would be "minimised where possible" or "significant". Which takes us to DefCon - perhaps one difference there between the deaths in that and the deaths in a Grand Theft Auto is that the kind of nuclear war it is describing is no longer a kind that is likely to happen (a), and the deaths are abstract. Is there a difference in the feedback from different reporting mechanisms? Is killing someone with a plastic bag in Manhunt more morally upsetitng than killing 5 million people in Defcon?
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
12:12 / 01.10.06
Well, there's the Stalin "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" psychology: a million people on the Big Board is a lot less distressing than somebody you've made eye contact with.

Carmageddon was loads of fun, but made me feel filthy at the same time. The game started with a klaxon and a genteel voice announcing that "civilians had sixty seconds to reach minimum safe distance." It was set in a dystopian future world where you drove killer cars around low-income areas of the city, and scored points by running people over (or winning the race, but who did that, really?). Most definitely people. They screamed when you hit them, and exploded into showers of blood, and bounced off your windshield.

I think there were kids in the mix, but I can't remember.

There were also -- and this raises a bigger point -- mods where you could set all the civilians to be the Spice Girls and similar.

On that front: frankly, I'm not too concerned about Bioshock being "accessible" to people who will get their kicks out of killing little girls, because within 24 hours of the game's release, somebody will be releasing skin packs so that you can kill strippers or John Kerry or something. I've never been a capital-G gamer, but I've certainly noticed that any given game usually gets subverted with various mindbending mods within scant days of release, and if your penchant is for misogyny and murder there'll be plenty of options from the "fan community" available in short order.

In response to the thread summary: I find Bioshock to fall within acceptable lines. It's asking the player to make moral decisions under extreme circumstances, and frankly, games have reached the point where extreme circumstances are so common that you need something to distinguish your game from other shoot-em-ups. I don't think Bioshock will be known as "the little-girl-killing game," and I suspect that going on wrench rampages will not be a winning strategy for the game in the first place.

Games can allow you to "avatar yourself" and be stronger/smarter/faster/deadlier than you are in real life. But if the only decisions presented to your avatar are cut-and-dried black-and-white (hey, Black and White... another game, by the way, where a winning strategy can be to be "Evil" and sacrifice children in your altar constantly, en masse, and it's done to a reasonable level of detail) ones, than your playing experience is relatively empty.

Arguably, the fantasy needs "real-feeling" choices to some degree to keep attracting those interested in "alternate life experiences" rather than a highly evolved form of Space Invaders. Whether or not to do something morally distasteful in the name of expediency is a "real-feeling" choice. The moral duty for Bioshock, I figure, is to ensure that the socially/morally reprehensible choices don't also become the easiest and "most fun" way to play the game.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
12:20 / 01.10.06
Haus: If I do recall correctly, all the people you killed were zombies, weren't they? To wit, already dead?

In the UK version. Originally, they weren't. Changing them to zombies was a damage limitation exercise on the part of the publisher after our press caused a scene about it and at least one politician - can'tremember who - brought it up in Parliament. Seriously.
 
 
Axolotl
13:15 / 01.10.06
Wrt the Carmageddon, I beleive the original had people, this caused an outrage and on some formats and/or in some regions it was therefore released with zombies replacing the people.
I remember the furor caused by Cannon Fodder, which was in fact an exceedingly moral game: While the player controlled the characters in the game and in fact had a huge number of them, meaning you could use them as cannon fodder each death left a tombstone on the level load screen.
 
 
Axolotl
13:20 / 01.10.06
Sorry x-post with Dupre. That's what happens when you get distracted by Wikipedia's list of controversial computer games.
 
 
Mouse
14:42 / 01.10.06
Not sure if I have a real point to make here, but Frontier: Elite II had me trading in slaves, illegal bioweapons (nerve gas &c), and drugs since you could make between fifty to a hundred times as much per trade run as you could trading legal goods. That's one of the more blatant pieces of being rewarded for suspect behaviour I've seen. Sure, the cops might catch you sometimes, but you'd be making so much money you could easily toss off gigantic bribes, and any criminal record you might get from a faction you could easily shrug off by working with the opposing group.

I can't really count Carmageddon for some reason, because that was all presented as some crazy nonsense anyway. GTA I can see as being a little more troubling, because it does at times try to be gritty and realistic.

Hmm, I guess also I don't see why there should be any difference between killing kids and killing baby animals in games, really. Killing creatures labelled as youngsters in World of Warcraft* bummed me out way more than the endless slaughter of people I go through in my daily FPS-ing.

* for no reason other than that a quest asks you to strip their beaks, or somesuch, and when only about 20% of them drop the items you need so you slaughter every young creature in an area just to get some paltry reward.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:54 / 01.10.06
Axolotl> Cannon Fodder's problems stemmed more from the way that it adopted the image of the Remembrance Day poppy for its loading screen and boxart, twinning it with the tagline "war has never been so much fun", than they did anything else.

Sorry, I want to reply to this thread properly, but keep getting distracted.
 
 
Janean Patience
16:26 / 01.10.06
Re Killing prostitutes in GTA

It's always bothered me that this is one of the few things non-GTA players know about the games. Not aimed at you, Haus, but whenever I've mentioned playing one of the GTA games to someone unfamiliar with videogaming in general, that's what they bring up. "Is that the one where you can pick up prostitutes and kill them?"

Picking up prostitutes was, as far as I'm aware, a new wrinkle in gaming when GTA introduced it. I can understand gamers mentioning it. Compared to the other depravities available in the games, though, it's a minor detail. And you don't have to kill the girls, of course - I never did, though I don't think I can argue that makes me a good person. Why, then, is this something everyone knows about? Was there a news item specifically about it or something? Or is the urge to be the Yorkshire Ripper closer to the surface than I'd previously thought?

There weren't children in Carmageddon, BTW. Or dogs. As a rule, unless mutated, killing those two is unacceptable. Killing innocent adults, hey, that's just collateral damage.
 
 
Mouse
16:41 / 01.10.06
Well, you may be forgetting that in Kingpin: Life of Crime one of the first actions available to you is to beat a prostitute to death with a lead pipe in order to get money to buy a gun.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
17:15 / 01.10.06
Re: Killing prostitutes in GTA. I was first introduced to this concept by, oddly enough, my little sister. Previously I had thought that the various women walking the streets were just background color like any other civilian NPC. It never occurred to me that by driving slowly alongside them and then driving them to a dark alley one could gain health by having sex. It's just not something you think of when you're driving around Vice City or San Andreas.
After I found out I didn't bother with the whole thing. GTA is a roleplaying game and Tommy Vercetti and Carl Johnson aren't the kind of guys to a) pay $20 for a quickie behind the Clucking Bell fried chicken shack (Carl has seven girls on the go for chrissake) and b) beat ladies to death with golf clubs, decapitate them with samurai swords or drive them off the end of a pier. So I can't understand why this pretty pointless feature is almost a selling point for a game that otherwise has a lot to offer.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:19 / 02.10.06
You can also pick up prostitutes in Fallout, which appears to be our bellwether for antisocial activities - and, this being Fallout, you could also then open fire on the prostitutes, as you could anyonee else.

In the UK version. Originally, they weren't. Changing them to zombies was a damage limitation exercise on the part of the publisher after our press caused a scene about it and at least one politician - can'tremember who - brought it up in Parliament. Seriously.

Ah! Yes, I remember the controversy now. I played the UK version, which was zombies and zombie cows, IIRC. Non-huamn status as a distancing mechanism...
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
08:23 / 02.10.06
Axolotl> Cannon Fodder's problems stemmed more from the way that it adopted the image of the Remembrance Day poppy for its loading screen and boxart, twinning it with the tagline "war has never been so much fun", than they did anything else.

Let's not forget that just very occasionally, when one of the little chaps got shot, he wouldn't die straight away, but lie there screaming for ages; or that you could bounce the wounded around the screen by shooting them some more...

On which note, the recently released RTS "Company of Heroes" features much the same sort of thing, only a zillion times more graphically impressive. Nasty. And yet; this sort of thing doesn't really bother me. It's the games which appear to glorify unpleasantness which get me bothered, the Soldier of Fortune sort of thing. I guess it's the degree to which gruesome death is made an active rather than a passive part of gameplay.
 
 
Axolotl
09:25 / 02.10.06
I always thought Cannon Fodder's mortal wounding was done quite well. Despite the fact that the characters were tiny with fairly primitve graphics I felt for them an awful lot (the dismay you felt when one of your long serving men was killed because you weren't good enough still haunts me *sob*)
and I always felt really bad when a soldier ws left wounded.
If you contrast this with Soldier of Fortune where wounding and/or mutilating people horribly was basically the USP for what was otherwise a standard FPS.
There is a couple of little bits from other games worth mentioning: Both the recent Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight/ Academy games had bits where if you'd snuck up on the Nazi guards or imperial Stormtroopers respectively you'd hear them whinging about their duties or wishing they were back home. I though in games where you basically slaughtered hundreds of these guys it was a remarkably odd choice, though quite effective in making you stop and think for a minute about your in-game actions.
The same is true of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory where you can hear guards talking about their families and then you can chose to just knock them out or slit their throats. While in game it makes no difference the only way to get a perfect score is to not kill anyone. I always feel this adds a little something to the game.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:05 / 07.10.06
Phex> Some pretty annoying generalisations in your first post. I'm starting to get a bit tired of the way that a section of Barbleith constantly needs to feel the need to attack other boards simply because they use avatars and Barbelith doesn't - actually, one of the things I've been thinking recently is that a part of Barbelith's current problem is that the overly dry visual design isn't particularly effective at encouraging a decent atmosphere of community. But that's for another thread.

Also: Finnegan's Wake? That's a miserable, sniffy excuse of an argument.

On dead children: Games have always shied away from allowing the player to enact any kind of violence towards virtual kids, to the extent that you don't even tend to see undead children in them. There are no child zombies in Resident Evil or Dead Rising. The child-things in Silent Hill were replaced with demonic teddy bears when that title left Japan.

I'm struggling to think of many games that allow you to harm anything that looks even remotely like a human child. Some shmups push the squelchy body horror angle by giving you enemies that look like fetuses - moral panic averted because that's a genre which has long since been abandoned by large audiences, so the mainstream press are never going to be altered to those examples. Splatterhouse did the same, but that series was notorious more for its depitions of violence than what the subjects of your killing spree looked like.

One of the episodes in Killer7 has you hunting down a child-abusing professional killer. That's about as close to this particular knuckle as I've seen any game come recently - the abuse of children is made explicit and there's a suggestion that the abuse is sexual. And Killer7 is a tangle of mixed messages and dubious morality - the fact that the guy likes to hurt kids has nothing to do with why you're out to kill him. The cutscene that introduces him has him presenting the decapitated head of a young boy to the boy's father. It's icky. But, again, Killer7 is cult enough to have glided under the moral majority radar effortlessly.

There's a just-released PS2 game called Ring of Rose that's caused a ruffling of feathers on gaming boards recently. It looks to be a game that sets out to disturb through characterisation - pre-teenage girls displaying an unsettling degree of sexualisation within a dark, dank setting of childhood secrets and horrors (trailer).

I hope this isn't an offensive generalisation, but the Japanese market seems to be much more willing to push these boundaries. I can't imagine I'll ever see a US-developed game featuring cutscenes like those in the above trailer.

The storline of the second Project Zero/Fatal Frame focuses on child sacrifice. The storyline of the third also deals with human sacrifice, but this time it has very young girls taking part in the sacrifical act itself. It's obvious why Project Zero gets a pass - it's a series of ghost stories. These events happened in the past, before the player arrived on the scene, and while the children are still present and need to be destroyed by the player, none of them have a physical presence. There's also a grand tradition of using children in ghost stories - this, again, is something that Japanese culture seems to understand well.

Even GTA doesn't have kids in it. The prostitue thing is a difficult one - I *do* find it highly questionable, but I'm not sure that I can explain why, when I don't get the ick factor from elements of other games that are, in theory, far worse. As far as that element of 'gameplay' goes - the buy/screw for health bonus/kill to retrieve money thing - it's possible that it was an accident, an emergent tactic that was first discovered by players and not an intentional inclusion. The people you kill often drop money. The health top-up linked from having sex is a gag. The combination of the two may not even have crossed anyone's mind until the game was already on shop shelves - it's been made fairly clear in the last year or so that Rockstar possibly don't think things through thoroughly enough, what with the whole Hot Coffee debacle, and this may be another example of that.

On GTA: I'm currently playing San Andreas and enjoying it a lot. It's an astonishing game - the illusion of being part of a real, living world is completely convincing and the size of that world is breathtaking. I wasn't expecting it to be, but the writing is of a seriously high standard. But.

But it squicks me out sometimes. An early mission has you taking part in a number of drive-by killings. It made me very uneasy - there's no choice here, you have to complete this mission successfully if you want to push the storyline forwards.

That storyline is the main culprit here. The impression I got from the opening sections was that the main character, CJ, was being forced to return to a world that he thought he'd escaped from, being forced to become something that he hated. It's clear that he's unhappy about coming back home. As soon as he gets back in with his old crew, though, that's forgotten - he suddenly revels in the gang life. Have him kill all the patrons and staff in a fast food joint and he lets loose with a string of (not particularly amusing) quips. Successfully complete a mission that has you killing indiscriminately and he'll be there with all the guys who never left the homestead, bigging each other up for a job well done.

The drive-bys squick me out because of this - because there's absolutely no sense that CJ - your avatar throughout - sees anything wrong in what he's doing. San Andreas' problem here is that its storyline is too closely tied to a real place, a real time in the real world. You can get a guilt-free kick out of taking Tommy Vercetti on a mad killing spree in Vice City, because the setting and characters are so clearly OTT. Vice is parody through and through. San Andreas isn't - it's a recreation of the real world. And it's this combination of elements that make me itchy about the drive-bys - they reference real-world events in a convincingly realistic, straight setting, without any of the knowing winks of GTAIII or Vice. CJ has no redeeming features at this point in the game - he isn't even an appealing anti-hero.

Bully - or Canis Canem Edit as it's now known in the UK (I just know that I'm going to have to Google that again before being able to search for the thing with any accuracy when I come to buy it from any online store) - looks like it's going to throw a lot of people, with its player character being on the unexpected side of the bullying fence. The original title was such a Rockstar move - courting controversy in order to grab free publicity.

Sex: Hot Coffee, Haus.

Rambling post, sorry. More about all this bubbling away in the front of my head, but I can't get to it at the mo.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
21:16 / 07.10.06
I'm struggling to think of many games that allow you to harm anything that looks even remotely like a human child.

I've just remembered, reading that, a game which requires you to do a variety of unpleasant things to babies (and hamsters, parrots, whippets and more). Imogen. Gun them down, shoot 'em with arrows, even play them to death with a saxophone (hey! I didn't write it... stop looking at me like that...); all in the course of helping the titular wizard escape from his own brain. Or somesuch rational. It's comic, but you do kill babies. It's a great little puzzle, and free to download, so get going.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
21:19 / 07.10.06
I always got the impression that the prostitute-killing stuff in Vice City was emergent, yes- the first time I even learned about the tactic was on a list of "cheats" and exploitable bugs.

The Cannon Fodder mortal woundings were a very "nice" touch- I'd have to shoot them to put them out of their misery, they freaked me out so much. CF was, imho, one of the most moral games ever produced (though it was a fairly simplistic morality). All your guys had names. They all got tombstones. The cutesy, "war has never been so much fun" aspect only served to reinforce this.
 
 
Axolotl
10:24 / 08.10.06
I'm struggling to think of many games that allow you to harm anything that looks even remotely like a human child

Didn't Syndicate have people pushing a pram, or was that only in the demo?

Sheik Zed, your thoughts on GTA:SA are interesting. I've never really had that squick factor with it and I'm not sure why. Possibly as it is a GTA game I took it as a "cartoon" OTT experience, and despite SA's greater realism never really looked beyond that.
 
 
Sniv
11:49 / 08.10.06
SPOILERS for San Andreas-

I think once you're flying around in a jetpack and completing missions for the government, any pretensions of realism are thrown out of the window.

That said, I think Zed definately has a point with regards to choice in San Andreas. For all of it's sandbox approach to the game world, it is quite a linear game once you start progressing through the missions. I didn't necessarily mind this, but the lack of choice in your actions is interesting. I guess maybe developers are thinking that if you give a player cars, guns and a massive city, what else are they going to do except kill people? I would love if future installments in the series allow you to do things like white-collar crime, making you millions without a single drop of blood spilled, but only if you want to. I wonder what percentage of players would want to play a bloodless game like that, versus the amounts of people that just like the pretty explosions and the driving very fast?
 
 
Janean Patience
11:55 / 08.10.06
The Cannon Fodder mortal woundings were a very "nice" touch- I'd have to shoot them to put them out of their misery, they freaked me out so much.

Threadrot, but in Quake 2 there's a section where you discover a bunch of tortured, mutilated but still alive fellow Marines in cells moaning things like "Help me," and "Kill me now". You unlock the cells and, by that point almost exclusively using the shotgun, do the kind thing and finish them off.

But. If you switch to your pistol instead and give them a single shot, wounding but not killing them, they realise that you command the power of death. That you can end their pain. So they start crawling and shuffling toward you, wherever you are on the level, still crying out for their lives to be ended.

There's nothing more fun than running off to your next demon-slaughtering engagement, getting all tactical and shooty, and then hearing them their way into the field of combat, a procession of crawling victims of this awful war. There's a tremendous sense of bathos.
 
 
invisible_al
14:09 / 23.10.06
Just as the moral panic about Rockstar's Bully seemed to be running out of steam, Gaygamer has discovered you can snog boys as well as girls in the game.

I am amused as Rockstar seem to be having a great deal of fun building up peoples expectations and then pulling the rug from under them. Jack Thompson will just explode I can tell .
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:12 / 23.10.06
Oh now that's quality.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
15:24 / 23.10.06
Jack Thompson will just explode I can tell

Well, not before he's gotten a lot of big retailers to refuse to stock Bully, which he already has as part of his 'must destroy Rockstar games' campaign.

The clip was awesome- though I'm still not psyched about Bully, which just strikes me as GTA for kids.
 
 
Blake Head
20:31 / 23.10.06
“I’m a totally awesome kisser… right?”

Ah, those golden days of teenage lust and self-doubt…

But with thoughts on the above:

Violence tends to be accepted as the common coin of interaction in computer games - and I suppose that greater complexity in games can but need not lead to greater complexity being placed on acts of violence.

I actually only have a similar example to Axolotl mentioning Splinter Cell. In terms of reward / punishment for harming innocents, the Hitman series of games is the only one that I’ve played that comes to mind where there’s both the ability to harm innocents and a response in the game’s scoring system. In terms of making moral choices, arguably it’s quicker and easier in some ways (on the initial difficulty settings at least) to go through each level quickly eliminating each guard and innocent before arriving at the target, and even trying to go through the game playing by the “rules” of the stealth genre the game repeatedly puts you in the position of being able to quickly eliminate an unsuspecting character with no penalty. The structure of the game, though, is obviously set up to reward careful exploration and working out alternate “paths” to the target. Getting a perfect score is only possible by largely avoiding overt violence, and there is some small in-game incentive in the form of bonus weapons. However, in the background to the game’s central character, rather than the player, there’s little reason to see these as moral choices – it almost entirely feels viewed through the lenses of efficiency, practicality and to a degree: style (I’m mainly referring to Hitman 2 here, I believe the latest instalment does further things with these ideas about style of play, but I don’t got it, so anyone who does do share). Anyway, as far as I can see this makes it a game which is basically amoral, rather than immoral, and the only situation where violence is prohibited (resulting in immediate mission failure) is not in the killing of non-combatants, but in one mission with the potential for attacking UN Peacekeepers. Which seems to me, in a game where you can attack criminals, military personnel, the police and civilians (no children), a curious if not entirely incongruous exception, and I can only presume is in place due to the in-game reason of an agent of a covert organisation attacking such a powerful international body being massively non-covert, and the meta-game reason that marketing a game where you can have pitched battles with neutrally perceived peacekeeping forces might be a wee bit difficult.

Which is to put aside the moral issue of carrying out assassinations for money obviously.

And I guess, just following on from that, I’ve begun to question how the US audience reacts to a game like GTA (in all it’s incarnations) where you can, and to some degree are encouraged, to attack members of their military and emergency services, especially with regard to the past five years where they’ve collectively drawn popular support as national heroes. Which I guess goes back to whether violence towards some people is more significant than to others. Hmmmm.

Interesting thoughts on San Andreas Zed. I think one of the things is that, despite the admitted linearity, I think the morality the characters represent is more complicated than is sometimes suggested. Not necessarily always consistent, and certainly not Shakespeare, but I recall being actually reasonably impressed that CJ wasn’t just the stereotype of a kid from the streets, and that there is a tension throughout the game between his desire for independence and solidarity with his past friends and his origins. I’m not saying that the presentation of that conflict is sophisticated or unproblematic, but it is there, that is, it’s not just a procession of drive-bys. The other thing, really, was that I didn’t really feel the realism you describe distinguishing San Andreas from the other games in the series to the same degree. As you go further into the game the situations become more improbable, but even at the initial stages, the ability to beat a fireman to death with a rubber dildo, steal his rig, then drive it around hosing people into traffic, however tasteless or actually quite immoral, makes the reality of the game seem absurd.

Another point was identification. While San Andreas is more realistic, I don’t think that most people playing it, at a guess the majority being middle class white suburban kids, actually have lives that resemble that of the central characters in the GTA: SA narrative. Which is to say that, as iffy as that might be, there’s a similar level of imaginative recreation going on as in other games. And in a way, while it’s more closely modelled on an existing reality as you describe, certainly the way I approached the game, and felt at times encouraged to do so, was in identification with popular and cinematic tropes of American, obviously particularly African and Hispanic American culture, and in that sense only saw it as a more modern (and equally unrealistic) simulation of certain clichés that games like Vice City so gloriously typify. Anyway, I agree with most of what you’re saying (just to a lesser degree), and even though I’m not sure about whether there are actually moral choices that the player can make in San Andreas that significantly alter the structure of the game, I’d be interested to know how you’re progressing with it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:29 / 23.10.06
There's also the story (not sure how true this is or how much it's part of the Rockstar self-mythologising, but I read it in an interview with one of the creators of the original GTA) that when they were first making Grand Theft Auto (remember that? All top-down and 2-D it was! How mad is THAT?) the original idea was for you to play a cop. But, given that you had the freedom to do pretty much whatever you wanted even back in the 2-D sandbox, and that OF COURSE players were gonna be committing mass murder and shit, it would be offensive and get them in tons of shit (given that they had no money at the time to fight anything legal) to have you playing a cop.

So, as the story goes, the entire "crim-sim" thing comes from a desire not to be too offensive and invite litigation.

As I say, it's fairly apocryphal, but it's a pretty funny Rockstar Secret Origin if it's true.
 
 
grime
03:38 / 25.10.06
sooooo ...

am i the only person here who thinks horrible, gory violence is funny? is there no one else who will rent a game specifically because you can target limbs? anyone who does maximum damage, repeatedly, just to watch the meat fly?

the fact that it'd practically impossible to find a game that allows child-killing is just another example of a repressive culture. i can't wait to be able to use a minigun on a schoolbus.

perhaps i am a horribly desensitized bastard with emotional problems. however, i've never killed a prostitute. i'm sure there's some psychological bullshit about allowing our inner demons out in a safe space. really though, it's just fun!

however, writing this does make me realize that i would not be able to play a game involving sexual violence. i've tortured men to death with a hundred different tools in the punisher game, but could not play, or watch a game that involved rape.
 
  
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