the lost and the damned and ethics

#1

Quote:now i know this is a very unpopular stance amongst gamers,
but seriously, wtf ? here we have a case where the exact violence which rocked a community one month is commodified and presented as a cool new "rockstar" game the next. the gaming community loves to take the stance that glorifying violence doesn't lead to a societal increase in actual violence, but i call bullshit.

Actually.. a new study came out recently stating racing games lead to far greater levels of anger than do shooters. Should we ban them to? I'm not saying you want to ban anything, and I do see the relevance of what your saying. But the question remains.. what do we do. I'm not willing to take away people's free speech rights.

And I dunno if glorifying violence leads to anything.. but I do know parents to self-absorbed and/or stupid to pay attention to their kids hold more blame than anything else (yes I'm a parent).

Personally, I think all the grand theft auto's are total crap, and are not allowed in my house for me or my kids.

#2 Copying my post from the blog.
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@Michael,

Quote:GamePolitics.com is also a much better place to get into this kind of debate.

Was that a suggestion of not introducing this topics in this community? I dont agree with you this time. Sorry, I know the napalm raids on this debates can usually be hard to control, and that can make your work guys harder, but thats not a reason to avoid this.

I fully support Orion on his need to express himself on the matter, here.

@Orion,

Quote:the gaming community loves to take the stance that glorifying violence doesn't lead to a societal increase in actual violence, but i call bullshit.

Now that is oversimplistic. In general terms, Im with you on your point, but then again, you are mixing several problems into the same problem, and that turns the topic into a sack of cats.

#3 I tend to disagree. People have been killing each other for thousands of years. Video games have only been around for a few decades, and violent crimes have been decreasing overall during that period. I might agree that they could use a little more circumspection with regards to advertising, but there's nothing wrong with the games.

Is it possible that some kids play these games and then go out and commit violence? Sure. Would they go out and commit violence if the game didn't exist? Most likely. Depriving millions of people of a popular form of entertainment as a substitution for parental guidance and personal responsibility doesn't strike me as particularly useful or wise. Especially when there's no real evidence to back up the claims that this stuff leads to violence. Calling bullshit doesn't count as evidence.

I could say that for every person that gets killed as a result of the glorification of violence in these games another life is saved because somebody was able to vent their stress in a way that doesn't hurt anybody. Of course, I have no evidence of that either other than knowing that I've ended the lives of a lot of virtual pedestrians in GTA after getting off the phone with my ex-girlfriend. And I have yet to run over any real people with my truck.

#4 I also disagree. Video games are getting the blame here where drugs, gang violence, and easy access to firearms is the real problem. If anything, I think that violent games let people release built-up anger and aggression in a safe way, like a punching bag.

Your personal experience is definitely tragic and putting the billboard at the location of a homocide is tasteless (but probably unintentional). But isn't there also a billboard for the new Terminator movie nearby?

John K.
www.envygames.com

#5 I think there are two separate points to address in Orion's OP. Yes, Rockstar has complete freedom to develop and market a game however they want. Is it in poor taste to market a violent game glorifying biker gang (ahem, motorcycle club) activity in a city rocked by the real thing? You're damn right it is. I could say it is offensive.

Our opinions differ on whether or not the game is marketed toward children. I fully stand behind the ESRB and how Rockstar voices their own opinion of the product. It is labeled appropriately: M for mature audiences, not for kids.

If the game makes its way into the hands of a child, an adult who is not affiliated with Rockstar is responsible for that action. If it is a parent or relative, then it is fully their decision and should not be policed beyond that.

If it is a clerk, then fire his/her ass for circumventing years of work that has gone into protecting the rights of gamers and game developers.

Do I believe violent games lead to violent behavior? Nope. Want me to post article after article, study after study? There has been no conclusive evidence of it. That means it will boil down to opinion every single time. The long standing argument of nature vs nurture.

Entertainment has been blamed for being a bad influence on youth and culture for a long time. It's just evolved over time. Books -> Rock & Roll -> Comic Books -> TV -> Rap/Metal -> Movies -> Toys -> Video Games, and now everything gets blamed.

#6 I get your point Orion and i agree with this specific case as it is distastful. You can and should file a complaint with the city which can (and probably will) take these down.

Still violent video games do not directly cause violent acts. There is no evendence of it and in fact the statistics are against this argument.

#7 @Tom - This has actually happened in several cities. Quite a few ads for violent games have been removed from posters and billboards near public transportation and schools.

I do not have much of a problem with that, so long as there is some logic behind it. I think, in this case, it would be appropriate to remove the poster in Orion's area.

#8 @Mich
I wouldn't call these games in poor taste. Why do I play GTA? Because, riding through New York on a bike rampaging wherever I want is FUN, in the game, but is something I would never do in real life. That's why I play GTA. I play FPS games because I don't want to get shot, but I want to pretend to be in a war. And I play racing games because I don't have easy access to hundreds of supercars to crash at will.

Edit(My comment from the blog):
Rockstar has the freedom to do what they want, it's a game made for 18+. If a child gets it, it's the parents fault.

Parents. Fault. There's no discussion about that. Sick of hearing things being blamed on Rockstar just because some people don't know what self control is and always want to point the finger on anyone but themselves.

My 2c's.

#9 @Neill - Read what I said again, please. I said their marketing posters were in poor taste considering where they were placed.

I play GTA as well, since I love sandbox style games. I actually play a wide variety of genres, like most gamers do. For me, the only skill or influence that has translated from a video game to real life is learning how to play the drums thanks to Rock Band.

If anything, I tend to try and transfer my real life skills to a video game to gain an edge...such as my martial arts background influencing how I play UFC 2009.

Also, as I stated it will not always be the parents fault. Blame is not the appropriate action. We could spend time blaming, or we could spend time trying to improve our community.

#10 I agree with Mich on this one. The game is fine, but that advertising was definitely in poor taste.

Imagine, for example, somebody makes a game where you fly planes into landmarks. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. I probably wouldn't play it, but I doubt it would encourage people to fly planes into buildings. But if they posted a huge billboard for it in downtown Manhattan, that would be in pretty bad taste and probably wouldn't last 10 minutes.

This scenario with Rockstar's ads in SF isn't as politically charged as that, but for the families of the people who have been victims of this stuff, it would be just as hurtful.

#11 You could cover their posters, if they seem offensive. It is public domain advertising (at least it looks like it from the pics). You could use milk and blank pieces of paper to render the tasteless advertising campaign useless ( a type of silent protest).

As far as my opinion: IF it is public domain advertising, and people dont like it, they can easily change it. If it is advertising by payment for the space, complain to the owner of the space. I would feel the same if it were religion, guns or sex being advertised; indifferent. I dont see this as an 'DIGITAL GAME' issue at all.

#12 > Entertainment has been blamed for being a bad influence on youth and culture for a long time.

it's true that entertainment has been blamed for changing the values of society, and i think in some cases that blame is accurately placed.

for example rock & roll. i would suggest that rock & roll did contribute to changing how youth culture behaved, and from the perspective of the establishment at the time that change was for the worse: their values were not propagating to the new generation. of course from our (parent's) generation's perspective, it was high time those stodgy old values got chucked out the window anyhow. my personal stodgy old values in this case are, you know, sort of opposed to killing, and i feel that much popular media & entertainment as exemplified by the GTA titles are eroding those values.

> it will boil down to opinion every single time.
> The long standing argument of nature vs nurture.

i guess i'm suggesting that the games industry/community should take the nurture side of things a little more seriously & responsibly.

fwiw, i myself am a counterexample to my own argument here -
i spent *countless* hours as a kid running around playing "guns".
it's what we did pretty much all summer, every summer, but the evidence thus far is that it didn't turn me into a callous violence-worshipper or something. kids playing "guns" and other violent role-playing can be fine and healthy, but the GTA titles and marketing have gone too far.

re parents,
yes, parents have an obligation to vet the media and entertainment their kids are engaging with. absolutely. but the fact is that many parents just don't, and that's not something which should just be ignored. how many times have you been over at someone's house and there's a ten year-old who wants to show you how good he is at GTA ? not everyone grows up in a household with parents who particularly care about their kid. lots of parents have enough trouble just keeping their own lives together, and they can't/don't take the time to give their kids the attention which all kids need. so if some new video-game keeps johnny happy and out of my hair for a few hours, well great!
and my guess is that these are kids who are going to have more frustration and societal angst and "risk" in the first place. you can say that it's the parent's fault here, and you would be right, but you'd be missing the bigger picture.

thanks to everyone for keeping it civil and moving your replies from the blog-post to here.

#13 > You could cover their posters, if they seem offensive.
excellent point Caylo. it is public domain advertising (first time i've heard that phrase, thanks) and i have to admit i intended to do some reconfiguration of them but motivational inertia won out again.

#14

Quote:
i guess i'm suggesting that the games industry/community should take the nurture side of things a little more seriously & responsibly.

I would agree with this if there was some real evidence that these games really have an impact on society. I just don't see what benefit there would really be had by not producing these games. Will it really reduce violence or lead to an improvement in society if Rockstar only made Match-3 games? I doubt it. I do know that it would deprive a lot of people of a form of entertainment that they enjoy.

Having grown up around gangs and kids that are always into mischief, I have a pretty good feeling that it doesn't really matter. Those kids will find a dozen different ways and venues of getting into mischief. You're not going to keep them on the straight and narrow by not making games with guns in them.

#15

Quote:yes, parents have an obligation to vet the media and entertainment their kids are engaging with. absolutely. but the fact is that many parents just don't, and that's not something which should just be ignored

So if some lazy parents want me to change my games to raise their child, then I'll do it (hypothetically). But I guarantee that I'll raise that kid to my own standards, and not theirs. So then when they get mad about what I teach that kid outside of the realms of violence, what then? Do I change again? And when that doesn't work, again? And if their kid goes out and shoots up fifty kids in their school because his house is empty of compassion and caring, is that then my fault because I tried to raise a kid I never knew in some house I've never been to, for some parents who didn't care about their kid or my efforts, but just that he shut up when they gave him something?

That example sounds ridiculous worded like that, I know. But the point I'm trying to make is that if people are not taking care of their kids and we give them an "out", they'll take it, and especially if something bad happens. It's not so much a matter of helping parents raise their kids by providing a better grade of entertainment, but rather trying to compensate for parenting that does not occur, which no game can do, even if it was intended to do just that.

Parenting requires years of emotional and mental engagement at a personal level with children that adapts to the changes that the child experiences during growing up. The most crucial years are the first five or so, and just as experts have found that many serial killers are created in those years, so they will also eventually find that many mass murderers are created during the same time period.

A game cannot fix that. It may indeed trigger it, but that's not to say that nothing else will. Books have triggered killers, just as the movie Taxi Driver inspired John Hinkley to try to kill President Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster. The human mind has way too many moving parts to be thwarted by playing a video game without having had a foundation laid for that either through a quirk of genetics or failed parenting, or both.

That is not a burden we should take upon our shoulders.

#16 You can not RIP them down, and you can not PAINT them. Both could be considered vandalism and/or creating public eyesore(at least the way it was in Seattle nearly 10 years ago when i had a tiff with the police about 'public domain advertising' with a band member putting up posters).

#17 The advertising may be a little tasteless, but I don't know what to say about that. Advertising is generally always tasteless. I do think Rockstar has done a decent job of being more socially aware with GTA4, though.

If you actually play through the game, it's basically a story about people who make very poor choices and pay the price for it. As you go through the game, things get progressively worse for all of the characters involved, and many of them end up dead.

Throughout the series, drugs are basically always represented negatively (crack destroys your neighborhood in GTA:SA, GTA4 has a number of characters who are serious addicts, and heroin plays a major role in destroying your gang in LaTD).

As far as the sandbox killing is concerned, it's old news. By the 6th game in the series, most players aren't spending their time running over pedestrians or mowing them down with an AK47. I'm not really inclined to believe that violent games can create violent people anyway. I've played violent video games since I was young and definitely feel that public school is a far more dangerous influence on kids than this kind of media. :P

All that aside, the gameplay is getting stale at this point. I wish the series would move back to PC-based development and crank up the depth a bit, but I don't see that happening.

#18 Interesting theories here.
Orien, I believe San Francisco has a ban on adds for mature audiences? You may want to check that out. (I listen to a San Fran. radio news station daily) (am 650 KCBS)
To answer the question from my point of view, I don't believe games cause or teach violence. Most of the people who commit crimes don't even own a computer, and probably never played a computer game. I don't think game making companies are responsible for the violence. In the cases presented here, Where you live, with what has transpired there over the past few years, placing any posters dipicting violence is inappropriate. The city should have stopped it instead of giving them the permit to put them up.

#19 I believe that while there's some truth in what you say, Orion, violent games can be an aid in "grounding" violence itself. They relive stress when done well.

They can also build up lots of stress. So say the many broken joysticks after playing Decathlon on the c64. That was a sports game on an 8 bit machine some 20 years ago, and I am yet to play a game that pisses me off that much.

I don't think that we, game developers have the luxury of generalization when discussing this topic. Each specific case must be examined thoroughly. Society's accepted many things that are violent. But I'm not so much worried about violent games. I believe that if violence stems from a game, it's a result of frustration, and it has nothing to do with the genre.

I'm worried about shows on television where people are arguing and hitting each other live. I'm worried about the carefully selected crap that news networks pick for us to consume, and you get 10 crimes versus 1 funny / good article. I'm worried about all kinds of aggressions on TV that do not have resolutions. I try to avoid them the most, and that's how I'm gonna raise my kids.

Some games are violent, but without violent games there would be much more tension around. I'm not in favor of them, but who doesn't like to play such games once in a while. They are fun. For a healthy person, they will not induce a killing spree. For others, the real reason will never be the game itself.

The ad? Distasteful, yes, but a whole different issue...

#20 I would check with the city to see if they got a permit to put those ad's up. If they didn't, I would report them and get them taken down.