Dead Pixels has 41 chronicles

1. The Great Gaming Culture War: Games & The News
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Oct 06 2009

   Dead Pixels
   10-05-09
   By Ryan M. Eft
   
   I’m a junkie. An addict. I’ve got more needs than the average rehab patient. My drugs of choice? Video games, graphic novels, movies, animation, music, art, nature. I tend to allow the things I like to become a part of my personality. I harbor a general belief that if you don’t have passion for the things you like, then why bother to like things?
   
   I’m also a news junkie. I subscribe to Time and National Geographic. I read local papers, even when I’m in another city, because I want to get the feel for a place. I check news updates online most mornings and evenings. There’s really no point in being a writer if you’re only interested in the part of the world you live in. Depending on who you are, my passion for current events and my determination to make others aware of them is either useful or annoying.
   
   Now, when it comes to our shared passion of gaming, I’m no different. I’m that one gamer out of probably a dozen who reads developer interviews top to bottom, who keeps up on sales trends, who takes what information he finds and uses it to make educated guesses about where gaming is going. I suppose if I wasn’t that guy I wouldn’t exactly be an ideal choice to write a gaming column.
   
   However, I’ve noticed to some dismay that these two of my passions do not cross over very often. Video games and current events seem to act like polite adversaries; they don’t antagonize each other constantly or openly, but they sure aren’t quick to invite one another to parties. When games make the news, it is usually because someone hurt someone else and the someone who did the hurting happened, typically by coincidence, to have once played Halo. And when current events show up in a game, it is usually in a form so thinly veiled that you can barely tell.
   
   The other forms of expression that I love don’t have this problem.
   Musicians are perfectly willing to express views on ongoing real-world events (listen to, say, the new Muse album The Resistance. You can draw a hundred direct parallels to the modern day).
   
   Likewise, while Six Days in Fallujah still struggles to find a publisher despite backing from the troops involved, there have already been a handful of television shows and films about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I see books and comics all the time tackling the subjects.
   
   Now, it’s no secret that games have used analogies for modern concerns for some time. The Modern Warfare line is the example that most readily springs to mind, though most games of that ilk continue to portray the situations in terms of good guy/bad guy.
   
   But less obvious examples are out there. The Final Fantasy series has long used Magic to represent things like the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the antagonists of that series are, more often than not, rulers or people of authority who get a bit too power-hungry. In the ninth installment, they even went so far as to identify the main villain as a weapons dealer, who sold magical weapons to power-hungry kingdoms in an attempt to foment war. And in the recent twelfth game, the main bad guy was actually trying to do what he thought was the right thing and nearly destroyed the world in the process. I’m sure we can all think of a few public figures who’d fit that mold.
   
   It’s sad, though, that such examples are so few and far between, when video games could do a lot more with the real world.
   
   Yet gaming as a majority seems intent on sticking to a set of unwritten rules. Whenever a real-world government is involved in a game, it almost always represents the good guys. The military is almost always presented as holier-than-thou and capable of no real human fallacy or of doing any wrong. And if a real-world situation is presented with no layer of paint, it seems it has to be at least a few decades old (that’ll be enough World War II games now).
   
   You’re thinking now that it would be awfully difficult to implement real-world situations into most games in an honest way without offending someone. Seeing as it is already difficult to make money on a game, I can kind of understand where developers are caught on this. What I don’t understand is why so many don’t seem game to try. The problems with Six Days in Fallujah have only intensified people’s desire for it; I wonder how many people even knew what it was before a handful threw a stink about it.
   
   I’m not by any means saying that escapism has no place in modern games, or that analogy isn’t a useful tool for making a point. I’m merely noting that, as the medium evolves, it may be time to step up and join fellow mediums in facing down issues in the real world. Hell, it would be nice to even use real events as a backdrop, as we so rarely get even that much.
   
   At the end of the day, I suppose I’m simply troubled at how much gaming evolution is associated merely with increased technology.
   
   I’m of a mind that we need to mature the possible subject matter as well. To involve situations like Darfur or abortion battles or elections into games wouldn’t come without a fair share of risk.
   
   But what people seem to forget is that movies, music, books, all went through this same type of risk, and came out intact and viable on the other side.
   
   It’d take work, yes. But the alternative---becoming popular but empty, the kid brother to the more grown-up forms of expression---may very well be worse.

   
   

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Dead Pixels has 2 comment s on this chronicle.

1. A-Thon X
   Posted On Oct 07 2009

   I agrre with Decipherone, but moral choices are becoming more ambiguous in games so i think it'd be possible to include these hot topics without alienating your base if you just allow people the freedom of choice in the game just as we have outside the game.
   
   And i think one reason more events aren't in games is because games take such a long time to make, compared to other media, And people have such short attention span, than several days after the fact people consider it old and done. Like a comment i read about the Kanyawest/TaylorSwift incident, someone complained about a blog done on the topic because it was already Done, the blog went up three days after the incident, not even a full week. So yeah, short attention spans.
   
   I also like your comments on Six Days in Fallujah. Adam Sessler did a soapbox about this very subject (current events in games; the whole Fallujah thing) which i found interesting. Here it is: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/694743/Sesslers-Soapbox-Fun-Vs-Art.html
   
   Great Chronicle, BTW
   
   

2. DecipherOne
   Posted On Oct 06 2009

   Good read as always Ryan. As I posted in the forum discussing these topics, I personally don't want the mix of current events mixed in with my gaming. I game to relax and to escape the stresses of the world around me. That isn't to say that the underlying themes from the events happening in the world can't be used in a generic way to form a storyline that I'd be interested in seeing.
   
   Expressive games have their place as well, which I believe is where this topic starts to go. Using games to express ideas and thoughts of a developer is, at this time, best left to the indie scene. Such games have emerged in forms of flash games and some other experimental games out there, and this is where you will see more things emerge. The big boys aren't going to be willing to take the risk involved in tackling issues that might offend, or heaven forbid make people stop and think a bit. They're in it to make money, not the guys actually doing the work per-say, but the investors and business management. That's why you see 15 years of Madden Games and sequel after sequel of your favorite shooter. They're quick, easy to build off of previous versions, and they sell.
   
   A sad state of affairs, but games are still in their infancy, and things will change. But in the meantime, I recommend checking out indie games to get a perspective on where such things can go.
   
   TIGSource.com is an excellent place to start. For the heavy expressive games though, you may have to do some digging. I could recommend some, but I've been kind of out of the loop for the last year. Facade was an interesting concept though so if you've never seen it, you may want to check that out.
   
   Eventually I think we will see some studious tackle things of this nature