Excuse My French: Media Doesn’t Know What the Fuck It’s Doing With Video Games

The co-CEO of Quantic Dream has made gaming news again for addressing content in electric entertainment, this time not for adjusting it to fit its audience’s sensibilities but to criticize how it’s unfairly blamed for violent behavior.

During an interview with French gaming site Digital Games, Guillame de Fondaumiere acknowledged the fact that many titles on the market contain extreme violence but said he believed that they were not the cause of headline-making tragedies.  “There are violent video games… that for sure,” he says at the interview’s opening, “but video games don’t make you violent. [...] I think that… many stupid things are being written and said about violence and video games.”

Fondaumiere points out that every form of expression contains its fair share of violent material, and that violent actions supposedly “inspired” by games in some individuals are nothing but expressions of deeper issues they hold unrelated to their pastime.

“The real problem is when… some medias are taking… small portions of video game footages, out of their contexts and then explain that this or that game will be extremely violent,” he says, saying that video games are this generation’s scapegoat for violent behavior just as other forms of entertainment and media were in the past.

(Note: The player is not cooperating, so you can get the video from GamePolitics here.)

The video is just one in a series that interviews the development team of the upcoming title Heavy Rain about video games and its impact on society as a medium.

The interview seems especially relevant considering the story carried by GamePolitics just one day later, involving a 13-year-old French student who was apprehended when it became obvious he intended to stage an attack in his school with a shotgun.   Gamepolitics’ addendum to the story noted how it played up the role of video games in the boy’s life, as did several other news outlets that the site was alerted to by one of its users.  A representative of Action Innocence, a French nonprofit group dedicated to protecting children on the Internet, actually came to the defense of video games during an ensuing debate on the issue, saying, “Rather than knowing he was a video game aficionado, I would like us to ask the question: what was the deep discomfort that made the child ask that way [...] All children and teenagers play video games, yet they’re not all mass murderers.”

Sega on Germany Release of Aliens vs. Predator: “Not Worth It”

Warning: Intense German

Sega has disclosed that it will not bother to try and release its upcoming title Aliens vs. Predator in Germany due to the country’s stringent ratings system, according to PC Games Hardware.

Riemann Link, the article’s author, says that the press release he was working from made it clear that Sega did not expect the country’s rating board, the USK, to approve the title due to the intense violence that comes as a part of the gameplay experience.  Sega is also unwilling to let the title’s content be compromised at the behest of the ratings board, and therefore fit its ideas of proper entertainment, due to the fact that the game “has been designed in coherence with the Alien and Predator brands–gameplay, graphics, and story all meet a mature theme.”  Ultimately, Link writes, the combination of the costs involved in translating the game and altering its content would not be compensated in Germany due to the significantly smaller available audience allowed to buy it due to its lack of official rating.

The story was picked up by The Escapist as well, which predicts that the game will be submitted for approval in the similarly conservative Australia due to the fact that no language barrier needs to be overcome before it can be released.

The USK has a history of refusing to classify many titles released elsewhere in the world, Australia included, a habit which it has attracted criticism for in the past.  In the linked article, the head of EA’s Germany branch advocates the adoption of the PEGI ratings system, which bears more similarity to the ESRB of all of North America and several other countries in the western hemisphere.  Curiously, USK head Marek Brunner says that his organization is not the true culprit behind what EA is calling censorship–that would be the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons, or the BPjM, which defines what is and what is not considered offensive or damaging content in German media.

At least one Internet writer hopes that some good will come out of this latest ban, believing that if Germany can’t be motivated to reassess its ratings system due to public outcry, maybe the “videogame-shaped hole” in its economy will.

Modern Warfare 2: Staying Classy

If you’ve been following gaming news at all this past week, there’s little doubt that you’ve heard about the latest fiasco surrounding the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 due to a video released by Infinity Ward that slipped in the phrase “fags.”  If you are somehow unfamiliar with it (and, incidentally, how did you end up here of all places?) basically every major gaming site has covered it already.  And if you’re a college student with a campus newspaper that covers gaming culture, like I am, chances are somebody covered it there too.

There isn’t much left to be said about the subject now, so this post is dedicated to letting you, the reader, actually see what all the hubbub is about.  Infinity Ward has taken down the video from their own YouTube account and has been forcing other users to do the same with copies.  Below is one of the few still active as of the writing of this post, though IGN has so far retained the advertisement in a different format.