Brazil Following in Venezuela’s Footsteps

Eerily mirroring my tradition of mindlessly reposting GamePolitics articles to this blog, Brazil is in the process of copying Venezuela’s decision to completely ban violent or otherwise offensive video games countrywide.

As of this posting, the measure, authored by Brazilian senator Valdir Raupp, has been approved by the Education Commission of the Senate and now needs to be voted on by the Committee on Constitution and Justice.

According to the oddly translated article that serves as an overview of Raupp’s bill, the new legislation is aimed at punishing the act of manufacturing, importing, distributing, and otherwise interacting with video games that are deemed offensive to people in any way, whether due to attacking their culture, religion, or sexuality.  The article’s justification for these measures reads, “…’the law shall punish any acts of discrimination against the rights and freedoms.’  Thus, we believe that freedom of expression in video games can not be confused with anarchy, disrespect to the image and honor of people and faiths and their scriptures.”

The effect this legislation will have on the video game market in Brazil seems questionable considering the fact that game piracy in the country is utterly out of control.  According to this Escapist article, it’s more than likely that “if you play video games in Brazil, you’re committing a crime.”  Numbers cited in the article indicate that, as of 2004, 94 percent of the nation’s games market consisted of pirated merchandise, while illegally imported titles made up 80 percent of the country’s games market overall and 94 percent of its home console market.

Officially at least, Brazil seems innately hostile to electronic entertainment, apparently to protect its own interests.  According to an Internet commentator going by the handle of Bokusatsu_Tenshi, import taxes for electronics can reach up to 70 percent of the product’s initial price, excluding shipping.  While Brazil experienced a boom in the games development industry during the 90s, a new president was elected and government funds for the industry were shut down.  Bokusatsu_Tenshi writes, “So you can imagine how hard it is to create cultural content to criticize the government.  We still do, it’s true, far more than other latin american countries… and Brazil still enjoys plenty of democracy compared to some of its neighbors.  But it’s not as good as our government makes it to be.”

Wish I’d Thought of That: An Examination of Gamers and Copyright Law

I think I could be sued for putting this logo here. Really! Click the picture if you don't believe me.

Today’s post is going to be less composed of material cribbed from other sites and more of me directing you to visit John Vanderhoef’s excellent, excellent blog Press Start to Drink, where he approaches issues in the games industry from an academic perspective and generally presents extremely interesting reading material. 

The post I’m concerned with today is his entry Cease and Desist: Games Culture and Copyright Laws, in which Vanderhoef examines the rocky relationship that has developed between fans and developers in our age of game mods and vicious copyright law.  The post illustrates its point by examining three separate reactions game developers took to fans interacting with and expanding upon their products–one consisting of putting together a make-it-yourself toy of Marcus Fenix of Gear of War, one a game mod of SNES classic Chrono Trigger, and the last recreating the entirety of the original Half-Life with Valve’s publicly available Source engine. 

The only one of these not to end with the threat of a lawsuit looming over the offending fan was, perhaps predictably, the one involving Valve, the same company sensitive enough to its fans to make community-generated memes part of the gameplay in Team Fortress 2 (to say nothing of the phenomenon of Counter-Strike). The tragedy of the situation, as cited by Vanderhoef, is the fact that creativity is stifled in an environment where inventiveness has to be looked over by lawyers. 

There’s a reason why gamers get angry when they read stories about the actions of companies like Square-Enix and Epic Games–it seems like there’s a betrayal in arbitrarily limiting the enjoyment of the people who bought their product. My personal favorite game of all time is Baldur’s Gate II, which is approaching its ten-year birthday and is woefully out of date by modern standards.  It remains my favorite title because of the massive modding community behind it that remains active to this day. While the “vanilla” storyline is incredibly expansive and the choices offered within varied enough to encourage multiple playthroughs, the modding community only broadens the title’s horizons with new gameplay options, companions, and entire campaigns.

I *have* to take Minsc with me every time, though. Not because it's necessary, but because he's awesome.

 

Neverwinter Nights, meanwhile, took a route similar to Valve and was packaged with modding tools, effectively encouraging players to play with the game itself and increasing the title’s shelf life dramatically. The resulting examples of user-generated content was often hailed as being superior to the original campaign. Unsurprisingly, both of my examples are based off of Dungeons and Dragons, a series of products where users only ever need to buy the basic rulebooks and derive the rest of the fun by creating antagonists and adventures themselves. 

At the same time, it seems like these companies are only allowing their customers to play with their product on their own terms. Valve and BioWare explicitly released the tools used to tamper with their product to their audience. And as for Baldur’s Gate II, while it’s certainly possible that large mods existed during the height of the franchise’s popularity, most of what you can find out there today was created after Black Isle (the title’s developing company) was disbanded, likely making legal action tricky.