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.

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.

Leaked “Modern Warfare 2″ Footage Causes Demand for Rating Re-Evaluation

The leaked footage from Activision’s upcoming title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has prompted an Australian watchdog organization to call for a review of the game’s current MA15+ rating, according to GamePolitics.

The Australian Council on Children and the Media, which refers to itself as a “national community organization” dedicated to the well-being of the country’s children, made the demand in response to the graphic nature of the footage recorded.  The videos, which GamePolitics have stated are being scoured from the web by the game’s publisher Activision, depict the player character and his four companions gunning down defenseless civilians in a crowded airport in an act of terrorism.

The only easily found site that still carries the footage is this page from Online Gaming Europe, and even then only the top video still works.  The gameplay shown has the player character open fire on a line of people with an assault rifle alongside four other men, all of whom are wearing body armor over civilian clothes.  The group then moves through the rest of the airport, with highlights including one of the AI companions coolly shooting through a window to his side and the player gunning down one man dragging another incapacitated man to safety.

What makes this particular story outstanding among Australia’s other anti-gaming reactions is the fact that the gaming community can see where they’re coming from this time.  A significant contributing factor to the footage’s disturbing aspect is the fact that it is made up of actual gameplay as opposed to a cutscene–all of the violence perpetrated by the viewpoint character was done by the player’s input.  Making the massacre part of the player’s interaction with the game undoubtedly provokes a greater (and much more deeply disturbing) emotional response to what’s playing out on screen, which has been tried before in other games.  At the finale the Cold War-set Metal Gear Solid 3, for instance–a series famous for having an extremely unbalanced gameplay-to-cutscene ratio–the player character defeats his mentor, who has defected from the USA to Russia for apparently ideological reasons and is ordered by her to kill her with her own gun.  Rather than have the protagonist shoot her during the course of the cutscene, the view pans out and the letterboxing recedes, at which point the player recognizes–to his extreme discomfort–that the game is going to make you pull the trigger yourself.

Of course, not all of Australia views the ACCM’s outcry in entirely black-or-white terms.  As noted in the first article, Electronic Frontiers Australia lobbyist Nicholas Suzor sees the controversy surrounding the game as even more evidence that the country needs to modify their ratings system, saying that, “We may make an argument that these sorts of topics are not suitable for children, but I don’t at all accept that it is unsuitable for adults.”

Chinese MMORPG Company Bans Virtual Transsexuals (Maybe)

It's a trap!

According to GamePolitics.com, Chinese MMORPG company Aurora Technology has begun to ban the accounts of male customers playing as female characters in their products.

The article, as always, speaks for itself, but if you’re too lazy to click the link then there are only a couple of bullet points that need reproducing here.  The first is that Aurora Technology, a subsidiary of Shanda, is applying this action to their MMO King of the World and ascertains the gender of its players through the use of their webcams. According to GamePolitics’ source, this is done in order to “reign in transsexuals in games.”  Significantly, there is no word of the same treatment given to female players using male characters.

This is probably a good place to point out that there seems to be some confusion on GamePolitics’ part on the relevancy of this particular story, given that the vast majority of the sources dug up on the topic seem to come from September of 2007 as opposed to 2009.  The GamePolitics article does not clarify as to whether this particular action is the culmination of two years of work on AT’s part, but I have yet to see anything that makes it clear that GamePolitics believes that it has made a mistake.

Adding to the doubt studious readers should harbor is this article from Joystiq (again, published in 2007, five days after the attached date of the “editorial summary” GamePolitics is working off of), which doubts the validity of both the source for the story as well as the practicality of AT using webcams to ascertain a player’s gender.  The blog post linked to in the GamePolitics article, for lack of a better term, sounds fishy as well: though it raises interesting and widely-held-to-be-true points, it also does not cite any sources for its claims and seems suspicious in its advertising itself to be posted to other blog sites.

Playing as characters of the opposite gender in online games has a long and much-looked-into history, given the percieved strangeness of the situation.  If this particular presentation is any indication, the practice has existed since the earliest days of internet gaming, when MUDs (“multi-user dungeons,” essentially the precoursers to modern MMORPGs) were the only options available to individuals who wanted to play long-distance with other human beings instead of their computers.  It also touches upon the reason why the act of masking your true gender online has opposition–it just feels weird to interact with an individual whose sex you cannot identify by interacting with them, even when it’s 1993 and you’re talking to a mass of letters as opposed to a three dimensional rendering of a Night Elf.

Reasons to strap on a pair of virtual high heels or experiment with wearing a mustache vary as well.  According to this article, a study done on “virtual transvetism” says that women played as male characters in order to be treated more humanely by other players, as opposed to being constantly hit on by male avatars or otherwise harassed.  Men playing as women say they did so in order to obtain money or weapons as gifts from other players, or because staring at a female character’s backside for hours on end was more pleasant than doing the same for a same-sex avatar.  The second linked article was a bit more forgiving in this regard, as it also says that–assumingly for both male and female players– players chose to use a character of the opposite gender as a means of furthering the role playing experience and experience the game world in a different manner than they would if they played as a thinly vieled version of themselves.

Notably, the study explored by both articles says that 54 percent of the men interviewed played as women, while a staggering 70 percent of female players used male characters.

Quantic Dream Gearing Up to Engage in Self-Censorship

Coming hot on the heels of my last post on Quantic Dream’s upcoming adventure title Heavy Rain is this interview with executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere, wherein he plays through a few previously unseen scenes from the game for the audience and also possibly contradicts what I said on Saturday.

The comments in question occur at about the 5 minute and 7:40 mark, where Guillaume breaks from talking about the game features and instead addresses its content, saying that the title revolves around serious and disturbing events and yet the company “didn’t want to create a game that would shock audiences, but we wanted to tell a story for adults.”

What this entails comes to light near the end of the video, where Guillaume reveals that the title will be “slightly adapted” for releases around the world (with specific mention of the Japanese version due to the audience being addressed in the interview).

“I don’t think the changes make a big difference, those are really marginal things.  We felt the need to adapt the content to the culture,” Guillaume says, before going on to back up Saturday’s post and say that Heavy Rain could continue to battle against the public perception of video games as merely toys instead of a serious medium of expression.

Exactly what these changes will be are not addressed or even hinted at, but this bit of self-censorship could be motivated both by events like the Australian Left 4 Dead 2 debacle as well as a way to appease Sony’s attempts to appeal to a wider audience.  The issue Sony had with the title several months ago concerned a sex scene that occurs over the course of the story, which game writer David Cage stubbornly refused to compromise.

Law Professor’s Paper: “Somebody Think of the Children!”

A research paper written by a law professor from the University of Michigan is calling for an examination of current video game legislation to increase the chances of content control laws being passed in the future, according to GamePolitics.

From Research Conclusions to Real Change: Understanding the First Amendment’s (Non) Response to Negative Effects of Mass Media on Children by Looking to the Example of Violent Video Game Regulations, by Renee Newman Knake, argues that the American court system is not addressing the threat posed by mass media to the delicate sensibilities of children while using past court cases concerning video game legislation as examples throughout the paper. 

According to the article’s abstract, “The disconnect between law and social science has led scholars like Professor Barbara Bennett Woodhouse to propose a reframing of the issues.  She calls for a paradigm shift from family law’s traditional approach of the parent-child-state triangle to recognize the influence of what she terms ‘mass-media marketing.’  She proposes a new ‘a child-centered approach [sic] to environmental ethics’ or, in her words ‘ecogenerism,’ and suggests that those who advocate for the protection of children from the harms of mass media and marketing have much to learn from the environmental law and ethics movement.”

According to the GamePolitics article, Knake comes to the conclusion that the courts are unreasonably refusing to compromise the first amendment to the United States Constitution in favor of waiting for science to “catch up” to the point where it can effectively prove that violent video games, and media in general, are having an adverse effect on America’s children.

The paper appears to be in response to the industry’s winning streak against similar legislation in general and the recent striking down of a California law which would ban the sale of violent video games to anyone under 18 years of age, which the paper explicitly refers to.

What the paper ignores (or at least avoids mentioning in its abstract) is a fact elaborated upon in a previous post, which is that there are no well-run studies that have come to the conclusion that it is video games that cause violent behavior in its players.  Also unaddressed by both Knake and Governor Schwarzenegger is the fact that a system has existed for several years to keep violent video games out of the hands of an audience that the ESRB deems to young to play them.

Heavy Rain Will Turn Video Game Sexuality on its Head

Madison Paige, one of the playable characters of Heavy Rain, as depicted in the trailer

It’s a slow news day, so I decided to dedicate this post to something that serves as food for thought due less to content control in video games and instead on how the medium’s being explored as a platform for expression and as an art form.

By which I mean I’m going to be writing about a woman performing a striptease.

Kotaku.com got their hands on an article covering an interview with Quantic Dream, the developer of the upcoming adventure title Heavy Rain. Described as an “interactive movie,” the game centers around four separate protagonists who are each pursuing a serial murderer known as the Origami Killer. During the course of the game, journalist Madison Paige is forced to strip for a mob boss in a way that is decidedly not meant to titillate the player.

 While the Kotaku article is merely commenting on an article that, itself, served as commentary on a separate article, it still picked up on the excellent subversion Quantic Dream is engaging in compared to the rest of the industry.  The original (male) interviewer said during the course of his discussion with Quantic Dream employee David Cage that he felt distinctly uncomfortable performing the striptease, despite the fact that he was doing so through a video game character.  Cage’s response was an ecstatic “Fantastic… if we managed to make you feel uncomfortable it is because at some point we made you believe you were Madison.”  Kotaku’s take on the article was that its writer, G. Christopher Williams, is saying that “the breakthrough lies not necessarily in a mature depiction of sex, but in delivering a new perspective on how it is understood, even if it means forcing someone in an opposite gender role to see its more degrading side.”

This is a far cry from how sex and sexuality is treated in most video games.  Readers who have played the God of War series should spot the difference immediately, given how the games treat its own depictions of Kratos’ conquests (mildly comedic as they are)–the scenes in question are played to appeal to a male audience, with an explicit reward given for participating.  Meanwhile, the upcoming Bayonetta incorporates the female main character’s nudity into basic gameplay.  Due to her “clothing” actually being formed from her supernaturally mutable hair, which she uses as part of her attacks, players are rewarded for stringing up combos (and thus dedicating more of Bayonetta’s hair to punching enemies in the face) by exposing more of her skin.

(Warning: pixilation)

Then again, these are all examples of the effect of video game sexuality on female characters.  I don’t remember reading any complaints when one of the in-game rewards for Devil May Cry 3 was the option to have pretty boy protagonists Dante and Vergil run around with their shirts off the whole game.  Perhaps we simply haven’t advanced yet as a society to be raising a stink about objectifying the male figure?