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.”

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.

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.

Venezuela Puts Wheels On Own Ban Wagon

Courtesy of the Associated Press

According to an Associated Press article recently written by Christopher Toothaker, Venezuela will be voting on legislation that will completely prohibit violent video games and toys in order to curb the country’s incredibly high murder rate within the coming weeks.

While the legislation was proposed as far back as August 27, it only received approval in September and is expected to pass through Venezuela’s National Assembly to get a final vote soon.  According to Toothaker’s article, the new law will give the country’s “consumer protection agency” the ability to decide what toys and video games are allowed to come into and be sold in Venezuela, with fines for breaking it running as high as $128,000.  The law is depending on the idea that there is a connection between pastimes simulating violent behavior and actual violent actions in order to curtail the country’s astronomical murder rate—according to Toothaker’s article, the estimated number of homicides within the country per year numbers around 7,900, which is five times that of Texas despite Venezuela having a comparable population size.  Further, the law would implement “crime prevention classes” in public schools, force the media to report on the perceived dangers of violent video games, and have the government “promote the production, distribution, sales and use” of games that teach consumers to respect their adversaries.

There are, of course, a number of problems with this plan.  Pointed out within the article is the fact that Venezuela has a huge market for pirated video games, which many members of the country’s working class sell on street corners.  The article says they will likely remain unaffected by the law, given the fact that they have been tolerated up to this point.  Further, even if the legislation is meant to target them, the consumer protection agency mentioned above has its hands full making sure supermarkets remain capable of selling food at reasonable prices, and will probably not have the time to go after a bunch of street corner vendors.

Courtesy of the Associated Press

Second is the fact that the high murder rate likely does not have any connection to violent games.  There have been no studies that have accurately drawn links between violent video games and violent behavior, despite constant attempts to do so.  The most recent “conclusive” study, reported on by the Washington Post and conducted by Pediatrics, turns out to have been poorly conducted due problems measuring and defining “aggressive behavior” in its subjects.  Game Politics reported on both the initial study and why it turned out to be inaccurate, and have more recently covered a research project saying that there is evidence suggesting that violent behavior has its roots in peer delinquency and depression.

Lastly, Hugo Chavez may have defeated himself in his attempts to have the government teach its citizens to show respect to one’s enemies, given what he’s been saying about the Bush administration for years and refuses to let anyone forget.

The last time Venezuela made major gaming news was in 2006, when the country’s leaders spoke out against Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.  Politicians said they believed it was meant to act as a piece of anti-Chavez propaganda designed to lay the groundwork for an invasion of their country by the United States.