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.”

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.

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?