Fluff, Snuff, and Muff. (On Mass Effect, Fox News, and semantics)

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wilsonscrazybed

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Dec 16, 2007
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For those of you that don?t know, this is an election year in the US. Actually, I am sure you knew that, but for the sake of this argument let?s pretend that there is someone out there with an internet connection that doesn?t get US politics shoved down their throat everyday. As it is an election year certain fluff issues come up. I say fluff because these are the topics that candidates can get behind and offend only people who don?t fall under the term ?constituent.? It is then easy to neglect said issues as soon as they?ve proven that they are much more morally pure than the other candidate.

This year the fluff d?jour is violence in media and how it affects our children. This debate is as old as salt and it seems to be wonderful fodder for the hungry cannons of the right-wing media giant known as Fox News.
Take the Mass Effect debacle. What was supposed to be "an angry man-child gets in a nerd-fight with the intelligent best-selling authors over something that interests everyone." The argument centers around a game they made up before the interview with the only resemblance to the actual game is the name. Fox News invented a game they would like to see so they could have something to talk about. The truth about Mass Effect is that it is a significant and important evolution in games. If Fox really wanted to win this argument they should have waited for someone to release ?Custer?s Revenge II? for Wii.

Fox had expected some ?man-child? to show up and he didn?t. In fact the debate was so one-sidedly in favor of the ?controversial game? that they resorted simply to cutting down the pro-game comments to sound bytes and letting the author talk at length to make her seem like she wasn?t floundering. In the end that ended up being her undoing as she dug herself into a deeply misinformed grave. I fear that in the eyes of most of the American numbskulls who actually watch Fox news it must have seemed like a win for hypochondriac middle-aged soccer-moms everywhere.

One thing I think keeps fueling this debate is simply that some adults cannot wrap their head around calling something a ?game? without being infantile. Adults sometimes like to use the word ?game? in an adult way also. That makes it all seem a little naughty. Let?s take another word that gets used in a both the adult and children?s world. If you imagine the word ?toy? you think of jack-in-the-boxes, yo-yos or, toy cars. But if you hyphenate it to ?adult-toy? you have something certainly not for children. If you do the same for game, i.e. adult-game you have something that not only seems sexual/violent but also aimed at children. We don?t call R-rated movies ?adult-movies? do we? We reserve that title for porn. Do we label anything not having to do with sex or violence as ?adult?? By default simply combining the word ?adult? with ?game? means you?re mislabeling the trend in games to cover more adult situations as ?games with fucking.?

I guess I am conflicted; I am all for protecting our children. My friend a few years ago sent me a link to a video. As I do with all links on chat I asked specifically ?what is this?? He told me ?It?s this American who gets his head chopped off by radical Muslims, but the machete was so dull they kind of sawed it off instead.? I would at all costs protect my children from those images. I knew that there were these things on the internet, but I imagined there was some invisible wall created by Santa Claus and The Tooth Fairy to protect me from growing up. After clicking my heels together three times I was back to my happy place. I never watched the video, but it made me wonder if we had really crossed the line with this internet thing. When did the internet become a place to circulate snuff films like twenty-something tourists pass the clap in Thailand? What is the line we have to cross before games simply are too repulsive for anyone? What can we do to change the perspective of games as one giant snuff playground? I say stop using the word "adult" to rate them, or call them something altogether different. Then we can truly know which games to avoid, and which games are simply rated R. I would say ?interactive-entertainment? is a good new word but not only is that a mouthful, it sounds dangerously boring and reminds me of the postage stamp sized videos featured in the first graphical Zork games. I am sure we?ll get there sooner or later. I?d happily change my vocabulary to get games out of the pillory.

Sources:
Fox News on Mass Effect
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/163925.html

Custer?s Revenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer's_Revenge

Return to Zork
http://youtube.com/watch?v=S3lRFRTrtuQ
 

DeathWyrmNexus

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Jan 5, 2008
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Personally, I always thought the Puritanical view of sex was creepy in perspective. We are okay with kids blasting people to bits in whatever game they pick up but we Freak if there is the mention of breasts. We call it misogyny if women have sexuality in a game. We call it lewd if the male characters have a sexual thought.

What I find really creepy about this thinking is that an orgasm is Not the worst thing that can happen to a person. I am pretty sure that gruesome murder is. However we are against orgasms/sex but are all for murder in games or other media.

A good example is that I could probably write up a script for this forum or any other forum, detailing death and murder but it wouldn't get Half the angst that a similarly detailed story with sex in it would get.

Granted, I would expect a snuff story to get deleted anywhere but not as fast as a story with sex would. It is just... Creepy.
 

SpiderLotus

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Jan 31, 2008
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Yeah but there have been books about snuff films and movies and whatnot. The subject matter shouldnt be whats controversial. If a game is talking about such things then it has something to say about them, or they are just trying to stir controversy. The whole hot coffee fiasco is a good example of stirring controversy. Rockstar could have taken it out but they didn't. Why? Where they hoping someone would find it? And if so, was it to make a statement or to gain publicity? These motives need to be taken into account when we are discussing whether or not games deserve to be treated with respect.

I like the "toy" analogy. Kids have been playing cowboys and indians since we could make costumes and toy guns. Aside from being completely racist, it also simulates violence. Are we to ban toy guns? Are we to ban super soakers? Obviously not, so why then should simulated violence with a control pad be any different?
 

Ixus Illwrath

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Feb 9, 2008
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Any government in the modern era would be serving it's self interest teaching it's citizens to be killers, not breeders. It's dystopian, fine. But encouraging your city streets to fill with zoned out hippies isn't always the best course of action when other civilizations really are gearing up to kill you at the first chance they get.

The crux of the biscuit is finding the balance, identifying who's enough of an impressionistic moron, and keeping them away from what they don't need to see.

Some of our American government, and most of many others, though, fears the worst of ANY medium, and censors whatever they can. It will take time, or it may never happen, that they will realize people are the products of their real life environments. Not what happens in front of their computers and TVs.
 

Fire Daemon

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Dec 18, 2007
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An Interesting read and I have to say that you 100% correct. I've recieved many snuff films and "funny" suicides over MSN and email and it leading me to believe that a few of my contacts are perverted wacko's.

I can understand why many parents claim that videogames are bad for kids. Thats because some videogames ARE bad for kids. But apart from people who buy or work with games no one really knows that videogames arn't allways marketed at kids. People need to know that the average age for a gamer is 33 and that Kill and Maim 4 isn't for little timmy.
 

Ixus Illwrath

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Feb 9, 2008
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In case you're wondering who the real messed up people are out there, go to youtube and look up 'sparkling wiggles'

NSFW, mind you. But it shows there definitely is a shade of humanity out there with ill intent.
 

the_tralfalmadorian

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Jan 11, 2008
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god those nut-jobs on fox news worry me quite a bit. I'm getting more than a little tired of all this censorship business.
 

RPJesus

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Nov 20, 2007
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See, the problem is even if we take all the (un)necesary measures to stop young children from playing games with mature content, there're still ways to get around it. So really people need to just take an interest in their kid's activities. Hell, some of my best memories are hanging out with my cousins playing Goldeneye, Mario Kart, and Diddy Kong Racing.
 

Katana314

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Oct 4, 2007
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My problem isn't with who can buy what. It's partially with "why does this shit even exist."
Examples like Manhunt, Gears of War (the chainsawing) Honestly, what teenager is going to feel cool by saying to his friends "I LOVE THE BLOOD IN THAT GAME! NEEEEAARROOWWW-BRRADADADADADADA" Thankfully, most of the real bad ones like the Japanese "sex-sims" and extraordinarily bloody games aren't really so well-known. I'm not going to go for any laws PREVENTING this sort of thing. But people like Rockstar need to realize something: No one wants this kind of game, and you're only making us all look bad. Quit it, and focus on coming up with a good game formula.
 

shadow skill

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Oct 12, 2007
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Katana314 said:
My problem isn't with who can buy what. It's partially with "why does this shit even exist."
Examples like Manhunt, Gears of War (the chainsawing) Honestly, what teenager is going to feel cool by saying to his friends "I LOVE THE BLOOD IN THAT GAME! NEEEEAARROOWWW-BRRADADADADADADA" Thankfully, most of the real bad ones like the Japanese "sex-sims" and extraordinarily bloody games aren't really so well-known. I'm not going to go for any laws PREVENTING this sort of thing. But people like Rockstar need to realize something: No one wants this kind of game, and you're only making us all look bad. Quit it, and focus on coming up with a good game formula.
You my friend don't realize why drama is so important in writing, movies, and games. You also don't know alot of teenagers.
 

werepossum

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Sep 12, 2007
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Wilson, you've totally missed the point of Fox News. For every issue, there are two sides, and on Fox both sides are represented. Fairly often one side turns out to be staffed mainly with idiots, but that's life. As a conservative libertarian, by the time Fox News came along I was heartily sick and tired of seeing "reporters" echo Democratic talking points. Anyone remember in 2000 when every liberal reporter or talking head (which is to say 99% of them) began using the word "gravitas" in the same 24 hour period when that word appeared in exactly three Lexus Nexus searches before that? That was news before Fox - a one-sided conversation.

And I do agree that Fox blew this one big time; neither the anchor nor the anti-Mass Effects nor the so-called media experts had actually seen the footage in question. How hard can it be to find this footage? Forgetting for a moment that the probably have interns willing to play the damned game on their own time if Fox News buys it, anyone arguing against something needs to be damned sure that he or she has a valid grasp of what actually occured. Everyone on the panel except the game's defender came off looking like idiots because they were condemning something that never actually existed. Some of them would no doubt have argued the propriety of a bit of CGI side boob and ass flank or of a human female having sex with a female-appearing alien anyway, but I suspect some of them would never had appeared had they actually seen the footage in question. (Although I totally fail to see the point in having my character get laid anyway, but then I'm old. I suspect the thrill of your character having sex is inversely proportional to the chance that you are having sex, but perhaps it's a generational thing...)

I do agree with your point of games being considered as something inherently designed for children. And to a large extent they are. Out of sixteen people in my engineering firm, exactly four play video games - but we all have children or grandchildren who do. A great number of teens and twenty-somethings play video games, but not among the world of television reporters and personalities. Most of them are tech-illiterate except for phones and Blackberries, PDSs in general. (To more or less quote Larry King, "I've never been on the Internet. What do you do, push a button or something?")

This is changing to some extent with the explosion in casual PC gaming and the Wii, as more and more adults take up those exploits. But those people will still see something like Mass Effect as suitable for only children or teenagers, I fear.
 

wilsonscrazybed

thinking about your ugly face
Dec 16, 2007
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werepossum said:
Wilson, you've totally missed the point of Fox News. For every issue, there are two sides, and on Fox both sides are represented. Fairly often one side turns out to be staffed mainly with idiots, but that's life. As a conservative libertarian, by the time Fox News came along I was heartily sick and tired of seeing "reporters" echo Democratic talking points. Anyone remember in 2000 when every liberal reporter or talking head (which is to say 99% of them) began using the word "gravitas" in the same 24 hour period when that word appeared in exactly three Lexus Nexus searches before that? That was news before Fox - a one-sided conversation.
I apologize for calling Fox News watchers "numskulls" you obviously don't belong in that category though I imagine a certain amount of Fox news watchers do fall under that demographic. It's nice to see a different perspective on something I heretofore considered redneck punditry.
 

GloatingSwine

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Nov 10, 2007
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Onmi said:
j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Ban? No. Regulate? Yes. A child shouldn't be able to go into a shop and be able to buy a game rated 18. They can't buy tickets for 18 rated films, they can't buy 18 rated DVDs, games should be no different. Likewise if a mother is buying a game such as GTA, the adult content of should be expressly pointed out to her (though to be honest, she should do some research into the game she's buying beforehand).
That IS how it works
IF a person buys GTA and you are on register, your compelled to Tell them "this game is not for kids, made for adults, blah blah blah" and guess what
the majority STILL buy it, despite all the warnings, because what little Shit A. wants little Shit A. Gets
Not quite here in the UK, and if he's talking about 18 ratings then jeffers is here. If a game is rated 18 by the BBFC, then it is illegal to sell it to anyone under that age. The rating system for games is exactly the same as for films, and it carries legal weight, though I don't think it's compulsory yet for games as it is for film and video (though it might be soon). (Mass Effect, for reference, carries a 12 rating).
 

tiredinnuendo

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Jan 2, 2008
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GloatingSwine said:
Not quite here in the UK, and if he's talking about 18 ratings then jeffers is here. If a game is rated 18 by the BBFC, then it is illegal to sell it to anyone under that age. The rating system for games is exactly the same as for films, and it carries legal weight, though I don't think it's compulsory yet for games as it is for film and video (though it might be soon). (Mass Effect, for reference, carries a 12 rating).
It's the same here, except we have "T" and "M" instead of "12" and "18". What the guy above you was referring to is that if an adult is buying a product for a child, the sales associate is supposed to say, "This game isn't really for kids." If a kid tried to buy GTA here, he'd be turned down.

- J
 
Nov 28, 2007
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Uh...in theory. In reality, half the kids will go skipping out of the store with a brand new copy on Manhunt 2, or whatever the devil the kids are playing these days.
 

tiredinnuendo

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Jan 2, 2008
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Well, yeah. It's the same for movie theaters, but I do think studies are showing that the ESRB ratings are working more often than not, so I'm not sure that "half" is accurate. But then, I'm just guessing.

- J