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When it comes to creating an
extensive game world, developers must take into account what sort of impact
that world will have on society through players. They have an ethical
responsibility to do this, since if there was no moral backbone to what they
were creating, it could potentially cause a lot of upset between different
groups in society. This is much more prevalent when a game is based on a
realistic setting or event, such as Activision’s ‘Call of Duty’ series and
Rockstar’s ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series. In these cases, they can give a very
negative view of the world we live in, one filled with war and corruption. Games
without any form of realism, however, such as SEGA’s ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’
franchise can be created without much worry that it will negatively impact the
world on a social scale. We all have a reasonable idea of what is right and
wrong in the world due to law, religion and general behaviour among society and
most games like to push these boundaries, letting you do thing in the game that
you would not be able to do in real-life without severe consequences. Some
companies use controversy as a profitable tactic, using the ‘bad publicity is
still publicity’ way of thinking. This essay aims to discuss the question – Do
companies need to cut controversial content in order to make their game sell
more copies, or do the complete opposite and make purposely controversial
content in order to gain publicity? Is controversial content a key factor when
it comes down to a game’s popularity?
Games
only seem to make a huge splash in the media when they’ve done something ‘bad’,
such as the controversy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous Airport
mission. In the stage, the player assumes control of an undercover CIA agent
who has joined the ranks of Russian terrorists. The player is positioned in the
middle of an airport raid, faced with a crowd of innocent civilians being held
at gunpoint by the terrorist group. The civilians are screaming, some are
injured in pools of blood and some try to drag the injured to safety, resulting
in deadly consequences. The player doesn’t have to shoot any civilians to
complete the mission, but even if they choose to make the moral choice and not
shoot at the civilians, they will be shot by the other terrorists anyway. The player
also has an option upon beginning the game, before this specific mission even
begins, to skip this mission entirely, due to the graphic content contained
within. There is no penalty for skipping the level, so the player would only be
missing out on a small part of the story by choosing not to play it. Despite
all this, the mission was edited or cut entirely from the game in many
territories around the world, such as Russia, Japan and Germany. The scene was
discussed briefly in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, with MP Keith
Vaz being “"absolutely shocked" by the violence portrayed in the game
(Emery, BBC News 2009)”. as well as all over the public media. A lot of the
media used scare tactics to drive people into believing that the fact that this
was featured in a video game made this completely unacceptable. In the article
‘Controversy just for the sake of it?’, Gerard Campbell describes his
experience whilst playing the mission: “Personally, I didn't fire a shot as I
walked - I can't run - through a Russian airport, while the men around me fired
systematically on innocent civilians, filling the air with terrified screams. I
don't know what it was but something just made me not want to pull the trigger.
Maybe my morality chip was kicking in, I don't know, but something just held me
back. (Campbell, Game Junkie 2009), ” This shows that although the person is
just playing a game, where none of what the player does will have any negative
effect on the real world, they still feel some emotional connection to it. They
feel a drive that makes them not want to shoot the civilian characters
on-screen. Campbell goes on to talk about the controversy and its inclusion in
the game: “I loved Modern Warfare 2 but was the terrorist sequence included
just to court controversy? Was it added just to generate more interest in a
game that was going to, controversial scene or not, sell millions of units
anyway? I can't help but think that it was (Campbell, Game Junkie 2009)”.
In
SEGA’s ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ series, the first games had a very vague message of
‘Machines vs. Nature’, which nature always prevailing over man-made
monstrosities but this message is never pushed onto people. Sonic as a
character has “always been a “good” character, portrayed to stand up for the
right and just. He is kind and self-sacrificing, like many heroes. (Bogost,
Persuasive Games, 2007)” However, in the later years of the series a new
character, Shadow the Hedgehog was introduced who was essentially the moral
opposite of Sonic, an anti-hero. In his own game, the player was given the
option to use guns and vehicles to kill army officers and alien creatures. This
takes the moral ethics of the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ franchise and flips them
over to create the complete opposite of what it once was. The game has a very
heavy focus on morality and choices, with ten different endings and each level
contain a Hero, Normal and Dark mission, all of which have a different outcome
depending on how the player navigates their through the stage. “James gee has cited ‘Shadow the Hedgehog’ as
an example of a game that teaches a moral system through play, and indeed the
game’s outcomes change based on how the player chooses to progress through the
game. These choices have effects – perhaps even non-trivial effects – on the
game world. (Bogost, Persuasive games, 2007)”
In
smaller, downloadable games that are bound to not get as noticed by the general
public, the threshold for content allowance is a lot broader than it would be
with a big-budget retail title. The example I’m going to use is a small game by
the name of ‘The Binding of Isaac’. The title itself is a direct reference to a
story in the Hebrew Bible where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac,
on Mount Moriah. Religion is always a sensitive subject when it comes to any
form of entertainment and with video games being as frowned-upon by some as
they are it’s going to be a big risk creating a game based on an entirely
religious image. Fortunately, it seems
that smaller games that are only available on services such as Steam have a lot
more creative freedom and less limits on the content they can contain. Many
game developers are taking advantage of this and creating new, original titles
that bigger companies would rarely take the financial risk for. ‘The Binding of
Isaac’ for instance only costs £3.99 on the Steam store and was made in Adobe
Flash by two people – Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. This means they could
set the game at a very low price point yet still make a lot of profit on it. It
is very child-like and cartoony in its visuals but this is just a cover for its
true tone. The game follows a story similar to the one from the Bible that it
is based on, where Isaac’s mother hears a voice from above that says her son is
evil and corrupted. This eventually drives Isaac’s mother to attempt to kill
him, before he manages to escape through a trapdoor in his bedroom and into the
basement below. The player is then put in control of Isaac, who wanders from
room to room firing nothing but tears from his eyes at any of the weird and
deformed creatures he comes across while collecting items of varying nature.
These creatures range from tumour-ridden siblings to aborted foetuses, so you can
already guess the content is very grotesque. If this sort of content were
included in a big-budget retail game, it would have been banned before it was
even finished because of the publicity it most likely would have got. If more
strong Christian groups got word of this game, they would have fought to get it
taken out of the public eye due to the views they’ve been brought up with. Each
religion has its own set of rules, or doctrine, which the person of said
religion should follow and abide by. Much of the content seen in this game
would go against a lot of what they might believe is right and force them to do
the unethical thing and push their beliefs onto people who may or may not find
this game offensive whether they like it or not. This just goes to show how
much Steam is a place where developers can truly be expressive in their titles.
The game’s designer, Edmund McMillen, wanted the game to be ported over to
Nintendo’s 3DS console and had everything set-up to do so except for Nintendo’s
approval. A few weeks later McMillen made an announcement via Twitter: "After
a long internal debate Nintendo has decided NOT to allow The Binding of Isaac
on the 3DS…as many assumed the reasons were due to the games 'questionable
religious content. '” He then went on to praise Steam and how it gave him the
creative freedom he wanted: “Thank GOD Steam exists, I gotta again publicly
thank Steam for fully supporting Isaac and not requiring ESRB or censoring its
published games. Just one of many reasons why Steam is the top dog of digital
distribution. (McMillen, Twitter, 2012)". The game itself has gone on to
sell over 500,000 units and received critical praise all around, so the content
of the game has definitely not stopped it from becoming a success. In fact,
most people say it really enhances the gameplay and makes the game feel fresh
despite its old-school inspiration - ‘The Legend of Zelda’. The game has had
virtually no coverage in non game-related media and still managed to be a hit
without causing un-needed controversy. It is widely agreed that Nintendo made
this decision because it wants to keep it’s ‘family-friendly’ image it has
going on, but by doing this they have lost out on a lot of good sales. The
company is most likely worried that the game could tarnish its clean name, but
I believe they could use smart marketing strategy to make sure this game only
gets to the right audience. This should be an easy task, especially with something
as small as being on Nintendo’s eShop.
Of
course, controversy itself doesn’t determine whether or not a game sells. The
previously mentioned games have sold well because the people who buy them
obviously believe they are good games, not just because they gained good or bad
publicity. This makes me question why some developers feel the need to either
restrict their content or make it deliberately controversial on an extreme
level. A big case of this was Grand Theft Auto IV where, like the previous game
in the series, the title would feature aeroplanes as drivable vehicles. This,
however, was eventually removed from the game before it was released, due to
comparisons of Liberty City (the game’s setting) and New York City and the 9/11
attacks and the fact that people may replicate them within the game. Now, this
is another very sensitive subject to many people, with good reason. I
personally think this is not the right attitude to take when it comes to
creating games and just because the game has an everyday vehicle and some
realistic buildings in, it shouldn’t mean that these features can’t be in a
game together when they are so loosely connected, if at all. There are many
ethical ways to get around these issues, but it seems a lot of companies don’t
want to invest the time and money to figure out how. It seems that game
developers are worried about people who don’t know much about games beyond
‘they cause violence’ rather than the people who would actually be buying and
playing the game, which is a real shame. I believe that if more platforms such
as Steam were introduced, where freedom is a key point in creating games, we
would see a whole new slew of original ideas and concepts flourish through
rather than the same games we get every year, such as Call of Duty. Originality
never comes easily, and more creative freedom from publishers can change this.
In
conclusion, I have found out that content can easily affect the world socially
in many ways. Whether that’s the perception of law and war, forcing people to push
their views onto others or ethical behaviour and morality, game developers always
look at every aspect of their game and how it might potentially affect the
public eye before deciding whether or not to include it in their game.
Bibliography
Game Junkie (2009) Controversy just for the sake of it? [Internet]
available at <http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/blogs/game-junkie/3066392/Controversy-just-for-the-sake-of-it>.
Accessed April 2012
BBC News (2009) MPs row over Modern Warfare game [Internet]
available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8342589.stm>.
Accessed April 2012
Bogost, Ian. (2007) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of
Videogames. 1st ed. MIT Press, p285.
EdmundMcMillen (2012) Twitter [Internet] available at <https://twitter.com/#!/BlakeTheGod>
Accessed April 2012
