The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
You know what? I'm going to disagree to some extent with Daniel and company.
Games can have messages, aside from entertainment, and they can use the form of the game to express that message to the player. A game like Harpooned isn't particular sneaky about it's message - the whole game is built around the idea that Japanese whaling is a commercial hunting enterprise thinly disguised by "research." The download site links to news stories about Harpooned (as well as Greenpeace and Paul Watson's organization). A reasonable person playing this game isn't going to be caught off guard for too long.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
The same thing can happen with books, right? Nobody's going to blame the author of a book for imposing their point of view on their readers, not merely as a point of principle. Books being about more than entertainment is nothing new; most books are about something, and they're persuasive too. When we're reading a book, we can have a pretty good idea of how the author wants us to react and what the intended reading is (whether we agree with the intended reading or or not). There are books that have messages we agree with and disagree with. Twilight is a book series that definitely has a message - and it's not one I'm comfortable with. Does that mean no books should have social or political messages?
So, the problem with these games is one of content, not form - we can disagree with the messages of the game, but it's not fair to disagree with a game merely for intending to convey a political message. I think that, instead of labeling something that has a very clearly disclosed point of view as propaganda, we're better off focusing on healthy skepticism, fact-checking, and media literacy. Truth claims are EVERYWHERE, and I don't think it's bad that activists are trying to reach people through games. Look at what literacy has done for empathy - the ability to imagine someone else's point of view. Imagine what games can do.
Anyway, I love this series and I'm glad to see it on PATV. Keep up the good work.
There is a very special place in hell for the development crew that made ZoG's Nightmare, as well as all other Nazis.
I recall the ending of MW2 has you killing a corrupt U.S. official because he wants to kill you and make propaganda out of it... although killing Arabs in a video game while the country is at war in the Middle East can't possibly leave kids unaffected.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
What I find interesting is that the main reason this is such a horrible, horrible thing is because you know they are specifically jews and homosexuals. I wouldn't have a clue how many jews and homosexuals I've killed while playing Grand Theft Auto 3 or its spinoffs, but there'd have to be more than a few. Is that better or worse?
What if I suddenly discovered right now that the reason why people turn into zombies if Left 4 Dead is that they all are people who accessed Obamacare? Would that change my previous playing experience?
I'd say that the examples given aren't great, because there isn't a lot that most games can do that `subvert' your view - mostly you know the biases of a game before you see pixel one. If you play a game written by an American company about war in Iraq, you already know whats happening going in. Its not sneaky, you already decided that you'd like to simulate killing people in the middle east for your country.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
What I find interesting is that the main reason this is such a horrible, horrible thing is because you know they are specifically jews and homosexuals. I wouldn't have a clue how many jews and homosexuals I've killed while playing Grand Theft Auto 3 or its spinoffs, but there'd have to be more than a few. Is that better or worse?
The difference between GTA and ZoG is that in GTA you're playing a bad guy. Everything you are doing is wrong, in an escapist sort of way. The killing is not, from my understanding, an overt ideological statement. It's mostly a game of cops and robbers. You're not saving the white world from the big bad jew.
In ZoG, you're killing overt stereotypical representations of people who the authors believe are evil based on racial prejudice or sexual orientation.
You might say, "who cares?" because in both games you're killing people. What do people care if the reason they were killed is racist or not? They're dead. Well, killing someone in a game isn't really killing. It's not an actual harmful action. An intentional attempt to promote hatred towards racial segments of the population, on the other hand?
ZoG is worse because there's intent to incite hate in the authorship.
You might say, "who cares?" because in both games you're killing people.
I guess I'm more curious about how its OK to pretend you're a criminal sociopath in a game but not a racist homophobe sociopath. Both are active choices by the purchaser/player.
The author might even have different intents (GTA wants you to kill everyone for fun, ZoG wants you to kill specific people for ideology/fun), but the player is still the one making the decision. They're deciding if killing everyone is fun or if killing just some specific people is fun.
If I'm a ZoG player, and I go around killing every obvious metrosexual or male wearer of pink in GTA, then how much `better' an experience is it than ZoG? Similarly, if I play ZoG ironically without believing the ideology, is it still a horrible horrible thing, or is it the same sort of `lol his hed is up his azz' sociopath funtime as GTA?
Doing things in the majority of popular games on the market would get you imprisoned or at the very least thought of as a terrible person in real life. I'm not sure how a line can be drawn between GTA or ZoG.
You might say, "who cares?" because in both games you're killing people.
I guess I'm more curious about how its OK to pretend you're a criminal sociopath in a game but not a racist homophobe sociopath. Both are active choices by the purchaser/player.
The author might even have different intents (GTA wants you to kill everyone for fun, ZoG wants you to kill specific people for ideology/fun), but the player is still the one making the decision. They're deciding if killing everyone is fun or if killing just some specific people is fun.
If I'm a ZoG player, and I go around killing every obvious metrosexual or male wearer of pink in GTA, then how much `better' an experience is it than ZoG? Similarly, if I play ZoG ironically without believing the ideology, is it still a horrible horrible thing, or is it the same sort of `lol his hed is up his azz' sociopath funtime as GTA?
Doing things in the majority of popular games on the market would get you imprisoned or at the very least thought of as a terrible person in real life. I'm not sure how a line can be drawn between GTA or ZoG.
I slipped past you. Let me clarify:
I'm not putting the onus on the player. That would be absurd. I'm want to be very clear that I'm putting the onus on the author. I'm not even sure what the onus is. What I'm arguing is "bad" is people intentionally creating a text for the intended purpose of spreading real hate against minorities. I'm not also not arguing for criminal charges or censorship - just that the act of authoring hate speech is bad.
If you want to purposely get Frogger run over and pretend he's Latino in the privacy of your own home, you're in all probability a terrible person but I'm not setting out to prove that here. Intent. To. Distribute. Hate. Speech. That's all I'm after in this tangent.
If you think he's being dramatic when he discusses being influenced by a game (or any media) without realizing it's happening, he's talking about you. When you watch a movie like The Day After Tomorrow or Contagion and you go "oh, that was one of those message movies" the artist has done it wrong.
The thing is, if you're worrying about how much people are influenced by the games they play and the books they read, you're doing it wrong too. The reason it happens so easily and naturally for us is because it's an extremely natural and useful way of absorbing information. I would even say it's a necessary way of absorbing information, because it's so natural that it's difficult to synthesize, and therefor difficult to edit. It's data in the raw!
It could be said that leaving it up to each individual to absorb this information in a responsible way requires I high level of faith in individuals, but.. personally I'm more apathetic towards the whole situation. I just absorb all the data I can and keep it in good order.
You know what? I'm going to disagree to some extent with Daniel and company.
Games can have messages, aside from entertainment, and they can use the form of the game to express that message to the player. A game like Harpooned isn't particular sneaky about it's message - the whole game is built around the idea that Japanese whaling is a commercial hunting enterprise thinly disguised by "research." The download site links to news stories about Harpooned (as well as Greenpeace and Paul Watson's organization). A reasonable person playing this game isn't going to be caught off guard for too long.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
The same thing can happen with books, right? Nobody's going to blame the author of a book for imposing their point of view on their readers, not merely as a point of principle. Books being about more than entertainment is nothing new; most books are about something, and they're persuasive too. When we're reading a book, we can have a pretty good idea of how the author wants us to react and what the intended reading is (whether we agree with the intended reading or or not). There are books that have messages we agree with and disagree with. Twilight is a book series that definitely has a message - and it's not one I'm comfortable with. Does that mean no books should have social or political messages?
So, the problem with these games is one of content, not form - we can disagree with the messages of the game, but it's not fair to disagree with a game merely for intending to convey a political message. I think that, instead of labeling something that has a very clearly disclosed point of view as propaganda, we're better off focusing on healthy skepticism, fact-checking, and media literacy. Truth claims are EVERYWHERE, and I don't think it's bad that activists are trying to reach people through games. Look at what literacy has done for empathy - the ability to imagine someone else's point of view. Imagine what games can do.
Anyway, I love this series and I'm glad to see it on PATV. Keep up the good work.
yeah this was pretty much what I thought too. It's not wrong for a narrative to have a point. In fact every narrative should have a point or it's not a very good narrative.
Inspiring a response or reaction in your audience without them even consciously noticing it isn't evil, it's being a good writer, even if you're using that good writing ability to espouse a despicable viewpoint.
I'm not putting the onus on the player. That would be absurd. I'm want to be very clear that I'm putting the onus on the author. I'm not even sure what the onus is. What I'm arguing is "bad" is people intentionally creating a text for the intended purpose of spreading real hate against minorities. I'm not also not arguing for criminal charges or censorship - just that the act of authoring hate speech is bad.
If you want to purposely get Frogger run over and pretend he's Latino in the privacy of your own home, you're in all probability a terrible person but I'm not setting out to prove that here. Intent. To. Distribute. Hate. Speech. That's all I'm after in this tangent.
OK, I'll clarify also. I've basically got three related queries.
1) If the content is the despicable part, how is there a real difference between GTA and ZoG?
2) If the despicable part the designer's intent, at what point do you acknowledge that a player is making a conscious decision to buy & play a specific game? I can't think of any games I've played that have had a surprising spin in their dialogue with the player, its pretty much always on the box.
3) If the despicable part is how the player chooses to interpret the game, I agree.
in GTA the people are completely anonymous nobodies. They're dolls, and killing them produces a reaction similar to breaking a GI Joe. By even giving the characters in ZoG the simple descriptor of "homosexual" or "jewish," you're elevating them beyond being simple mannequins. You're telling the player that they have a motive for murder, and that motive his hatred toward a minority. Carrying out the act is tantamount to accepting that motivation, if only in the context of the game, since you have no other reason to do it. The motive GTA gives you for being a murderous psychopath is "it would be fun."
Additionally, even though you can do a lot of killing in GTA, the game doesn't explicitly reward you for killing people. Just the opposite. If you kill lots of people the game becomes much more difficult, with police bearing down on you, until the game becomes unplayably difficult and you're killed and stripped of your stuff. Other than some petty cash and a little juvenile fun, there's no actual benefit to acting like a homicidal killer. The game doesn't condone it even though it allows it. Presumably ZoG does condone it, given what I know about the thing.
Also GTA is very clearly a silly and zany world. It's crime drama as seen in a funhouse mirror. The actions aren't meaningful in the way they would be in other contexts, because it's established that nothing's really meaningful in this world. It's the same reason you can laugh when a comedian suggests killing someone for, I don't know, voting Republican, but would feel uncomfortable if a Democrat politician made the same suggestion in earnest.
in GTA the people are completely anonymous nobodies. They're dolls, and killing them produces a reaction similar to breaking a GI Joe. By even giving the characters in ZoG the simple descriptor of "homosexual" or "jewish," you're elevating them beyond being simple mannequins. You're telling the player that they have a motive for murder, and that motive his hatred toward a minority. Carrying out the act is tantamount to accepting that motivation, if only in the context of the game, since you have no other reason to do it. The motive GTA gives you for being a murderous psychopath is "it would be fun."
But doesn't that make GTA the more insidious game? It says that its ok to kill anonymous nobodies, even when passers-by run off screaming and you get a bloody corpse? Because its a fun environment!
Additionally, even though you can do a lot of killing in GTA, the game doesn't explicitly reward you for killing people. Just the opposite. If you kill lots of people the game becomes much more difficult, with police bearing down on you, until the game becomes unplayably difficult and you're killed and stripped of your stuff. Other than some petty cash and a little juvenile fun, there's no actual benefit to acting like a homicidal killer. The game doesn't condone it even though it allows it. Presumably ZoG does condone it, given what I know about the thing.
We're dancing in the dark here also, but I'm guessing even ZoG has guards that want to stop you killing the homosexuals and jews. Sure they want the guards to fail, but I'm pretty sure GTA wants the police to fail too, or it wouldn't be so easy to evade them (and reset them). So isn't that condoned?
Also GTA is very clearly a silly and zany world. It's crime drama as seen in a funhouse mirror. The actions aren't meaningful in the way they would be in other contexts, because it's established that nothing's really meaningful in this world.
Thats right, they're not real people so it doesn't count. Wait, thats probably the tagline on ZoG.
It's the same reason you can laugh when a comedian suggests killing someone for, I don't know, voting Republican, but would feel uncomfortable if a Democrat politician made the same suggestion in earnest.
Sure, and its to do with perceived context by the audience, not just content, or even the actual intent of the speaker.
I think maybe this episode wasted too much time on the obvious narratives; maybe they didn't want to fuel the `video games are evil' crowd by going after popular franchises that are already regularly maligned.
You know what? I'm going to disagree to some extent with Daniel and company.
Games can have messages, aside from entertainment, and they can use the form of the game to express that message to the player. A game like Harpooned isn't particular sneaky about it's message - the whole game is built around the idea that Japanese whaling is a commercial hunting enterprise thinly disguised by "research." The download site links to news stories about Harpooned (as well as Greenpeace and Paul Watson's organization). A reasonable person playing this game isn't going to be caught off guard for too long.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
The same thing can happen with books, right? Nobody's going to blame the author of a book for imposing their point of view on their readers, not merely as a point of principle. Books being about more than entertainment is nothing new; most books are about something, and they're persuasive too. When we're reading a book, we can have a pretty good idea of how the author wants us to react and what the intended reading is (whether we agree with the intended reading or or not). There are books that have messages we agree with and disagree with. Twilight is a book series that definitely has a message - and it's not one I'm comfortable with. Does that mean no books should have social or political messages?
So, the problem with these games is one of content, not form - we can disagree with the messages of the game, but it's not fair to disagree with a game merely for intending to convey a political message. I think that, instead of labeling something that has a very clearly disclosed point of view as propaganda, we're better off focusing on healthy skepticism, fact-checking, and media literacy. Truth claims are EVERYWHERE, and I don't think it's bad that activists are trying to reach people through games. Look at what literacy has done for empathy - the ability to imagine someone else's point of view. Imagine what games can do.
Anyway, I love this series and I'm glad to see it on PATV. Keep up the good work.
yeah this was pretty much what I thought too. It's not wrong for a narrative to have a point. In fact every narrative should have a point or it's not a very good narrative.
Inspiring a response or reaction in your audience without them even consciously noticing it isn't evil, it's being a good writer, even if you're using that good writing ability to espouse a despicable viewpoint.
I think the point of talking about games in this way was less to condemn games with a message and more to remind gamers of all the subtext that goes on, usually without our noticing. There is a concept that you'll find in mid-level communications classes that (in extremely watered-down fashion) goes something like this:
The average consumer looks at whether a piece of media has an intentional message, and if it does, then that's all we as consumers have to be worried about. There's no tension in the decision of whether we like the message or not, so that part's usually pretty easy for us to figure out on our own. But the sticking point is that we can't neglect all the messages a piece of media sends out that may or may not be intentional. This is why you have claims of sexism from media that doesn't explicitly tell its consumers that one sex needs to be discriminated against. In some cases it's done so thoroughly or from so many sources that it starts to become normalized, and we stop noticing that it was sexism at all. They went into better detail with this in terms of fantasy female armor, but I think you get where I'm going with this.
So no, of course it's not evil to espouse a certain viewpoint, but our consumption of games as messengers as well as entertainment needs to take the game as a whole into account...not just what the game "says" directly.
1) If the content is the despicable part, how is there a real difference between GTA and ZoG?
Here's a hypothetical:
Diane pours tea for her grandma. She sees a container marked "sugar" and pours it into her grandmother's tea with the intent of sweetening the tea. It's actually deadly poison. Her grandmother dies.
Robert pours tea for his grandma. He sees a container marked "deadly poison" and pours it into his grandmother's tea, with the intent of murdering his grandma and getting the inheritance or whatever. His grandmother lives because the container was just filled with sugar.
The sugar in the tea, thought to be poison, is still attempted murder.
The point: Intent is important. If we're gauging the "wrongness" of an action, intent can be more important than the results of the action. If the intent is to incite hate, it's hate speech. Regardless of how effective or ineffective that particular game can be it can be in "seducing" people to a racist point of view, it's a malevolent action against people who happen to be distinguishable targets.
Your freemarket libertarian ethos can be right, and ZoG is still bad.
I think the point of talking about games in this way was less to condemn games with a message and more to remind gamers of all the subtext that goes on, usually without our noticing. There is a concept that you'll find in mid-level communications classes that (in extremely watered-down fashion) goes something like this:
The average consumer looks at whether a piece of media has an intentional message, and if it does, then that's all we as consumers have to be worried about. There's no tension in the decision of whether we like the message or not, so that part's usually pretty easy for us to figure out on our own. But the sticking point is that we can't neglect all the messages a piece of media sends out that may or may not be intentional. This is why you have claims of sexism from media that doesn't explicitly tell its consumers that one sex needs to be discriminated against. In some cases it's done so thoroughly or from so many sources that it starts to become normalized, and we stop noticing that it was sexism at all. They went into better detail with this in terms of fantasy female armor, but I think you get where I'm going with this.
So no, of course it's not evil to espouse a certain viewpoint, but our consumption of games as messengers as well as entertainment needs to take the game as a whole into account...not just what the game "says" directly.
I'm a communications student, and I'd also advocate media literacy approach. The Extra Credits video, however, labelled activist games like Harpooned in the more pejorative "propaganda" bin and suggested that developers attempt to keep their point of view out of games. That's not a approach I support. In what other art form do we tell the creators to keep their point of view out of the medium. (Besides journalism, and even that's a questionable practice at best.)
As someone who recognizes games as having (and achieving) potential beyond entertainment, I don't want the authors to be told to keep what's important to them out of the game. Don't deprive us the opportunity to explore someone else's head. (Yes, Gosprey. Even if they are terrible people.)
- That said, I agree with the other bits in the video as well as the point you made about patriarchal hegemony.
From what i could gather from the episode, the difference between objectionable acts in games, like killing in GTA, is that GTA doesn't have a bias, you're killing relatively indiscriminately. Suffering the consequences of your actions as a result.
Propaganda games like the whaling game deliberately omitted information and outright lied about it's intentions, it wasn't a balanced account of a real-life occurrence. (exchanging "whaling for blubber and meat" for "research")
ZoG is absolute propaganda. You are a Neo-Nazi killing minorities. The game was developed with no other narrative than the deranged fantasy of a Neo-Nazi who wanted to give other sick individuals a simulation of their own wet dreams. While it has every free right to exist, it shouldn't be given a minute of play by any decent person.
America's Army is obviously a recruitment tool. And while it does represent situations in war, it does seem to deliberately leave out a lot of major questions that would be of concern to a potential recruit.
The point is this; Propaganda Games are there to reinforce or put across an inaccurate view point of a real life event/occurrence/point.
Propaganda games like the whaling game deliberately omitted information and outright lied about it's intentions, it wasn't a balanced account of a real-life occurrence. (exchanging "whaling for blubber and meat" for "research")
1) The video didn't say that. Nowhere in the video does it allege that Harpooned lied about it's intentions or deliberately omitted information, and they didn't expect the activist game to give a balanced account of the occurring. Satire shouldn't be expected to be balanced.
2) Not providing a balanced account =/= lying about intentions. Balanced doesn't mean truthful. Opinionated doesn't mean lies. Showing a "BOTH SIDES" account of an event is often distortional, as it presents equal argumentative legitimacy where it may not actually exist. The whalers have their own PR people. Why shouldn't activists focus on their account in their own media?
3) Japan actually does use research as a front to legitimize whaling for food. This is internationally recognized fact, and they get away with it because they operate in international waters.
The point is this; Propaganda Games are there to reinforce or put across an inaccurate view point of a real life event/occurrence/point.
See, this is why I don't like the term "propaganda." It's pejorative, so people automatically assume BAD. Anti-smoking PSAs are propaganda. It's an attempt at persuasion. "Persuasive" isn't a synonym for "false." Neither is opinionated.
1) If the content is the despicable part, how is there a real difference between GTA and ZoG?
Here's a hypothetical
<snip>
The sugar in the tea, thought to be poison, is still attempted murder.
I fail to see how that hypothetical has relevance to the discussion at hand, particularly with your actual `ingredient' change between people.
The point: Intent is important. If we're gauging the "wrongness" of an action, intent can be more important than the results of the action. If the intent is to incite hate, it's hate speech. Regardless of how effective or ineffective that particular game can be it can be in "seducing" people to a racist point of view, it's a malevolent action against people who happen to be distinguishable targets.
OK, but whose intent is important? The intent of the creator? But when something has been created, it is up to the user how they use it - they make a conscious choice, and as I said previously, I've not played a game where the over-all bias within it hasn't been something you could ascertain from the box.
Your freemarket libertarian ethos can be right, and ZoG is still bad.
I'm actually not disputing that ZoG is bad, I'm asserting that if it is, a game like GTA must also be bad.
I know that when I first played GTA3 and got the samurai sword, I had a sick feeling in my stomach as I hacked people with it, `cartoony' or not. But friends of mine who'd been playing shooters since the year dot were already completely desensitized to the violence. And sure, now I play a game like Left 4 Dead without thinking twice about it, but how has the desensitizing process I've gone through over years of violent games impacted on my own worldview?
Did Rockstar games set out to make people into sociopaths? No. Is GTA3 a game enjoyed by players that wish to imagine themselves being a criminal undertaking anti-social acts? Oh you bet.
The difference between ZoG and GTA is easy to draw, but the distinction is drawn on the basis of creator intent, which is not the most personal aspect of the playing experience, and I think that can create a false `safety' for games like GTA.
The difference between ZoG and GTA is easy to draw, but the distinction is drawn on the basis of creator intent, which is not the most personal aspect of the playing experience, and I think that can create a false `safety' for games like GTA.
Okay. Are you against Film Noir in cinemas too? Grindhouse exploitation movies? Anything with a touch of the old ultra-violence? Because if you are, we're talking about very different issues. Intent to incite violence against minorities and media effects concerns don't have to be mutually exclusive heuristics. But they're not interchangeable things.
We're talking past eachother because we're talking about different issues. GTA can be harmful (I'd argue it isn't, but that's besides the point) without being hate speech or an attempt to persuade. I was addressing the propagandistic aspects of games, concerned with issues around an attempt to persuade.
I don't really give a fuck whether or not GTA is safe.
The difference between GTA and ZoG is the potential clientele to whom each game is marketed.
For the most part, Rockstar sells its GTA games without losing sleep because they know most of their buyers won't be tricked or seduced into killing strangers indiscriminately in the real world.
In ZoG, it seems like the creators are trying to do just that, incite real life murder and bigotry.
The difference is the desired end result when the game is turned off, whether it is escapist joy (GTA) or stirring up racist sentiments and violence (ZoG).
I understand there are unintended consequences for both games, but it seems GTA is less likely to produce unforeseen responses than ZoG.
I'm just weirded out that they seem to think that conveying any kind of message is a bad thing. It's a good thing! You just have to choose your messages carefully as a creator and be responsible about it, and as an audience member you have to have a critical eye and recognize bad messages and dismiss them.
Clearly this is a new low in gaming. First-person shooter plotlines have gone consistently downhill since German soldiers were stereotyped as mutant-breeders and robot overlords in Wolfenstein 3D.
Posts
Also stoked that the archives are available now.
Games can have messages, aside from entertainment, and they can use the form of the game to express that message to the player. A game like Harpooned isn't particular sneaky about it's message - the whole game is built around the idea that Japanese whaling is a commercial hunting enterprise thinly disguised by "research." The download site links to news stories about Harpooned (as well as Greenpeace and Paul Watson's organization). A reasonable person playing this game isn't going to be caught off guard for too long.
Hell, the problem with the other overt games you listed might not be of form but of content. The game about beating up homosexuals might be bad, not because it's a game that forces a the player to operate within the author's point of view, but because it's a game with a point of view supporting the killing of jews and homosexuals.
The same thing can happen with books, right? Nobody's going to blame the author of a book for imposing their point of view on their readers, not merely as a point of principle. Books being about more than entertainment is nothing new; most books are about something, and they're persuasive too. When we're reading a book, we can have a pretty good idea of how the author wants us to react and what the intended reading is (whether we agree with the intended reading or or not). There are books that have messages we agree with and disagree with. Twilight is a book series that definitely has a message - and it's not one I'm comfortable with. Does that mean no books should have social or political messages?
So, the problem with these games is one of content, not form - we can disagree with the messages of the game, but it's not fair to disagree with a game merely for intending to convey a political message. I think that, instead of labeling something that has a very clearly disclosed point of view as propaganda, we're better off focusing on healthy skepticism, fact-checking, and media literacy. Truth claims are EVERYWHERE, and I don't think it's bad that activists are trying to reach people through games. Look at what literacy has done for empathy - the ability to imagine someone else's point of view. Imagine what games can do.
Anyway, I love this series and I'm glad to see it on PATV. Keep up the good work.
What if I suddenly discovered right now that the reason why people turn into zombies if Left 4 Dead is that they all are people who accessed Obamacare? Would that change my previous playing experience?
I'd say that the examples given aren't great, because there isn't a lot that most games can do that `subvert' your view - mostly you know the biases of a game before you see pixel one. If you play a game written by an American company about war in Iraq, you already know whats happening going in. Its not sneaky, you already decided that you'd like to simulate killing people in the middle east for your country.
In ZoG, you're killing overt stereotypical representations of people who the authors believe are evil based on racial prejudice or sexual orientation.
You might say, "who cares?" because in both games you're killing people. What do people care if the reason they were killed is racist or not? They're dead. Well, killing someone in a game isn't really killing. It's not an actual harmful action. An intentional attempt to promote hatred towards racial segments of the population, on the other hand?
ZoG is worse because there's intent to incite hate in the authorship.
The author might even have different intents (GTA wants you to kill everyone for fun, ZoG wants you to kill specific people for ideology/fun), but the player is still the one making the decision. They're deciding if killing everyone is fun or if killing just some specific people is fun.
If I'm a ZoG player, and I go around killing every obvious metrosexual or male wearer of pink in GTA, then how much `better' an experience is it than ZoG? Similarly, if I play ZoG ironically without believing the ideology, is it still a horrible horrible thing, or is it the same sort of `lol his hed is up his azz' sociopath funtime as GTA?
Doing things in the majority of popular games on the market would get you imprisoned or at the very least thought of as a terrible person in real life. I'm not sure how a line can be drawn between GTA or ZoG.
I'm not putting the onus on the player. That would be absurd. I'm want to be very clear that I'm putting the onus on the author. I'm not even sure what the onus is. What I'm arguing is "bad" is people intentionally creating a text for the intended purpose of spreading real hate against minorities. I'm not also not arguing for criminal charges or censorship - just that the act of authoring hate speech is bad.
If you want to purposely get Frogger run over and pretend he's Latino in the privacy of your own home, you're in all probability a terrible person but I'm not setting out to prove that here. Intent. To. Distribute. Hate. Speech. That's all I'm after in this tangent.
The thing is, if you're worrying about how much people are influenced by the games they play and the books they read, you're doing it wrong too. The reason it happens so easily and naturally for us is because it's an extremely natural and useful way of absorbing information. I would even say it's a necessary way of absorbing information, because it's so natural that it's difficult to synthesize, and therefor difficult to edit. It's data in the raw!
It could be said that leaving it up to each individual to absorb this information in a responsible way requires I high level of faith in individuals, but.. personally I'm more apathetic towards the whole situation. I just absorb all the data I can and keep it in good order.
yeah this was pretty much what I thought too. It's not wrong for a narrative to have a point. In fact every narrative should have a point or it's not a very good narrative.
Inspiring a response or reaction in your audience without them even consciously noticing it isn't evil, it's being a good writer, even if you're using that good writing ability to espouse a despicable viewpoint.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
1) If the content is the despicable part, how is there a real difference between GTA and ZoG?
2) If the despicable part the designer's intent, at what point do you acknowledge that a player is making a conscious decision to buy & play a specific game? I can't think of any games I've played that have had a surprising spin in their dialogue with the player, its pretty much always on the box.
3) If the despicable part is how the player chooses to interpret the game, I agree.
in GTA the people are completely anonymous nobodies. They're dolls, and killing them produces a reaction similar to breaking a GI Joe. By even giving the characters in ZoG the simple descriptor of "homosexual" or "jewish," you're elevating them beyond being simple mannequins. You're telling the player that they have a motive for murder, and that motive his hatred toward a minority. Carrying out the act is tantamount to accepting that motivation, if only in the context of the game, since you have no other reason to do it. The motive GTA gives you for being a murderous psychopath is "it would be fun."
Additionally, even though you can do a lot of killing in GTA, the game doesn't explicitly reward you for killing people. Just the opposite. If you kill lots of people the game becomes much more difficult, with police bearing down on you, until the game becomes unplayably difficult and you're killed and stripped of your stuff. Other than some petty cash and a little juvenile fun, there's no actual benefit to acting like a homicidal killer. The game doesn't condone it even though it allows it. Presumably ZoG does condone it, given what I know about the thing.
Also GTA is very clearly a silly and zany world. It's crime drama as seen in a funhouse mirror. The actions aren't meaningful in the way they would be in other contexts, because it's established that nothing's really meaningful in this world. It's the same reason you can laugh when a comedian suggests killing someone for, I don't know, voting Republican, but would feel uncomfortable if a Democrat politician made the same suggestion in earnest.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
We're dancing in the dark here also, but I'm guessing even ZoG has guards that want to stop you killing the homosexuals and jews. Sure they want the guards to fail, but I'm pretty sure GTA wants the police to fail too, or it wouldn't be so easy to evade them (and reset them). So isn't that condoned?
Thats right, they're not real people so it doesn't count. Wait, thats probably the tagline on ZoG.
Sure, and its to do with perceived context by the audience, not just content, or even the actual intent of the speaker.
I think maybe this episode wasted too much time on the obvious narratives; maybe they didn't want to fuel the `video games are evil' crowd by going after popular franchises that are already regularly maligned.
I think the point of talking about games in this way was less to condemn games with a message and more to remind gamers of all the subtext that goes on, usually without our noticing. There is a concept that you'll find in mid-level communications classes that (in extremely watered-down fashion) goes something like this:
The average consumer looks at whether a piece of media has an intentional message, and if it does, then that's all we as consumers have to be worried about. There's no tension in the decision of whether we like the message or not, so that part's usually pretty easy for us to figure out on our own. But the sticking point is that we can't neglect all the messages a piece of media sends out that may or may not be intentional. This is why you have claims of sexism from media that doesn't explicitly tell its consumers that one sex needs to be discriminated against. In some cases it's done so thoroughly or from so many sources that it starts to become normalized, and we stop noticing that it was sexism at all. They went into better detail with this in terms of fantasy female armor, but I think you get where I'm going with this.
So no, of course it's not evil to espouse a certain viewpoint, but our consumption of games as messengers as well as entertainment needs to take the game as a whole into account...not just what the game "says" directly.
Ka-Chung!
Ka-Chung!
Diane pours tea for her grandma. She sees a container marked "sugar" and pours it into her grandmother's tea with the intent of sweetening the tea. It's actually deadly poison. Her grandmother dies.
Robert pours tea for his grandma. He sees a container marked "deadly poison" and pours it into his grandmother's tea, with the intent of murdering his grandma and getting the inheritance or whatever. His grandmother lives because the container was just filled with sugar.
The sugar in the tea, thought to be poison, is still attempted murder.
The point: Intent is important. If we're gauging the "wrongness" of an action, intent can be more important than the results of the action. If the intent is to incite hate, it's hate speech. Regardless of how effective or ineffective that particular game can be it can be in "seducing" people to a racist point of view, it's a malevolent action against people who happen to be distinguishable targets.
Your freemarket libertarian ethos can be right, and ZoG is still bad.
As someone who recognizes games as having (and achieving) potential beyond entertainment, I don't want the authors to be told to keep what's important to them out of the game. Don't deprive us the opportunity to explore someone else's head. (Yes, Gosprey. Even if they are terrible people.)
- That said, I agree with the other bits in the video as well as the point you made about patriarchal hegemony.
Propaganda games like the whaling game deliberately omitted information and outright lied about it's intentions, it wasn't a balanced account of a real-life occurrence. (exchanging "whaling for blubber and meat" for "research")
ZoG is absolute propaganda. You are a Neo-Nazi killing minorities. The game was developed with no other narrative than the deranged fantasy of a Neo-Nazi who wanted to give other sick individuals a simulation of their own wet dreams. While it has every free right to exist, it shouldn't be given a minute of play by any decent person.
America's Army is obviously a recruitment tool. And while it does represent situations in war, it does seem to deliberately leave out a lot of major questions that would be of concern to a potential recruit.
The point is this; Propaganda Games are there to reinforce or put across an inaccurate view point of a real life event/occurrence/point.
2) Not providing a balanced account =/= lying about intentions. Balanced doesn't mean truthful. Opinionated doesn't mean lies. Showing a "BOTH SIDES" account of an event is often distortional, as it presents equal argumentative legitimacy where it may not actually exist. The whalers have their own PR people. Why shouldn't activists focus on their account in their own media?
3) Japan actually does use research as a front to legitimize whaling for food. This is internationally recognized fact, and they get away with it because they operate in international waters.
See, this is why I don't like the term "propaganda." It's pejorative, so people automatically assume BAD. Anti-smoking PSAs are propaganda. It's an attempt at persuasion. "Persuasive" isn't a synonym for "false." Neither is opinionated.
OK, but whose intent is important? The intent of the creator? But when something has been created, it is up to the user how they use it - they make a conscious choice, and as I said previously, I've not played a game where the over-all bias within it hasn't been something you could ascertain from the box.
I'm actually not disputing that ZoG is bad, I'm asserting that if it is, a game like GTA must also be bad.
I know that when I first played GTA3 and got the samurai sword, I had a sick feeling in my stomach as I hacked people with it, `cartoony' or not. But friends of mine who'd been playing shooters since the year dot were already completely desensitized to the violence. And sure, now I play a game like Left 4 Dead without thinking twice about it, but how has the desensitizing process I've gone through over years of violent games impacted on my own worldview?
Did Rockstar games set out to make people into sociopaths? No. Is GTA3 a game enjoyed by players that wish to imagine themselves being a criminal undertaking anti-social acts? Oh you bet.
The difference between ZoG and GTA is easy to draw, but the distinction is drawn on the basis of creator intent, which is not the most personal aspect of the playing experience, and I think that can create a false `safety' for games like GTA.
We're talking past eachother because we're talking about different issues. GTA can be harmful (I'd argue it isn't, but that's besides the point) without being hate speech or an attempt to persuade. I was addressing the propagandistic aspects of games, concerned with issues around an attempt to persuade.
I don't really give a fuck whether or not GTA is safe.
For the most part, Rockstar sells its GTA games without losing sleep because they know most of their buyers won't be tricked or seduced into killing strangers indiscriminately in the real world.
In ZoG, it seems like the creators are trying to do just that, incite real life murder and bigotry.
The difference is the desired end result when the game is turned off, whether it is escapist joy (GTA) or stirring up racist sentiments and violence (ZoG).
I understand there are unintended consequences for both games, but it seems GTA is less likely to produce unforeseen responses than ZoG.
There you go.
yeah basically
I'm just weirded out that they seem to think that conveying any kind of message is a bad thing. It's a good thing! You just have to choose your messages carefully as a creator and be responsible about it, and as an audience member you have to have a critical eye and recognize bad messages and dismiss them.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
God fucking damnit, Call of Juarez
god fucking damnit