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[PATV] Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 3, Ep. 13: Call of Juarez: The Cartel
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we further examine the "lazy design" we discussed last week by picking apart a specific title: Call of Juarez: The Cartel. <br /> Come discuss the topic with us in the <a href="http://extra-credits.net" target="_blank">forums</a>!
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Dropping the "n" word in GTA isn't a real world problem. It is not stating a fact. It never said the in-game mexican cartels (this is as far as my knowledge goes) were "kidnapping american women and selling them to mexican men" which as the video stated, was completely and blatantly wrong and entirely propaganda based. That's the kind of crap that you hear on FOX News, not what we want to see coming from a product of our medium.
Mowing people down in a Russian airport in MW2 is not a real world problem. It was not stating fact. That event in the game was also not "just because," but was setting a tone in the game and was used as a major plot point for the rest of the series. That was not pointless massacre, it was a key plot point, and *you were not required to shoot them*. You did not fail if you did not kill civilians. There also wasn't an achievement for mowing down 40 of them, meaning an argument can not even be made for killing them. And at no point did they state incorrect information about any topics they dealt with, mostly because the topics were not real.
And to put it in short, the reason this topic specifically deserves a certain level of honor is because of the things that happened to the two brave men massacred in the following video. The deaths start at 3:08 in the video. I know the title bar is off putting, but scroll down to the video and listen to the guy with the knife death, you can still hear him breathing through his trachea:
http://www.bestgore.com/beheading/chainsaw-beheading-video-sinaloa-cartel-members-decapitated-mexico/
That's why this game is so incredibly offensive. These men died brutal deaths trying to bring the truth out on the topic, and the little bit they did were disgraced by the thousands who bought this game. If you're looking for extra disgust, look at the comments and some of the things they said about it. I don't ever get emotionally affected by videos or games like this (exclusion of killing Mordin in Mass Effect 3) but this one made me sick to my stomach the rest of the day. Not for the gore, but for the fact that the threat of this occurring even exists.
Call of Juarez more or less belittles this by not taking the time to get things right and it's offensive. If your game is about an event, you need to do your research.
We call these games but honestly, there is a lot more at stake here. If I made a movie framing the same lies that this game perpetuates, I'd have my ass handed to me by the public at large. Same if it was a novel, if it was a comment on a radio show. We, as consumers, have a duty to call out bullshit.
When a game comes right out to feed us bigotry and misinformation like this, we need to judge it with the same standards that we hold any other art or media form. "It's just a game" shouldn't be our defense.
I may not like CoD or GTA but at least the violence came with a reason, whether it was to forward the plot or it was a part of the tone. This is just plain laziness. It's obvious that Techland approached the research of this Drug War with the same attitude of an 8th Grader with a paper to submit the very next morning.
I hope that when people google for this game, this page and this video show up first, just as a warning for everyone else to turn and never come back.
Quoting Alighieri71 below
"I hope that when people google for this game, this page and this video show up first, just as a warning for everyone else to turn and never come back."
We should definitely try and make sure this is exactly what happens.
The rest of you can do as you wish, but I do not condone BenDogg's words. He has every right to say whatever he wishes, and I have every right to call him out on it.
i share part (and only part) of BenDogg30's opinions. i'm not so in favour of dealing with real-life issues while trying to kick back and relax when playing games...i mean, i'm not saying these aspects shouldn't be approached at all and overall avoided (that'd be really, again, immature and lazy, e.g. sexuality in gaming), but i wouldn't like it to become ANOTHER way of getting across certain ways of thinking or viewing things. you'd guess we have plenty of it with the film and music industry, and that's great, and a few games would be fine, but it strikes me that it'd be too easy for it to become ridden with such
what i'm trying to say is that it's high time for the game developers to realise that they are responsible for all sort of aspects regarding to their products...and that means no oversimplfying real-life events, especially when they deal with suffering and wrongs. they are still entitled to have opinions on certain subjects, but they aren't journalists or professors, they should stay as far away from propaganda as possible
if tl/dr: In brief, they don't have to teach (they can try), but they definitely mustn't misinform!
i find it utmost ridiculous that people are going to whine about a game.. i mean they are just pixels being shot.. COLORED PIXELS!.. and would it be good if you get the achievement if you shot mixed people?.. or a white gang?, then probably some other people would make a problem out of it or maybe no one would say something but then again.. it would be just pixels.. sigh..
the moment this becomes a problem is when the people make a problem out of it!
a game should just be made to kickback and relax and i don't need to be told a real life story everytime i buy a game, cause in this case i honestly don't feel like learning the history of the drug trade of mexico if i start my xbox, if i wanted to do that i would probably go on the internet and watch some documentary's.
you see, stuff like this is what ruins the game industry, people getting offended because of stuff that they shouldn't be getting offended in the first place!.
i call this Politically Correct non sense
You must be new here.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/art-is-not-the-opposite-of-fun
"Giving games more attention to detail is not going to make them worse"
"The biggest threat to games is not people caring too much. But rather people not caring."
They're not saying "Call of Juarez should be taken off the market." They're saying "Call of Juarez should have told it like it is, instead of making up a bunch of bullshit that sounds okay to an uninformed audience but grossly distorts the meaning of the actual conflict if it were true."
As a hispanic/black individual, wouldn't you RATHER play a game LIKE Call of Juarez except featuring a heroic hispanic/black lead character who fights to save his family, free his country, and protect his way of life against all comers, whether it's criminal gangs, a corrupt government, or invading foreign troops? I don't even know which side of the border you live on, but it doesn't matter. The basic ideals I just described work either way. It's kind of a fucking universal human motivation.
You can HAVE a hispanic/black heroic lead who does the right thing for the right reasons. You can HAVE enemy factions who are basically good people, but they have bad intel or have corrupt leadership. You can HAVE a game that talks honestly about what's actually going on in the Mexican drug war without outright REVERSING THE ROLES just to make America blameless in the conflict.
A good writer can make this stuff work. And he could make it work whether the hero of the game is American or Mexican. Soldier or regular dude caught in the middle. That's the game you and all hispanic/black gamers DESERVED to be able to play.
Why the fuck would you settle for just another half-assed Call of Duty knockoff where everything is twisted around so that hispanic/blacks are the BAD GUYS?
You deserve better man.
This is an amazing first episode for me, and I will be checking out more Extra Credit from now on.