Why am I blogging twice on a Sunday? I almost never do that. Well, because there's just so much awesome stuff out there today, and I don't want you guys to miss any of it.
I just spent way too many words linking you to Tom Cross' Resident Evil 5 article. Now I guess it's touchy topics time, because I'd like you to read Nick Breckon's thoughts on Konami's Six Days In Fallujah over at Shacknews. He visited Konami's Gamer's Night to see the game, and apparently Konami is having genuine Marines speak to the project:
"The unique, controversial nature of the project was apparent in Ergo's speech. In the middle of a night headlined by cheap, exploitative fare like Saw: The Videogame, to suddenly be listening to someone's first-hand account of combat in Iraq was quite the about-face. At that point, I wasn't sure whether this was an indication of the inappropriateness of the stunt, or how unusual it was to be faced with a real person's dramatic struggle in the midst of a pre-planned marketing campaign for silly videogames. Maybe Six Days really would be a serious, mature take on war. Maybe we're just not used to this kind of thing."
Maybe. Maybe not:
But whereas Ridley Scott could get away with a movie that mostly glossed over the political and moral questions of that comparatively small conflict in favor of telling the on-the-ground storyline, pulling off that same trick with Fallujah--a battle from a war with an incomparable level of public awareness and charged political debate--will be far more difficult, and require a certain degree of dignity that was not demonstrated on Thursday.
Konami and Atomic have already contradicted themselves more than once, which isn't helping.
Read the whole post. I'm really happy we're having so many chances to discuss how games should treat difficult, ugly things, and with Six Days In Fallujah, we're dealing with the real world. I'm really interested in what we can learn from how it's executed, whether or not it's successful.
Is it possible for games to provide genuine and dignified portrayals of real war? Should they try? On a related topic, a friend of mine once explained why playing CoD4 helped him cope with his cousin's serious injury at war in Iraq.
Next up: remember when we were talking about RapeLay, and many commenters asked why mowing down endless humans in a hail of gunfire in video games is "OK" while rape isn't? At Resolution, Lewis Denby explores whether mowing down humans in games is so OK after all:
The issue here isn’t really the age-old debate about whether videogames desensitise us towards violence, but that they perhaps fail to acknowledge the seriousness of their common subject matter. And if the medium is going to be considered mature, something it so desperately wants to be, is this not something that’s going to severely hinder its claim?
Great, thought provoking discussion, and Denby collects input from others, too. Michaël Samyn of the Tale of Tales pair, who're making a name for themselves by being unafraid to confront these questions, weighs in, and so do Rock Paper Shotgun elite Kieron Gillen and John Walker. I tend to fall on Gillen's side of the argument:“It supposes an aesthetic purpose for the developer - that death should be treated like it is when your gran dies or whatever. A serious treatment of death can be powerful and moving, but it’s certainly not the only way to view it, and never has been throughout the history of human art and expression across all media. It’s like saying that being bankrupted in Monopoly trivialises the world’s financial downturn.”
But I also like that Denby asks whether we're ignoring a wider issue. Two years ago (wow, time flies!) I asked the same question in an Aberrant Gamer column that you might find worth revisiting in light of this discussion:
Haven’t you ever deliberately executed the most gratuitous combo to finish an enemy? Because you were frustrated, maybe? Furious? Or because dismemberment, skull crushing and mutilation killings are just fun?
Either way, I'm a hundred percent with Denby when he says we ought to at least be able to explain ourselves on these questions, whatever the answers are.
