I wrote a review in this month’s issue of PTD magazine that I’m sure is going to garner me much hate mail. I won’t reiterate the entire thing here, but to make a long story short, I panned Crackdown, a game where your objective, as a cop, is to murder as many immigrants as possible. I panned it specifically because of the game’s absolutely vile morals, and more specifically its vile politics.
I actually felt uncomfortable panning the game. Technically brilliant, this is still a game whose idea of a good time is shooting a rocket launcher into a crowd of racial stereotypes. Why hesitate before panning it? Because game reviews are expected to be analytical, not holistic. For all the bleating about the “new games journalism,” discussing a game in political or, worse, moral terms is a risky activity. Avid gamers, and thus critics who game avidly, are too quick to credit the winking eye. “Oh, sure, Grand Theft Auto lets you beat up hookers, but they didn’t really mean it. It’s only a game. That was just a joke.” As if being a joke makes it OK. As a consequence, the games industry is beset by outside critics like Jack Thompson, with their calls for censorship and regulation.
In Crackdown you travel through a fairly unconstrained sandbox. Once you start getting the hang of things, you can deal destruction on a truly impressive scale. You’ll leap tall buildings in a single bound. You’ll drive cars up ramps and launch them hundreds of feet into the air. You’ll waste hundreds of thugs with a variety of weapons. All of this is presented with clear hints that you’re in a Robocop-like dystopia. So the defense of the game is that all of this violence is somehow ironic. That really, the designers were aware of the political implications of what they were saying. It’s all just a joke.
I played Crackdown. I got the joke. It was a crappy joke.
I think that what we fantasize about matters. I think that when you decide to tell a story like Crackdown, a product that is created, packaged, and marketed to mass audiences at a cost of millions of dollars, the type of fantasy you choose to create matters. The games you produce will require the collaboration of thousands of players, making them a part of the fantasy you conceived. And I think that when you choose to tell a corrupt story, a story that makes the player an accessory to a moral crime, then it’s important that those of us who play games stand up and tell you that you’ve done something wrong.
It is possible to create games that address ethically problematic – oh, hell, let’s just call them “evil” – situations without being reprehensible: consider Shadow of the Colossus, which makes the player just as much a collaborator in that game’s crimes as does Crackdown. The difference is in the details. Just as no one would mistake the torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the same sort of pointless brutality in American Psycho, neither can one mistake the evil acts in Shadow, with say, the “pointless murder for fun and profit” sandbox activities in Grand Theft Auto.
It’s not a matter of the game adopting a finger-wagging posture. If a game has reprehensible elements, are they in the service of some greater theme? Or are the reprehensible elements – as they are in Crackdown – the whole point of the game? Games are narratives mixed with player-driven activities. Is a given act in a game because it advances the narrative? Or because some developer whose psychosexual development was arrested at 12 said to themselves “Hey, you know what? Raping an American Indian would be fun.”
My larger point, I suspect, will be lost. I’m not wanting – or expecting – game developers and publishers to only publish videogame versions of The Book of Virtues. I don’t want them to avoid controversy, or avoid edginess. But I do want to put a stake in the ground and say that the politics of games are not only a legitimate subject of criticism, but are in fact something critics should feel obligated to address. The attitude that critics should shut up and swallow whatever swill the industry is shilling at the moment is contemptible, and anyone who makes such arguments deserves no respect.
And if your idea of “edgy” is dropping a guy into a snake’s stomach then your game probably wasn’t worth playing anyway.
You can Download the “digest” version of PTD magazine here. The digest includes my full review of Crackdown.
Update: PTDmagazine has posted the review as HTML, so you don’t have to download the PDF unless you want to. Also, if you’re so inclined, please feel free to Digg this story.
I think they attempted to address this with a tacked-on feeling ending in which
SPOILERS!
After you defeat all of the racially stereotyped criminals, the repetitive disembodied voice tells you that it was “us” the Agency who financed all the criminals in some convoluted way to show the citizens why they need complete and utter domination rule by the Agency and that you helped them achieve this. Of course, then my wish was that you could turn against the Agency, perhaps build your own gang to fight against them (perhaps getting to know the bosses beyond elements of racial stereotyping). It’s such a soft sell at the end that it rings extremely hollow.weak, weak ending.
There’s not really a lot of incentive there to avoid controversy or shock value if a game is M-rated. If people talk about it, (as we are), it’s free advertising. In fact, to some people (enough to financially matter) being edgy in that way is actually enticing. I know, it’s sad, but if the only incentive to stereotype less is to know that you’re doing the right thing, that’s not enough for most.
sdstone: Yes, I address the false ending in the PTD review. I agree with you that it felt very much tacked on, as if the designers were trying to have their cake (“I made a game with endless amounts of racial violence!”) and eat it too (“I can still sleep at night!”)
Pete, to compare that against Shadow and to ramp the pretentiometer to OVER 9000 for a second – Shadow’s got the core elements of classical tragedy: hubris and inevitability. It took me about a third of the way through the game to realize that Wanda had made a big mistake, and watching it unfold is part of the narrative. Realizing that he’d doomed himself as soon as he rode over that bridge was a key part of the narrative for me.
Maybe we’re all old farts now, but I really am disturbed and unsettled by the moral messages in games like God of War and GTA. It’s not really a “think of the children!” problem, it’s more that the narratives are becoming -increasingly- febrile and that the technical excellence of the game doesn’t require this. There is no narrative reason that Kratos has to sacrifice people while they’re screaming for mercy, except to satisfy some moral cripple’s definition of badass.
Be that as it may – the issue here is still the issue of freedom of speech. I know it’s unpopular lately, but people should be free to say whatever they want. (Usual restrictions apply, “fire in crowded theater”, yadda yadda)
Yes, the speech that emanates from the game industry is mostly what, at some point, was called “pulp”. “Swill” is pretty good, too. The point is that it is their *right* to produce garbage.
The larger issue here is, why do we have a society that demands that garbage? Games don’t get made the way they are because the developers think it’s cool – they’re driven by what the audience buys. (Yay to the Wii for bringing in a slightly saner audience!)
Criticism – especially of the current crop of games – is perfectly valid, and warranted. Calls for censorship are not.
I don’t want to put words in Peter’s mouth, but I don’t think he was in any way advocating censorship.
Sure, free speech means people can say what they want, but it also means that criticizing them is fair game.
The game industry has the right to produce garbage. Players have the right to complain about that garbage.
While there are certainly people who do want to censor media, and they should be resisted, it bothers me that so many discussions of this type veer towards a “how dare you deny these rich multinational publishers their freedom of speech by criticizing them in an online forum!” direction.
To coin a phrase: oh please. There is no one advocating censorship here. What we are advocating here is that the “industry” get off their collective ass and show a bit of intellectual honesty and maturity. There is no doubt that they have a right to make whatever they want. But if they keep making crap, then its up to the rest of us to call them out on this and let them know that they have made crap.
Hiding behind the fig leaf of “free speech” is a cop out that ignores the fact that game developers and gamers like to talk about maturity while at the same time winking and nodding and shooting hookers. This has nothing to do with free speech. This has to do with the industry acting like the mature adults that they would have us believe they are.
Well, I’m not sure the issue *is* freedom of speech. I won’t contest the right of these folks to make games like this, but that doesn’t obligate anyone to ignore the content of the game when determining whether it’s a good game or not.
peterb wasn’t asking for this sort of thing to be censored—he was just reviewing the game and calling it what it is.
(Actually, I find it interesting that points about censorship were raised *even though this was a review saying the game was crap, without saying that games like this should be kept off the shelves*.)
I’ll go beyond John — I think it’s actually possible to reasonably advocate censorship, in some circumstances, even, but nobody here is doing so, and the “issue”, flat out, no bones about it, obviously to anyone with any sense, IS NOT CENSORSHIP. Yelling “free speech” here is absurd. Flat out absurd.
Heck, in a larger sense, it is an issue — if “the gaming community” is so adolescent and lacking a sense of shame (I don’t expect shame from the company laughing all the way to the bank) as to have no reaction to games about beating hookers or shooting stereotypes other than “waaah censorship” this is a pretty strong argument in the right hands _in favor of censorship_. Censorship makes little sense for intelligent, mature communities that have a proper sense of morality and shame — for crybabies with no moral sense, it starts looking like taking the copy of de Sade out of your ten year old’s hands. Way to help Tipper Gore, gamers!
My apologies that I actually followed the links in the article and replied to the set of articles, not only this particular one.
it starts looking like taking the copy of de Sade out of your ten year old’s hands.
You’re perfectly free to take it off your ten year old’s hands. You’ve got no right whatsoever to tell me what my ten year old is reading.
So let me go back to what I explicitly said was my main point: Why do we have a society that demands that garbage? $15 million games don’t get made on a pre-adolescent developers whim. You can pan them all you want, it’s not going to change things.
You might even reach game developers with your arguments, but game development these days is driven by large corporate machines – and they *really* don’t care about the issue if something is vile or not.
So by panning one game, all you’re doing is doctoring around at the symptoms. When will we instead start asking questions that dig at the root of the issue?
Robert, if multiple people read your comment a certain way, I think it’s a bit unfair to snipe at them for misunderstanding you. You may not have been as clear as you thought.
As far as what you state as your main point goes, I don’t think it’s anything like the sort of zero-sum game you’re painting it as — why do we have to pick between “criticize individual games” and “change society”, especially when choice #2 is pretty nebulously defined?
It’s really a lot like the cookie-cutter response to any sort of minor political activism, “why are you bothering with this instead of fixing hunger in africa, ending war, etc, etc, etc.”.
In addition to the false framing that implies you have to do one or the other, there’s an implication that nobody is working on the second option, which is presented as by far the more important of the choices. It’s not at all clear to me that that’s even remotely true — do you seriously think nobody’s thinking about and talking about why society likes violence?
The fact that this particular game review doesn’t include a full summary of society’s ills doesn’t really say anything about the broader set of topics people discuss.
So yes, it’s good for people to think about society and what it wants/needs/does. People should do more of it. However, that doesn’t mean that focusing on individual instances is in any way invalid.
I’ll bite. Ask those questions.
One guess would be — if people could actually get on board talking about how reprehensible such games are, even if won’t ban them, maybe that might hurt sales a bit? Grandstanding about the First Amendment does… what? It’s not in terrible danger, last I looked, at least not for selling repugnant games.
(I can at the very least tell you you’re a real lousy parent if your ten year old is reading de Sade, if free speech means anything.)
I mean people who _play and like games_ talking about it. Politicians and people who generally despise all video games going on about it only produces a circling the wagons effect, I’ll agree. But the response when someone like peterb attacks a game doesn’t inspire confidence in that internal conversation.
Of course, I myself am complicit in capitalist/modernist/liberal/pick-your-ill society by gunning down innocent orcs and ogres in Puzzle Quest at an obsessive rate.
Bundling up responses…
Nat: I’m not saying we shouldn’t do both. I’m just saying that merely panning individual games will not result in any lasting change. Yes, by all means, have your reviews talk about the problematic world view – but don’t forget that ultimately, those games are as the customers want them.
“do you seriously think nobody’s thinking about and talking about why society likes violence”
There’s certainly nobody *acting* on it. And, to be honest, I don’t see much thought on it either, outside of Academia. Sure, you can just qualify it as puerile fantasies, as we’re wont to do in the gaming discussion – but I don’t believe that that’s the only issue. I’ve had the fortune of travelling and moving around a lot. I’ve seen many different types of societies, with different attitudes towards violence. The U.S. has by far the most encouragement towards rage and violence. I don’t know why that is, but I don’t see much introspection, either.
Alex: I didn’t propose not talking about them. See my reply to Nat. And yes, I might very well be a lousy parent – there’s a reason I chose not to have kids. If I ever have them, I fully expect to raise them according to *my* principles, though, not anybody elses. There seems to be this idea that government needs to legislate morality, which I *strongly* object to. And yes, the first amendment for selling repugnant games is in danger. Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil are working hard at undermining it, and our wonderful media loves joining forces with them.
Also, I’m – if I read this thread correctly – the only one who’s not just saying “Yay”. I’m still on peterb’s side, merely pointing out that panning an individual game won’t do much. Neither will claiming that “those of us who play games” object to this. Most of the game players *want* this kind of content. Games are a commercial venture and get driven by demand. If we all really objected to this content, it wouldn’t get produced.
If you think that minor disagreement “doesn’t inspire confidence in that internal conversation”, you obviously seem to expect people to agree with you or shut up. It’s not going to happen.
Well, what kind of acting would satisfy you here? It’s easy to complain that other people aren’t doing enough, but you’re really not being very specific about what you’d like to see instead.
Also, the “outside of Academia” disclaimer strikes me as odd — given that the whole point of “Academia” is study and research, why is it particularly bad if cultural study tends to be focused there? Is it a problem that discussion on these issues isn’t lead by people with day jobs? If so, why?
I certainly won’t ever accuse Alex of failing to state his positions emphatically enough or failing to differentiate between shades of grey, but I do think this is an unfair characterization.
Discussions of games too often go off into an almost-rehearsed outcry of gamers circling the wagons and preparing to defend GTA or Crackdown or whatever the current game is from the evil forces of Dr. Phil, Jack Thompson, the PTA, and so forth. The end result is that anybody who disagrees with the “it’s all just harmless self-expression” party line tends to, by implication or directly, get painted as being in league with the evil censors.
This is both untrue and unfair, and I think Alex is right to call it out.
You may not have meant to do that, but framing the discussion as “the issue here is still the issue of freedom of speech” and adopting a free-speech-is-under-attack-and-will-be-destroyed posture is sloppy rhetoric at best given the actual piece you were responding to.
Robert,
I don’t have a problem with your statements after the initial one — I might not agree with them all (for example, I think you think I am saying the government should step into your house and take away the kid because you read de Sade; I’m not — I’m saying your neighbors and friends and certainly the people you go to church with should, if they know about it, let you know this is pretty awful, and maybe not let their kids play with yours — and you may not like that either). But I don’t think _you_ are dragging the conversation down, or whatever. We’re all sort of piling on peterb’s “side” here — but this is a somewhat insular little spot on the web map. As Nat said, my chief complaint is that “the issue here is still the issue of freedom of speech” is not a very useful or reasonable thing to inject into the discussion, because peterb is clearly not Dr. Phil (uncanny resemblance, but it’s just a coincidence, I’ve seen them in the same room).
Moreover, the automatic “I know it’s unpopular lately” bit added was just — boilerplate, I think. I mean, in the larger world it may be unpopular, but I think it’s an almost unquestioned sentiment among the gaming crowd and people reading Tea Leaves, with the obvious fire/theater/death threat exceptions.
On your larger point, I think you may be right about America, but also think those differences probably have both good and ill effects — and were in place long before society frowned vaguely but did little to actually stigmatize playing repulsive games. Of course, I’m pretty sure the US encourages violence less than quite a few countries we can think of — we just don’t go to those places much, ’cause you tend to get shot or blown up maybe if you go there. And hey, our violent crime rate (not murder, alas) is now considerably below stuffy old England, last I checked (has been a while). So it isn’t that simple, is it?
is sloppy rhetoric at best given the actual piece you were responding to.
Granted. As I said, I was responding to more than just this one article, and I failed to make that clear.
Is it a problem that discussion on these issues isn’t lead by people with day jobs? If so, why?
It’s a problem because it shows a complete lack of introspection, on behalf of a fairly large culture. Instead, people with a day job are busy discussing what the MSM feeds them. (Games, today. Drugs, tomorrow. Anna Nicole Smith’s resurrection after that, probably
but you’re really not being very specific about what you’d like to see instead.
‘Acting’ might have been the wrong choice of word. Given the large focus on violence, I’d expect people to ask questions. “Why are we such a violent society? Or, if we aren’t, why is the media creating that image?”
get painted as being in league with the evil censors.
I never did that. I only said that you should remember that there is such a thing as free speech. It gets easily forgotten in the outrage about “morally wrong” and “vile” things. So, to make it perfectly clear: I don’t think this article advocates censorship. I urge you to keep in mind that many people are pushing for censorship, though. Better?
but I do think this is an unfair characterization.
It is? I’m pretty much on the same side, with a minor disagreement. If that doesn’t inspire confidence in the internal conversation, only complete agreement can. Maybe I’m seeing this wrong, but that’s the way it reads to me.
Alex: Of course it’s not simple. If it were, we wouldn’t be debating
I would hope that my reply to Nat cleared up _why_ I dragged free speech into the debate. Yes, it is about framing. We either choose how to frame a discussion, or it gets framed for us. If we don’t have free speech in the discussion at every step, sooner or later there will be censorship. Remember the “self-censoring” of the comic book industry?
Also, I’m sure there are both good and bad effects from those differences. I’m just curious _why_ there are those differences – it would go a long way towards understanding violence in general, I think. (The same would go for understanding why Britains murder rate rises in the face of tough gun laws)
I guess I come back to the same issue – we fail to ask for the reasons. We look at symptoms. That’s where I think peterb’s piece goes wrong. Critizing a vile game is all good, but it’s not going to address the issue – not really. It does, however, open the door to outsiders saying: “Hey, even gamers think this is vile – let’s ban it”.
But “goes wrong” is an odd thing to say — peterb can’t say “this is bad?” without going into a root understanding of unknown aspects of socety, or including a kneejerk “but don’t censor it!” Why NOT?
I mean, there’s something wrong with a community so upset about banning it freaks out as if it’s the ONLY point to really concern yourself with — I don’t advocate cops arresting people for being jerks to their spouses. But if I hear a friend being a total creep to his wife, I might let him know I thought that was, you know, “morally wrong” or “vile.”
The movie viewing community doesn’t seem to respond as much this way when Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert makes the moral/political depravity of a film a central issue in a review. Perhaps this is why movies get respect as _art_ and games don’t — because it must be true, in some sense, given our reactions.
First off, I don’t think that a critical piece has any obligation to do anything other than adequately cover the subject of its critique. That there are larger social issues outside the purview of any given critique is not only acceptable, it is inevitable.
Second, I categorically reject the idea that because the video game industry feels threatened by some of the reactions to their games, critics should ignore (or worse, laud) games that are morally or ethically repugnant.
The larger context of my Crackdown review is that I believe that it may in fact be singular. In all of the reviews of the game that I’ve read – and believe me, I’ve read many – I haven’t seen a single word discussing the game’s very explicit theme of immigrant-killing cop.
Not. One. Goddamn. Word.
So if you think that my review has “gone wrong” by addressing this issue head on, and that instead I should have printed yet another indistinguishable page talking about the jumping game mechanics, or how the graphics are rendered, or something, then I think there may be an unbridgable gap between us as to what we each think the role of the critic in discussing a text is. I think that game reviewers generally have dropped the ball vis-a-vis Crackdown and to argue that it’s a problem for me to point out that the game is, from a political standpoint, completely poisonous is misguided.
Note: the below is not meant to be Robert, but is why I think this way of talking about these things ENCOURAGES censorship.
REVIEWER: “It is corrupt and evil to have made a game called ‘CONCENTRATION CAMP ESCAPEE HUNT’, and people who play Nazis shooting down boss monster Elie Wiesel are really awful rotten terrible people”
GAMING COMMUNITY: “This is a first amendment issue; if you condemn CCEH (which had a GREAT ENGINE), you are a fascist pig, and open the doors to censors. How dare you judge people? Free speech is at the heart of our country and you should not use it to call a game immoral.”
NORMAL PEOPLE: “Ok, that’s it. We’re not letting you ‘gamers’ have scissors anymore, because you’re clearly dangerous weirdos. I don’t know much about your ‘people’ but Dr. Phil tells me this Mario thing may lead to children playing doctor. Just get it all out of my face.”
Why NOT?
Because, when you choose to paint an entire profession with broad strokes,(“Gaming’s Stillborn Conscience”) you better provide insights into the underlying issues – not just one example. Otherwise it’s simply inflammatory and not to the point. I’d have never brought up these points if the article wasn’t headlined this way.
And the movie industry doesn’t freak out because Ebert & Kael usually don’t accuse the entire industry of having no conscience, just because one crappy movie gets produced. (That, and they’re smart enough at lobbying that they’re not as much under pressure as games.)
I don’t think Peter is accusing the industry of having no conscience for producing Crackdown, but rather for the way games like Crackdown are treated in general — it’s very unusual to talk about moral issues in games at all, and attempts to do so appear to result in an odd mixture of surprise and disgust. There’s the “if you mention this, you open us up to censoring response” that’s being discussed here, along with the “this doesn’t belong in a review” stuff that showed up in the PTD post, and so forth.
The title may be hyperbolic, but I definitely agree with Peter that something’s definitely wrong when it’s not legitimate to discuss these issues — as he mentioned, this is basically the onlyCrackdown review that even mentions the icky moral theme of the game.
It may not be entirely fair to condemn the whole industry for that, but it’s more than a little creepy for people to claim that discussing that theme at all is inappropriate.
If you want to take the post title as a direct personal assault against yourself, nobody can stop you, but I do think you’re overreacting to it more than a little.
I don’t think that a critical piece has any obligation to do anything other than adequately cover the subject of its critique.
Yup. Which is “Gaming’s Stillborn Conscience”. I’m sorry, maybe less inflammatory produces a better debate?
Second, I categorically reject the idea that because the video game industry feels threatened by some of the reactions to their games, critics should ignore (or worse, laud) games that are morally or ethically repugnant.
I don’t believe that has been said _anywhere_ in the comments.
I haven’t seen a single word discussing the game’s very explicit theme of immigrant-killing cop.
Not. One. Goddamn. Word.
Yes. When you have TV series like “The Shield” glorified as “great TV”, are you _really_ surprised?
So if you think that my review has “gone wrong†by addressing this issue head on
I think it’s great you adressed the issue. I object to being grouped with the people who wrote Crackdown. This is not the conscience of an entire industry. This is not even a large part of the industry. There are a few high-profile pre-adolescent fantasies, and I’m sick and tired of hearing that that represents the industry at large.
I don’t take it as a personal insult – I take it as sloppy title writing. And, again, I’m glad peterb adressed the issue in the game. I was NOT advocating he does a run-of-the-mill review. Nobody claims it’s inappropriate.
(Why does everybody keep bringing up the “great engine” argument, by the way? I’ve never discussed the technical merits of the game)
And again, if you criticize the entire industry, it *is* additional fodder for the pro-censorship camp. Which is why I asked to keep that in mind. Don’t attack an entire group if you just meant to attack a few.
I had similar feelings when playing Crackdown, but my main real moral ambivalence was due to the complete lack of story in the game. A paragraph of text in a dossier doesn’t really convey WHY I’m going after all these “crime bosses”. I never actually saw crimes other than people shooting at me or other Agents. At least in a GTA game, all the other characters are actually CHARACTERS, with motives and personalities.
I never felt like a policeman in Crackdown. I was just a mass-murderer with a “Get out of jail free” pass. And frankly it got pretty boring after the first few boss fights.
A game that took a similar topic and did it properly was Mercenaries. The criminals were actually distinct criminals, but more importantly you were rewarded for NOT slaughtering them. Trying to capture them alive and bring them to justice not only made the game morally better, but made it much more fun. I wish Crackdown had an option like that, or some other strategy besides “Jump to the red arrow as quickly as possible and kick to death.”
With the complete dearth of story, I don’t think that making all the enemies in Crackdown white Americans would have helped at all.
There are a few high-profile pre-adolescent fantasies, and I’m sick and tired of hearing that that represents the industry at large.
While it’s true that out of the total number of games created and sold, relatively few can be characterized as vile amoral adolescent fever-dreams, it has also been my observation that it is exacly those few that are constantly put up as the cream of the industry:
- GTA
- Gears of War
- God of War
- Devil May Cry
Games with tamer material, especially if made by Nintendo and not called Zelda are almost universally greeted in a way that is less enthusiastic.
I am as guilty as anyone for occasionally indulging in this sort of entertainment. I’m sure I’m worse about this than Mr. Blum. Still, I don’t think it’s completely unfair to paint the industry as a whole with an adolescent brush. Especially when they take themselves oh-so-seriously sometimes.
I think it’s time for some Paper Mario.
I doubt you’re worse than me – I try to stay current on most of the “top” games.
But let me bring up just a few great games that come to mind that are NOT mindless violence
* Guitar Hero
* Brain Age
* Wii Sports
* Katamari Damacy
You instead want attempts at storytelling? Sure: Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, KOTOR, Fable (to a lesser extent)
So it seems to me we’re perfectly capable of more or less mindful entertainment.
Oh, and don’t call me Mr. Blum – I’ll be looking for my Dad
Peterb, once again you have nudged the definition of “game review” closer to its ideal form. First, you had the good sense not to overlook annoyances like copy protection. Now you have decided not to overlook annoyances like having to play a role many players are likely to find offensive.
You get it: Games are all about *fun*. Annoyances get in the way of fun, and therefore annoyances of all stripes — technical and psychological included — are legitimate targets in game reviews. As long as game companies keep stuffing annoyances into the box, reviewers ought to keep calling them on it.
It’s too bad the gaming sites haven’t figured it out yet.
I guess that’s why I read your blog and ignore the gaming sites.
Cheers,
Tom
First, I gotta say, I admire this review for it’s earnestness. You got slagged for taking a moral stance on a game (when what people usually expect from a review is a distillation of the game’s technical and game play features), but frankly, there’s a hundred and one websites to get that from.
What I am a bit less clear on, and this is important to me, why does it matter that they were minorities? Would the game be any worse if they had been an ethnically diverse crowd of thugs that you viciously murder with rocket launchers? I would not argue that the game was violent, but having put a fair bit of time into the game, the question I’m asking myself isn’t ‘why am I playing a game that encourages me to murder immigrants’. It’s ‘Why am I enjoying a game that is literally nothing BUT mass murder’.
The fact is, reviewing my own behavior? I’m not concerned about the fact that the Volks are clearly slavic. In fact, I was surprised by the Shai-Gen faction, because they were NOT stereotypical Asian villains. In fact, with the exception of a few bosses, they weren’t Asian at all. The majority of the security guards I kept killing had a Texan accent, I think I may have even offed a few Brit’s in there somewhere.
What concerns me is my own complete disregard for any of the computer controlled organisms in the game world. Frankly, in crackdown, you play a rampaging psychotic who has absolutely no reason to avoid collateral damage. That’s the soulless part to me, that where GTA is a sandbox game where you get immersed in the criminal underlife, Crackdown is a sandbox game where literally everything in the world is either someone you can kill but shouldn’t, someone you can kill and should, or something you can use to kill people with.
So I’m not arguing with your take that the game is pretty twisted, I’m curious why you chose to focus on the fact that you are mass murdering racial stereotypes (as opposed to the fact that you are committing mass murder in the first place).
It’s strange…I read the PTD review first and most of the comments* were along the lines of “You suck! Why do you suck so much?”, which seems to be the general response whenever someone implies that games and gamers aren’t always 100% in the right. Then I come here and people are being all, y’know, smart and stuff. Brings a tear to the eye.
Aaaanyway. Very good article. Regardless of anyone’s stance on the particular issues in this or any other game, you absolutely hit the nail on the head when you said “the politics of games are not only a legitimate subject of criticism, but are in fact something critics should feel obligated to address.” I mean, I stood up and cheered when I read that.** Most game criticism, professional and especially amateur, is painfully knuckleheaded.
Eight thumbs up.
*that I bothered to read
**figuratively speaking