Are there really any issues games shouldn’t touch?
Lewis Denby July 25, 2012 - 1:00 pmOut of bounds
Some of these – such as sex – have been discussed before. Sex in games is mainly problematic because it looks ridiculous. Because of the massive cultural taboo surrounding sex, you can use it in a couple of ways: either to shock, or to stress just how serious an on-screen relationship is. Sex grabs your attention. But when it grabs your attention with shiny polygonal hands and weird, uncanny-valley faces, it doesn’t quite have the same effect.
FIVE GAMES THAT DIDN’T SHY AWAY…
3. To the Moon
WHAT IT TACKLED: Both terminal illness and mental health – and the ways in which people deal with those issues.
WHAT HAPPENED: To the Moon was almost universally acclaimed for its mature and poignant storytelling – although this indie game’s big themes were discussed less than whether or not the game made people cry.
Other topics covered in the article, though, are more worrying. For example, the author asserts that games should not try to approach their themes from a feminist perspective – and doesn’t really seem to be able to come up with a compelling reason why not:
“Now don’t get me wrong, you ladies are great. I’m all for empowerment and equal wages and the such. Just don’t expect me to understand or care about feminism as a movement. I’ll be honest, I don’t care. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
It strikes me as a startling example of buck-passing – and no, I don’t think it’s okay if you thinly veil it in humour. And I still don’t think it’s okay when you go on to explain yourself a bit more carefully, and say games should steer clear of feminism until there are more women in the industry because they understand it better. Because that’s just odd, and basically amounts to a lack of effort in trying to understand it, and to make games a better place.
FIVE GAMES THAT DIDN’T SHY AWAY…
4. Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
WHAT IT TACKLED: The Columbine High School shooting of 1999.
WHAT HAPPENED: A lot of people were upset, claiming that the game glorified the atrocities committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, even though the developer insisted the game was meant to make people think.
We all know that women and games is a thorny issue. There is no denying that sexism is rife within our culture. It’s getting better, certainly, but we’re a long way away from our goals at the moment. And it’s precisely because of this issue that we should be standing up and making statements. Why would we wait and hope the problem gets better on its own before we even dare to mention it? It’s times like this when it’s best to take a stand.
No point in avoidance
Feminism has everything to do with you if you live within our culture – and especially within gaming culture. If you are a gamer, you are associating with a field that has a negative reputation when it comes to gender equality. Whatever your own personal views, this is unavoidable. Saying “oh, whatever, it’s not my area of expertise” just doesn’t cut it.
This is precisely why games shouldn’t be afraid of these sorts of issues: because as long as they are, they’re just playing into the very problems they have the opportunity to tackle.
FIVE GAMES THAT DIDN’T SHY AWAY…
5. Papo & Yo
WHAT IT TACKLES: The life of a child with an alcoholic parent.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN? This adventure game releases for PS3 and PS Vita next month – it’ll be interesting to see how people respond…
I’m not saying all games should come armed with a feminist agenda or a pacifist message or whatever. I’m not saying games should start including rape scenes just to highlight the severity of the crime, or that we should start making actual murder sims so we can consider the weight of the killings we’ve been carrying out since the dawn of the action genre. There will always be space for light entertainment, just as there is in any medium.
But to say games shouldn’t be considering any of these issues? It’s an oddly common viewpoint, but I just can’t understand it. Clearly, games are powerful things, and there are a lot of taboos on Earth that need to be questioned. Let’s use games to do that. I think it’d spawn some exciting, thought-provoking results.
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Comments (7)
Completely agree. There are plenty of touchy issues which absolutely should be addressed by art, and I see no reason why gaming should be excluded from that.
As someone who played part of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! it always annoyed me when people said it was glorifying the events that happened at Columbine High School. The fact that when your character dies in the game they end up in hell, was always ignored. Plus the tone of language used in the game is pretty sarcastic – it was obvious how disgusted the game’s creators were of the two young men that committed the original, devastating act plus the media’s reaction to them.
The thing is that there’s still this idea in the minds of people who don’t play games that games are intended to be played only by young children. Besides, getting people to confront these issues ‘first-hand’ makes the impact seemingly more intense.
The “argument” of rape being worse than murder is rather perverse. If you seriously believe that a rapist murdering his victim afterwards would be some kind of a mercy, you are a sick individual.
As a female gamer, I agree completely with everything that was said, including the feminism bit. There is such thing as ‘too little’ and ‘too much’, and that applies to feminism too.
I also love books and I love art, and I don’t see why games can’t be used to address touchy subjects like the ones mentioned above, too. Maybe it’s because instead of reading about someone committing the act of rape, YOU instead are the one doing it, and I guess that does make a difference. You can either learn from the experience, as the makers of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! intended, or you can take it from a different perspective and think it’s encouraging you to do all those things. In my opinion, it all comes down to who you are and how you think.
I thought this was a very good article, I think it can be very persuasive to someone who is touchy about these things
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Well, the main difference is that killing be it people or animals may serve a positive purpose, accepted by society, in case of animals, for food, clothing and materials, in case of people mainly to protect or to punish.
So, as such whether the act of killing is good or bad depends on the motive, so we can lie to ourselves and get ourselves to think that the act itself is just or necessary.
Even in Mortal Kombat: You kill the other guy because unless you kill him, he kills you. So, if you want to survive, you better rip out that spinal column to make sure he doesn’t get back up again… You get my point.
Rape on the other hand (in Western societies that is) can never serve a positive purpose. You don’t save person A by raping person B, rape is not an accepted form of punishment and you don’t put somebody out of their misery by raping them.It is always a selfish act at the expense of another person. Even torture as horrible as it is, can be argued to serve a positive purpose in certain cases.
So, I think it is not that hard to graps, why society has a much larger problem with rape than murder.
However, this does not explain, why in the US showing an exposed boob is widely considered worse than a headshot with brains splattering. That to me is sexual repression. They rape thing I get completely