Ban This Game

By Shamus Posted Monday Jan 19, 2009

Filed under: Video Games 162 comments

Let us gently open this topic for discussion, and see if we can keep it from blowing up into a flamewar.

I’ve always been in favor of lots of freedom when it comes to producing media: TV, Movies, Computer games, Music, etc. As long as people can choose not to experience it, and as long as you didn’t hurt anyone in the process, you can be as offensive as you like as the worst I’ll do is complain about it because the controls sucked and the save points were too far apart. (Or whatever.) I realize this sounds like the beginnings of a political rant, which says more about the sad state of politics than anything else. So to head that off – let’s just keep this in the realm of personal opinion and no use this discussion as a launching point for or against a political group.

Sometimes I’ll articulate this and someone will throw me a “me too!” for my troubles. Now, as much as I like having people agree with me, I’m always curious if this person really agrees with me, or if they just don’t like the idea of censorship.

In which case it’s time for a blend of the hypothetical and rhetorical:

  1. So, you would be okay with someone selling a game where you would have to torture a mass murderer – in gruesome realistic detail – to find out where the (say) bombs are planted? Like, the better you are at torturing this guy, the better you win the game.
  2. Same gameplay, but now you’re torturing an enemy soldier to save the life of your squad.
  3. What about an enemy civilian instead of a soldier?
  4. What about just torturing a guy for revenge or money?
  5. What about a woman?
  6. What about a kid? For no good reason?

At some point on this continuum, nearly everyone stops and says they would be in favor of banning a videogame. Maybe a videogame like this will turn a normal person into a monster. Maybe it will act as a scratching post and keep a monster from doing something destructive. Maybe the real monster is the guy who makes the game in the first place. I don’t know. It’s a difficult thing to study and even when you do, the data is easily dismissed if it doesn’t say what people expect.

What I find interesting is that my examples above are now slightly less hypothetical. A while back someone made a “game” – a plotless, context-free interactive program where you torture an emotionless avatar. There’s no score, no goal, no point to the thing. You just rip the thing apart (it bleeds) and skewer it until you decide to go do something else instead.

Now, I wouldn’t lobby to ban this game. I wouldn’t play it, either. I certainly wouldn’t buy it. I’d be less worried about the person who plays it (most likely motivated by morbid curiosity) than the person who makes this sort of thing. I’ve said before that I think games are a form of artistic expression, and I would wonder about the person who wrote all that code and arranged these art assets in a desire to provide a sandbox where you can torture a lifeless doll.

Hostel was an “edgy” movie, but if it were a videogame then concerned parents would have erected trebuchets in the Wal-Mart parking lot and reduced the place to burning cinders before they allowed them to sell such a thing.

Movies are given more license videogames. (Compare the outcry of “three seconds of bare ass” Mass Effect to the non-outcry from (say) Eyes Wide Shut.) Part of this is due to the relative newness of videogames. Part of this comes from the more engaging and interactive nature of the medium. I do wonder what things will look like in ten years. Perhaps the censorship problems in Australia will spread to other western nations and become even more entrenched. Or perhaps as gamers take up seats in government those laws will fade into obscurity and become quaint amusements, like those laws about horse-drawn buggies that are still on the books but nobody knows or cares about.

Topic for discussion: What one game or gaming moment Went Too Far for you? Not that you necessarily would ban it, but that you were offended or insulted.

 


From The Archives:
 

162 thoughts on “Ban This Game

  1. Shamus says:

    To answer my own question: The child-killing in Prey offended and sickened me, although the same in the original Fallout did not. Of course, in Prey it was mandatory in order to proceed through the game (it will not let you out of the room until you kill the ghost children) and in Fallout it was just something that was possible to do.

    In Prey it felt like a teenager was trying to be “edgy”. In Fallout it felt like a valid component of the world they were offering.

  2. TehShrike says:

    I’ve been all about the libertarian movement lately, and I really don’t think the civil government should be involved in many parts of our lives, including video games.

    That statement stands no matter how “bad for society” some people may think something is.

  3. maehara says:

    I think movies also get additional leeway as they can influence the viewer’s response (or at least try to). Do a torture scene, show the character responsible dealing with some sort of emotional fallout from that. You can’t really do that in a game – if I torture an in-game character, for whatever reason, the developers can’t ensure that I’m going to respond to the experience in a controllable way. They may want me to feel uncomfortable about what I / my in-game persona are doing, but I may not care, I may enjoy the experience – who knows. The devs certainly don’t.

    That ability to offer “moral guidance” is what sets movies / TV and games apart. Now, whether we should be being spoonfed such moral guidance, or whether anyone pays a blind bit no notice when it’s served up, is another argument entirely…

  4. wererogue says:

    I don’t believe in banning content unless the process by which the content is created is illegal. So yes, I’d be happy for somebody to sell a torture simulator – but not for them to make a torture simulator which included footage of actual torture. Either way, I wouldn’t buy it.

  5. MintSkittle says:

    I’d also say Prey went too far with the child killing, but I bailed on it earlier than that. For me, it was when the one child exploded into ghost form, then skewered the other child on a spike. I dropped the game right there, and haven’t looked back.

    EDIT: On your numbered list, I’d be okay with 1 through 4, but I’d part ways with you at 5.

  6. Robyrt says:

    God of War has some sequences which for me are over the line. After the first boss Kratos rushes through a room, cutting one zombie in half vertically, which always made me sort of sick. In the sequel, you are required to quick-time event your way through a sequence in which you brutally dispatch of Theseus by catching his head in a doorframe ten times. The first time I did it, it was horrifying and I felt sorry for the guy.

    …But I do admit some satisfaction when doing it on the ludicrously difficult Titan Mode, after spending upwards of two hours getting Theseus to stop shooting unblockable magic arrows at me.

  7. Factoid says:

    Prey didn’t actually bother me at all. I can’t say any video game really has. Not that I don’t get emotionally involved in a video game…I do…just not that much. I don’t cry at movies either.

    The one game I can think of where I actually had a moment of pause before doing some horrific and unspeakable act was Bioshock. Choosing between saving and harming those Little Sisters was actually pretty agonizing and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As it turns out one of my few criticisms of that game is that you don’t get penalized enough for NOT harming the little sisters. They could have made that choice a LOT harder.

    Mostly, though, I don’t really have trouble doing pretty much any horrible thing in a video game. They’re not real too me and it’s all pretty dispassionate, except when you’re working with a well developed character.

    Mutilating random NPCs isn’t a big deal…but if I had to put a bullet in Alyx Vance it would be another story.

  8. Krellen says:

    I don’t think I’ve ever been offended by a game; frustrated, yes. Offended, no. (Well, unless you count being offended by Bethesda’s spurious claim that they have made a Fallout game, but I don’t think that does count.)

    But I wouldn’t ban any of the items on the list, either, so that may have something to do with it.

    For what it’s worth, I think the reason video games get ire that movies do not is because video games are still viewed by large parts of the population as “children’s toys”, which hold different standards than other forms of entertainment.

    As more and more members of Generation X (and moreso with Generation “Wired”) grow into positions of authority, culturally and politically, we’ll see that change. Video games will become just another medium of entertainment, like movies, and thus people will see that there are “children’s games” and “adult games”, just like there are with movies.

  9. acronix says:

    I ussually avoid games that look like they have something that could offend me, so I don´t have a list.
    But I must say that I felt offended on Fallout 2, in the “cutscene” where the super mutant in power armor whose-name-scapes-my-memory killed a family of three, including a kid. It was an unavoidable cutscene, so it wasn´t something I could skip.
    It didn´t stop me from playing the game 9 times more tough, probably because of the clumsy graphics and the lack of detail. I´m quite sure that if something similar would been put in any FPS or RPG nowadays I would stop playing that game immediately and burn the DVD after shattering it into a thousand pieces.

  10. Eric says:

    When it comes to games, I treat them the same as movies, television, and other forms of media. A while back a indie programmer made a Columbine massacre shooter(a game in extremely poor taste)which he entered into a independent game developer competition that was sponsored by Berkely, or some other big collegiate school. Now the game actually advanced to the finals, then the judges were pressured by some of the other sponsors to remove the game from the finalists nominations. Now the school in question pulled their sponsorship, because they thought the credibility of the competition was definitely in question. Now I would never play this game, buy it, or boycott it. If a big time developer wanted to put it out there for people to buy, I wouldn’t object. As I said before, I believe people should have the right to choose for themselves if they want to buy this game or not. Although I wouldn’t be opposed to punching the guy in the face for this.

  11. Cybron says:

    I simply don’t buy games that I think would offend me. Vote with your purchases.

  12. WanderingGrapefruit says:

    I only just started playing games that weren’t Nintendoid of nature. Needless to say, I haven’t been offended by any games. Pretty likely I would be by some, though. Blood and gore isn’t really for me.

  13. Didacsoy says:

    Well, I’ve never encountered a game that offended me. Also, I’m with Shamus in this: as long as content has been created legally, I don’t see the harm in selling it freely. If I think I’m not going to like it, I just won’t buy it.

    What does offend me is people willing to sell inappropriate stuff to minors. I get enraged everytime I see a 14-year old with a cigarrete or a drunken 16-year old (happens a lot here in Spain). Same for videogames or books or movies… whatever. As long as it is marked 18+ (M in the USA, I think) it can contain anything, I don’t mind… provided selling regulations are enforced, of course!

  14. BarGamer says:

    1 thru 4, and then I’d look at spoiler FAQs to see if you could possibly avoid 5 and 6. If not, that game gets dropped.

  15. chuko says:

    I wouldn’t set any limits on content, of course. Do most people really stop you at some point on that list and say it should be banned? I know you don’t want this to get political, but that’s kind of disturbing; after all, freedom of speech (and that is what we’re talking about here after all) is an American value.

  16. Telas says:

    I like the way you’re evoking (provoking?) some thought on this one.

    There are certainly social taboos which are represented in our media – violence against children (especially infants) being one of many.

    At what point does the government have the right to enforce those taboos? I personally tend to think that the government shouldn’t be involved at all, except at the local level. If a community didn’t want (say) Robert Mapplethorpe‘s work portrayed in a public venue, then that community, working through their local government, has that right. This does not prevent other communities from showing the work.

    And if a piece of alleged art is so offensive that no community will agree to house it, then it seems that society as a whole has spoken.

    On your list, I don’t have a problem with most of them. #6 is where I draw the line, but let’s make sure we define “kid” correctly: 17 year old murderers are not kids.

  17. Xpovos says:

    I think the question probably needs to be broken down further.

    You are absolutely right that most of those scenarios raise completely valid questions about the mental stability of not just those who play through the scenes (and enjoy them?) but more of those who design and write them. But I can’t get behind the idea that it’s so repugnant that we need to ban it.

    I can think of no reason to rationally justify making a video game where the point, or a major portion involves torturing a child. But just because I can think of no redeeming value for it doesn’t mean I think it should be banned. I also can’t think of any redeeming value for pornography and polka. And one of those things is actually demonstrably harmful to real people, the video game is not.

    Would I buy and play these games? Possibly up to 5. I’m less upset by violence against women than I probably should be because I can think of plenty of plot reasons why it would be reasonable. So it all comes down to the rationale presented in game. Lastly, this is all contingent on the fact that there’s full knowledge prior to purchase.

  18. Snook says:

    I never played it, but a while back on somethingawful, I saw a “review” of one of the most offending games I’ve ever seen. It was a japanese hentai (anime porn for the uninitiated) game in which the player abducts and then rapes 3 women (a mother and her 2 teenage daughters, probably aged 12 and 16 by all guesses.) The reason the characters avatar has for doing this is because the 16 year old turned him in to the police for groping her on a train. So you’re a criminal of the highest degree in this game.

    Still, even this wasn’t enough for me to want censorship. As Voltaire once said, “I may not agree with your opinions, sir, but I would lay my life down to protect your right to express them.”

  19. Alan De Smet says:

    Part of why older adults are keen to restrict video games is probably part of why you still get insane legal cases against comic book store owners, and why many adults can’t take animation for adults (that is, mature subjects, not porn) seriously: because a significant number of older adults still view comics, animation, and video games as something only children read, watch, and play. Of course at least in video games we know that 62% of players are adults, and the average age is 30, so the claim is utter nonsense. But too many older adults are fixed in their ways and won’t see the new reality. So change will be slow, but inevitable.

    This is, of course, hardly new. We had similar scares about the rock and the roll music, and the rap with it’s hipping and hopping. We got over it. I’m betting people were running around trying to ban the pictures that move, but I don’t know.

  20. Kevin says:

    I should possibly qualify this by saying up front that I play far fewer games than most here, (I’d imagine) but I’ve never really had that feeling. “Omigod that was dumb,” or “That looks terrible, who designs this?” or “Who programmed that stupid, stinking, piece of s#!t!” have all been opinions I’ve had at one point or another, but I’ve never felt offended by anything “over the top” in the way you describe.

    As far as the litmus test of tolerance I don’t think any of those things would bother me in a videogame. It doesn’t sound like a FUN game, or anything I’d be interested in playing, but every programmer/game designer should have the right to fail on their own by making whatever stupid waste of time they want.

    I guess you can put me in the “against censorship generally” camp.

    (Oh, I’d also guess that folks pay more attention to videogames because they are seen as being marketed primarily to children.)

  21. Zwebbie says:

    For me, they’re all pretty offensive, because they’re skill-based.

    The problem with making it a skill-based game element is that it’s *fun*. It’s a game in itself and could work without the context of torturing.
    When it’s something you just have to sit or click through, it’s a tradgedy, which makes it much more acceptable, in my opinion. It’s a necessary evil, both in the game’s context and in the player’s. I’d actually like to see something as complicated as this tried out, since I’m sick and tired of heroic heroes who don’t have to make any difficult choices or sacrifice something. Or, as Max Payne’s Vlad said it: “Hypothetically, if the only choice you’ve got is to do the wrong thing, then it’s not really the wrong thing, is it? It’s more like fate.”

    I can only think of one game that twisted my stomach in such a way, and it’s, oddly enough, Empire Earth. There’s a mission in the German campaign where you have to build up your army and invade Poland, which is a tech level behind and really isn’t even close to a challenge. After that, you have to fight France, which has a huge army, so that part of the mission isn’t as offensive because it’s actually fun. The part where you invade Poland isn’t, but, even if probably not specifically designed this way, a good ‘experience’.

  22. nilus says:

    I believe the cost of having a free society, with freedom of speech is that you have to allow people to say and make things that would offend or even sicken you. I think the whole “Torture Porn” Horror movie industry is a disgusting waste of time but I would fight to make sure it was never banned. Just like I would never play and would encourage people to not play a game called “Baby killer”, I would never call it to be banned because thats not what this country is about. People have the freedom to make games like that, just like you have the freedom to never play it and to tell everyone in ear shot that they are a sociopathic dicks if they play it.

  23. Apathy Curve says:

    The entire GTA series (and its imitators) went too far for me. I find the idea of playing a thug reprehensible. But ban them? No, absolutely not. It’s the parent’s responsibility to police their child’s entertainment, not the state’s responsibility.

    Adults can choose to play what they wish. If they’re a criminal inside, then a game — even a GTA or rap-based piece of flotsam like that 50-cent crap — isn’t going to change it one way or another. A thug is a thug is a thug, and a certain percentage of people are just bad seed. The best thing for society and the race as a whole is to either lock them up or kill them. Banning video games isn’t going to change that equation; it’s treating a cancer patient for a hangnail.

    Now requiring a license to breed… that holds possibilities.

  24. Nalano says:

    I’ve found a number of games tasteless on the grounds of juvenile humor or such, and offensive on the grounds of racism, but never offensive because of violence.

    Trying to be ‘edgy’ falls squarely in the tasteless category. Practically every other instance of violence seems to be jealousy guarded in the Rule of Cool mantra.

    The only instance I could see a game being banned is if it was explicitly racist or sexist. Hell, I think the preceding comment said in earnest, “a certain percentage of people are just bad seed” is far more offensive than anything I experienced in the GTA series.

  25. Primogenitor says:

    As seems to be the concensuss here, Im in the “censorship is bad; dont like it, dont buy it” camp.

    However, I would go so far deliberately not buying overly self-censored games. Most recently this would be Little Big Planet.

    So I guess I am more offended by excessive self-censorship than most things that are censored. I’m don’t know if thats good or not…

  26. Magnus says:

    My only problem with things like “Hostel” is that they are badly made…

    I also wouldn’t censor any of the above, just slap an 18+ sticker on it and prosecute anyone who sold it to kids.

    In the fallout instance, it is interesting that for Fallout 3 they included kids (but invincible so I’m told) despite having no kids in Oblivion. There was a consequence for killing a child in Fallout 1/2, and it was in no way needed by any quest or plotline.

    It almost seems like we are adult enough to see all the violence in the world, (heads blown off etc.) but cannot see or do (in a virtual world no less) anything that breaks specific taboo subjects (sex etc.) in otherwise “adult” games.

  27. Inscrutibob says:

    They can make anything they want.
    I can buy what I want.
    Seems pretty simple.
    And if there are no torture movies like Hostel & Saw, and no wanton death and destruction games, kids (and adults) will still play cops & robbers and paintball, or torture the neighbor’s cat, so I don’t see an excuse there for more censorship.

  28. Bryan says:

    For me, the gore factor is a huge consideration. Any of the listed examples would be enough to turn me off. It does not matter to me what the moral implications are; I don’t play games like that because I know I can’t stomach them. On the other hand, I have never tried to ban a game with gory content for any reason. I figure that there are people who don’t mind that kind of content, and if no one wants to see it then the game will not last. Karmic justice, so to speak.

    An example of this philosophy is when I saw my niece (17) playing a game (never asked about the title) where she was a vampire fighting Nazis. There was so much blood and flying body parts in the few seconds I watched that I had to excuse myself. However, I did not tell her she had to quit playing because it’s gross. I figure that if her parents are OK with it then I have no business trying to sway her. I just didn’t watch any more.

  29. Nevermind says:

    I’m an extremist in this case. Art should never be banned, and games are art. So you don’t ban a game, even if it is about torturing a kid for no good reason. Actually, turturing a kid for a “good” reason is worse, because it is reinforcement learning. But I’d still not ban this game.

    The only ban-worthy example I can think of is a game that really messes with a player’s mind. Like, one containing schizoprenia-indusing sounds or images… I don’t know if that’s technically possible, of course, but that’s about the only real reason to ban a game in my book.

  30. Ingvar says:

    For your hypothetical example, all I can say is that it starts off mis-guided (torture gives undependable to useless information, so to even contemplating torture means you’ve resigned yourself to bad intel) and slides straight into “very much not in good taste and I’d wonder about anyone wanting to PLAY that game”.

    Would I want a ban on it? I don’t know. I hope I wouldn’t.

  31. FireStomp says:

    I’m going to hop on the “no censorship, period” train. You don’t like it, you don’t see it, but you don’t need to banhammer it.

    As for disturbing bits in games? For me, it was the same as Shamus. Prey was messed up.

  32. Magnus says:

    @Nevermind: There was that case of the Pokemon show that caused a mass epileptic fit. Not a gaming response, but whatever you can do on TV you can surely do in a game.

  33. Thirith says:

    I would actually be quite comfortable with a game such as Concentration Camp Manager being banned. The game existed, although to my knowledge it was downloadable on BBSes rather than retail. Just as I would be comfortable with fundie idiots who picket the funeral of a homosexual killed for his sexual orientation having their freedom of speech curtailed. Or as I am comfortable with there being laws against racist hate speech in public in my country. Perhaps I’m naive in this, but I do think that our legal system has enough checks and balances and cases are looked at on an individual basis, so context – which is vital in determining meaning – is taken into consideration… or, in fact, it’s paramount in evaluating any given case.

    I know that this is an unpopular opinion, but I find that very often an absolute principle of freedom of speech gets in the way of interesting discussions about whether any- and everything *should* be said because it *can* be said. More often than not, anyone who says they don’t believe in absolute free speech is shouted down. Which is ironic, I guess… ;)

  34. Smileyfax says:

    The worst thing I ever saw in a game was in Oblivion, Molag Bal’s Daedric quest, where he asks you to provoke a good man into murder. I threw down the mace he gave me and walked away.

  35. Minion says:

    I’ve never stopped playing a video game because it went too far. I’m also kind of picky about what I am going to throw my $60 away on however so do not get exposed to so much. I’ve found, oddly, that in video games I am quite happy to go along killing people who annoy me or need to die for a quest. What I can’t do are the slavery quests. To each their own. In Fable 2 and Fallout 3 I’ve not done any of the enslavement quests. But whacking bandits, farmers, ghouls (F*ing zombies!) what have you? Bring em on.

    And, yea, kids invincible in both those games. Only good thing is that NPCs can’t kill em either so you can usually have someone to go to in order to get end of quest reward.

  36. scragar says:

    @FireStomp:
    I want to join you on the no censorship at all train, if I don’t want to see something I think I am smart enough to avoid it, and if not I like to think of myself as mature enough to not get seriously offended.

    I also want to push the idea of doing away with age recommendations, to argue my point on the later I have a true story, my nephew is 5, he has a playstation 2, when he first got it his mum asked me for any games I had that he could play, I threw all my old playstation one games in a bag and told her to take her pick. Anyway, I went around a couple of days later and she was playing Mortal Kombat 4 against him, he was having a lot of fun, anyway, I made the mistake of asking why she hadn’t turned gore off, long story short she banned him from the game because it was an 18. She had no problems letting him play it with gore on until it was mentioned that the game was an 18, when suddenly it became forbidden. Complete hypocrisy.

    @ Original question.
    The Punisher, most of that game revolved around torturing people to get them to talk.

  37. Zel says:

    I couldn’t agree more about the fact that censorship is bad, and parents should pay more attention to what their children are playing (or watching in the movies). I know it’s hard, but I think it’s best if each individual can review if something is suitable or not instead of having someone decide and enforce the decision for everyone.

    But to be able to do that, you have to give the parents their tools. You can’t ask them to know each and every game, so I’d like to see stronger acknowledgment and improvements of ESRB or similar ratings. Honestly, have anyone ever seen a shop owner inform the accompanying adult of a 12 years old kid of the content of the game (reading the ESRB tags is easy enough, but you have to know where to look) ? It’s even worse on websites where it’s usually only mentioned, and not explained at all.

    I’m usually uneasy about playing games including mindless acts of violence with no explanation, or making you kill everyone for no apparent reason.

  38. Rich says:

    “What one game or gaming moment Went Too Far for you? Not that you necessarily would ban it, but that you were offended or insulted.”

    None. I’m not affected that way by games or for that matter movies. I have been insulted by game mechanics that were plain stupid. But not by content.

    I guess I’m some kind of amoral sociopath.

  39. Galen says:

    Ideally I don’t think we should have censorship. But ideally everyone online is nice and flame wars only happen in WoW topics.

    Without censorship here’s what I think should happen, stores should have the right to refuse to sell something on moral (or any) grounds. I think the people who work those stores should have the right to find someone else to sell those products (I for one wouldn’t feel right selling games like that). THEN it’s up to the purchaser to decide if they should get a game like that.

    If all that was true then I don’t think we’d need censorship. Otherwise i’d be willing to go along with it as a ‘necessary evil’.

    As far as what game went to far for me? I can’t think of any, but my selections have always been relatively mild.

  40. Kajen says:

    When would I stop playing a game containing torture?
    At 1.

    Sorry, but torture is the one topic where I’m simply unable to separate fiction and reality.

    Skip the following paragraph if you’re not interested in my reasons.

    I used to work with victims of torture and there is no way I’d ever play anything like it in any sort of game.

    How would you proceed anyway? Nearly drown your prisoners in tubs filled with human excrement? Castrate them? Slowly burn their extremities? Take a power drill and riddle their bodies with holes? Poke their eyes out? Or would it be “soft” methods like beating them up, dislocating limbs, waterboarding, prolonged imprisonment in complete darkness, or mock executions?

    While I (being against censorship) would not ban those games, I don’t think that I could be friends with somebody who “just plays them”.
    And I most certainly couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with a person who programs this stuff.

  41. Galenor says:

    On the list you gave, I’d only really do 1 and 2. At least they’ve done something either against helpless people, or your own people, that gives the little sense of justice when you do the deed. The civilian was just in the wrong country at the wrong time. Sure, he may support the victory of the enemy, but what else is he going to do in a war situation? Hope that he loses?

    I’m gonna hop on the Prey/Fallout 2 bandwagon. Hope you don’t mind!

    So i recently played Fallout 2. Loved it, and of course, I came across the scene Acronix did:

    “Fallout 2, in the “cutscene” where the super mutant in power armor whose-name-scapes-my-memory killed a family of three, including a kid.”

    Now I was slightly hurt when I saw a kid shot to shreds by a minigun – literally. However, as i watched this scene, it was if the game was beside me, gesturing towards the Enclave and saying “Look, they just killed an entire family because the man didn’t obey their commands. You can obviously see these guys are exploiting the harshness of the wastelands, and they need to be stopped”. Yes, i felt bad about it, but it was there to show the fact that these guys mean business, and they didn’t care who they killed to get what they wanted. Since you see this scene early in the game, you don’t even know if the Enclave are good or bad guys, until that happens.
    So I found it acceptable – but only just. It was just showing that these guys were terrible, and needed to be stopped.

    Now, lemme just grab someone elses comment. Ah yes, good old MintSkittle put it this way for the Prey game:

    “For me, it was when the one child exploded into ghost form, then skewered the other child on a spike. I dropped the game right there, and haven't looked back.”

    I played the demo, which contained this scene. So now we have a scene with a kid being shot to pieces with a minigun, and a scene where a kid is impaled. Not too different, but the reason it was put in made me decide that Prey wasn’t the game for me. In contrast to Fallout, it was almost as if this game had this huge grin on it’s face, walking up behind me saying “Woooo! Scary, right? That kid just got nailed, eh?”. It continues to remark as it nudges me with it’s elbow while I stare at the screen slackjawed. “Eh? Scary, eh? Teens like you love that kinda thing! That was cool, right? Right?”

    No! No, it wasn’t! You just showed a kid being slaughtered purely for the adrenaline and the “Boo!” factor. You didn’t really have to explain the fact that ghosts are bad – just have one claw at me every so often and I’ll get the hint! Not this! In this case, the death of the child felt unneccesary and bolted-on for the sakes of it. Almost as if it was a ‘wasted’ life.

    You could say “Well, why not have the Enclave shoot at you, so you realise they’re bad guys?”. I guess it’s mainly because Fallout is trying to set up a story with their bad guys, and a good way to do that is to let the player look in on the life of the baddy. The ghosts in Prey just seemed to be Cannon Fodder to fill the halls with, and didn’t need this scene. That’s not to say killing kids is a great way to put story to your bad guys – like i said, i just barely forgave Fallout – but putting it in there without justification is a no-go for me.

  42. Malkara says:

    Wasn’t actually Voltaire that said that… But, nevermind that. I find censorship to be abhorrent. The Government has no place limiting media of any sort.

  43. Dys says:

    Um, couple of responses saying people are ok with depiction of men being tortured, but not women. What? Let’s have some equality. I think a shrink would have a field day with that particular distinction.

    Personally, banning media is pretty clearly wrong for the usual slew of reasons. I hit blocks in some places, like someone mentioned the slavery quests in Fallout. Never did those. Tried to play Bioshock with the killing of the sisters, never could do it. KotOR was a pretty good example. After a few hours of playing dark side, I started to feel really uneasy. Finished in the end, but only by leavening the experience with regular doses of light side goodness.

    Your list there doesn’t bother me. A game where you torture kids for no reason would be frankly too absurd to be offensive. Then again, if it really was researched and made to a high standard, it would have to be truly disgusting.

    I feel quite strongly that exposure to such things is beneficial, what Kajen said about personal experience of torture victims is poignant. If you had a game (that word seems wrong in this context) maybe a simulation rather, which truthfully and graphically depicted torture, I think it would produce in most people a similar sensibility. It would help those of us who have no real understanding of evil to learn.

    And by the way, some people really are born bad. All kinds of personality traits and mental disorders are inheritable, rather like physical ones. This is however, not an automatic excuse for eugenics.

  44. Joe says:

    Very interesting topic…

    First off, I’ve never been particularly offended by anything in a game, but that’s not saying much as I don’t actually play all that many…

    I could see being disturbed or offended by something like you describe in Prey. I wonder if anyone has been offended enough by it that they modded/hacked the game to avoid it, a la xkcd

    Several people have said that they don’t have a problem with any game, so long as nothing illegal was done to make it. I disagree. I don’t have a problem with any game so long as nothing wrong was done to make it. Just because it’s illegal doesn’t make it wrong. If it’s illegal to make a game that includes, say, sexual content, then making such a game is, in its own circular-logic way, illegal. Similarly, just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right. If you live somewhere where the law says that torturing babies is OK, that doesn’t mean that a game with video of it being done is OK. However, if you live in such a place, focus on trying to get baby-torture outlawed first, then worry about it in games.

    And last, I talk about some similar things on my blog (which definitely is political), but the short answer is this: there are probably games I wouldn’t personally play because they would offend me. There could be games that would make me suspicious of the sanity of those who did enjoy them. This leads to the important point: I don’t want any games or other media banned, entirely for practical reasons. I believe that games don’t change people (much). Given that, the availability of offensive games gives me a metric by which to judge other people. If there’s a game that I find morally offensive, and someone buys and enjoys it, I know that I don’t want to associate with that person. If they choose not to buy it, maybe they’re not so bad. But once you ban it, I can’t tell the difference between the people who don’t buy it because it’s offensive and the people who don’t buy it because it’s illegal. And that makes me less safe thank you very much Mr. Congressman.

  45. Liz says:

    From a legal/political standpoint: Everything on the list should be acceptable (with the by-now old hat disclaimer that no actual people were hurt in the creation thereof).

    From a strictly personal standpoint? I fall off the wagon right at the top of the list. World of Warcraft’s WotLK expansion has been getting some flak for just this — they have a few quest chains where the PC is required to torture people to get information from them, and… on the line where the PC is supposed to be evil, I admired it from a technical standpoint, even though my insides were already squirming with all the other evil things they’d made me do… The quest line where you’re a good guy and have to torture a bad guy — it’s the only way to get to one of the zones/instances in the game, and there’s no alternative option which gives you credit for refusing to do it.

    If WoW had more realistic graphics, I might not have been willing to do it, and as uncomfortable as I felt about it anyway, I suspect none of my alts are going to do it. If they have to skip that zone, so be it.

  46. Cuthalion says:

    Well, first of all, I wouldn’t buy any of that list.

    Second, I tend to be easily repulsed. I even end up as a goodie-goodie in games like Morrowind because I feel bad if I do mean stuff.

    Third, while I wouldn’t really object to the idea of a specific kind of game/movie/etc. being banned (eg. porn), it’s the precedent that would establish that would bother me. If we can ban people from saying “the N word”, then what’s to stop them from banning me from saying “Jesus”? If we can give people extra penalties for crimes because they were motivated by homophobia, what’s to keep them from reducing penalties for crimes against old-fashioned Christians like me? We already see Creationists being called “intellectual terrorists”, so it’s not very far-fetched.

    That’s why I’m generally against censorship, so-called “hate crimes” laws, etc. I know I would be next in line. The vitriol against Fred Phelps, Jack Chick, etc. is such that even though I strongly disagree with them, I know I’d get lumped in with them anyway because there are enough similarities in our beliefs (though like I said, not all of them).

    Of course, I’m sort of “Neutral Good” aligned. “We must obey God rather than men.” So I’d probably just end up getting arrested.

  47. Robert says:

    In SimCity, you can put up coal-fired power plants and hurt Mother Gaia. Now that’s just wrong!!!

  48. Galen says:

    Off the top of my head I can only think of one instance where I was told to torture someone in-game. Kotor had this, but quite frankly it wasn’t life-like enough to make me care. I was a good guy of course, but even when I accidentally hit the wrong button I just reloaded. Nothing there was real enough to make me care about aside from ‘woops I got dark points *click*’. So I admittedly don’t know about the more extreme examples being brought up. But just from the screenshot you linked to Shamus, I can tell I would never play that torture game. Maybe I’m just too nice.

    @Joe- THAT is a very interesting point. I’m not sure i would say that justifies forbidding all censorship but it is a very interesting point.

  49. Justin says:

    In terms of games, I’m largely unflappable. The child killing in Prey bugged me not because of the act, but because it wasn’t germane to the story. Why exactly were there ghost children? Why were they hostile? Why were they even on the ship? And so on. I want a good story more than anything. What if they banned Shamus’ proposed torture simulator? People would go out of their way to get it and play it. The message would be that obscenity = good. (Obscenity in the sense that something is socially taboo.) Splinter Cell: Double Agent has some ethically questionable content, but it is there because that is the nature of the story. Like Inscrutibob said, they can make what they want, and I’ll buy what I want. Banning things is swatting flies with a bazooka: unnecessary.

  50. Kobyov says:

    Manhunt went too far for me. Of course, I didn’t play it here in NZ, as it is banned. I think the way things work here as far as censorship is pretty good. Our law considers films and games to be equal. For instance, my copy of Fallout 3 has a large R18 label on it, with additional warnings of “graphic violence and offensive language”. And not only is it illegal for a minor to buy it, it is illegal for you to buy it and let a minor watch/play it. The biggest problem we have is that games distributors often send us the Australian version, and they do tend to censor things quite heavily.
    I am for censorship, in very limited cases. Things should only be censored if there is a real public harm from viewing them, and no merit whatsoever in the media.
    For instance, I would consider a game/movie/whatever that was centered around suicide in a how-to fashion should be banned. However, a game/movie/whatever that included suicide as a theme should merely be restricted, to make sure a child doesnt inadvertantly see it.

  51. I can’t honestly think of any case where any sort of violent game content offended me. I’ve played through most of Prey, including the ghost children scene. I’ve also trudged through many other violent games, such as Postal 2 and Manhunt. Really, the only thing that offended me about those two titles in particular is how shallow the gameplay is. :)

  52. Dys says:

    @Kobyov : How is an instruction manual for suicide harmful? As far as I know it would in no way increase the likelihood the subject will commit suicide.

  53. MadTinkerer says:

    The “child killing” in Prey doesn’t count.

    1) They are already dead.
    2) They will try to kill you no matter what you do.
    3) They’re obviously more than a little crazy, and it’s possible that “killing” them simply puts their spirits to rest.

    The only difference between the child-ghosts in Prey and, for example, mindless hostile child-zombies in another game (Ultima XIII was one example) is that the kids in Prey could shoot lethal ectoplasm at you.

    Bioshock, on the other hand, is a game where you can go around murdering children and it’s completely optional to finish the game, but mandatory to see the “evil” ending. People have complained about the endings being too “binary”, but that’s the nature of the choice you’re presented. It would have been much worse if there was just one ending.

    (Personally, I would have preferred a bit more choice: Add in a few adult characters who you have the choice of killing, assisting, or leaving alone (the splicers don’t count because it’s just like the child-ghost situation above) instead of being stuck on rails regarding what to do besides fighting for survival. Maybe some more characters who are only half-mad or completely sane that you can actually interact with.)

    Anyway, to answer the question regarding banning: violence in video-games is a self-regulating matter. The worse the subject matter is, the more niche the audience. The more niche the audience, the worse it will sell. There are lots and lots of games that are just horrible that you can get right now, but no one’s paying for them, and they’re all low-budget eyesores.

    Did you know that the original Tales From The Crypt comics had advertisements for Bible comics? Because “Hey, if you like reading this comic, maybe you’d like reading our Bible comics too!”. That’s how tame they really were. They’re not even scary compared to movies of several decades ago. Just a few decades later, Saw is a quintilogy and no one’s shouting about banning that series from cinemas even though idiot parents take their children to see it.

    Comparing what’s actually been banned to what’s mainstream now is ridiculous. Banning does nothing except harm peoples’ careers for others’ political gain. That’s really what it’s all about.

  54. Cuthalion says:

    Well, you could make anything from flowery happiness to gory madness in a Bible comic… although gory madness would be quite a bit easier.

  55. Plasma says:

    I would not support a ban on any of those listed concepts. I wouldn’t necessarily play any of them, but I would oppose banning them.

    Interesting that continuing your list a number of steps further, arriving at the obvious final step of allowing the player to commit the worst known crime – which is to say, genocide – is already basically accepted and included in most strategy games and many RPGs. Apparently there are people who feel that torturing one set of pixels and bit of code to death is unacceptable, but doing it to millions is just fine and dandy.

    Yes, I know why this is (strategy games don’t generally let you witness the individual suffering of your victims like an RPG might), but the moral dissonance amuses me nonetheless.

    The worst response I’ve had to a game in moral terms has been the contact Westin Phipps in City of Villains. But my response was limited to repeated vocalized objections that “This is so terrible! This is so awful!”, which hasn’t stopped me from doing his arcs on more than one character, despite having the easy choice not to.

  56. ThaneofFife says:

    Just wanted to opine along with the rest of the folks here. Regarding the numbered list, I wouldn’t condone torture in any of those cases, and think that in real life the torturer should face criminal charges in each of them, regardless of how “good” the reasons for torture may have been. BUT, that being said, I would NOT ban ANY of the games that had any of those scenarios. These games should allow you to experience things that you can’t and don’t want to in real life. All art allows you to explore the human experience in different ways, and I think this is a part of that.

    Now that I’ve said that, I’ll do my anecdote from the prompt. Keep in mind the three most modern PC games I’ve played have been WoW, Jedi Academy, and World of Goo, so I have not played with Prey or a lot of the other games cited here.

    I was mildly offended/bothered by WoW Wrath of the Lich King. Specifically, there’s an Alliance quest in the Borean Tundra in your early 70s where one of the Kirin Tor mages gives you a magical poker and asks you to go torture a prisoner, whom the mage himself can’t torture due to ethical considerations. Now, I don’t object to the inclusion of torture in WoW per se, but I don’t think it should be mandatory for progression, as this quest was (you couldn’t get to the Nexus in Coldarra before obtaining cold weather flying unless you did this quest). The Alliance bills itself as being on the side of good (which most of the horde does too), so it really breaks character for a quest like this to be included. I was expecting to be able to refuse, or suffer some consequences for going through with it. Neither were presented as possibilities. So, I guess what bothered me about it was that I was being forced to do an action that I considered out-of-character for my avatar with (1) zero recognition of its out-of-character nature by the game and (2) a requirement that I do it anyway if I want to proceed. That was both bothersome and frustrating.

  57. Torsten says:

    First of on the rhetorical situation, I was going to answer that torturing scene would be where my game would end. But then I thought how much emotionally attached to the goals the game had me made. If I have to save the world of nameless NPCs by torturing a helpless creature – even an enemy soldier or hostile alien – I wouldn’t do it. If I care about those I would save then maybe I could bring myself into playing the scene through.

    I’ve never really played a game that would have offended me, but I think Prey would have been one had I played it. I wouldn’t ban Prey, but if any game would go any further than Prey did, then banning it would be ok in my book. I’m just not liberal enough to think that it is ok for a game to show violence that is done to children.

  58. Bryan says:

    Who needs gore, anyway? Check out this article…

    http://www.nugget.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1392412

    Some people like the violence, but most simply enjoyed the game whether the violence and gore were turned up or down. It’s something to think about. What is more important — being able to turn mutants into bloody smears, or understanding the reasons why?

  59. Picador says:

    I have found the dialogue and storyline of almost every video game I’ve ever played to be offensively stupid and cliched. Does that count?

    As for emotional disturbance, I remember the first time I hit that level in Quake 2 where the prisoners in their holding cells are screaming in pain and fear… that was the moment that I first realized the capacity of the medium for creating immersive, emotionally powerful experiences. That being said, it is a morally neutral capacity of the medium.

    Games have the capacity to make the player complicit in the atrocities being committed in the narrative in a way that non-interactive media do not. Thus, games like this torture sim under discussion or the Super Columbine Massacre RPG may (unintentionally in the first case, intentionally in the second) implicate the player in the perpetration of (virtual) evil acts in all kinds of interesting ways. Whether one approves or disapproves of the art, or of the artist, or of the players, is a complex issue, just as it is with, say, cinema: look at Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” for a good example of how, even in a non-interactive medium, the audience can be set up to feel morally complicit in atrocities by their voyeurism (the choice to continue watching the film) or their sympathies (their expectations and hopes for the direction of the narrative). Haneke’s film is “torture porn” with the titillation excised and the audience’s decision to watch the torture criticized directly in addresses to the camera from the characters on-screen. Some critics feel offended by the film’s content and the intent attributed to the film’s creator, but I thought that Haneke’s critique of audience sadism-by-proxy was dead-on. YMMV.

  60. Mark says:

    The suicide imagery in Persona 3 kept me away from that game in spite of the heaps of praise it had received from people I trusted and my appreciation for the genre. Didn’t get anything like the urge that incites people to ban a game, but I knew that playing it would make me uncomfortable.

    The only comment on the general issue is: free speech means defending the indefensible.

  61. Luke Maciak says:

    Hey, Shamus – I am pretty sure that Japan has a pretty big market for games featuring senseless torture of women and children. Discretely look up the word “guro” on the interwebs and you will see what I mean. The whole genre is messed up, but apparently there are lots of people into that kind of stuff.

    Anyway, to answer your question: there is virtually no reason I would ever want anyone to ban anything. The only exception would be if a real person was hurt in the process of making the game/movie/whatever. In that case, yeah, ban the game out of respect for the victim, and put the people who made it in jail.

    Other than that, why should I care? Seriously, to each it’s own. If I do not enjoy something, I will simply ignore it.

    I have yet to find a game that would disturb me or make me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t play pray, but I found stuff like Postal games just painfully boring.

    That said, when I’m playing games that allow you to pick good/bad guy I usually choose the good guy role. Mostly because they get the better dialog options.

  62. Damian says:

    The last one for me was the GTA IV teaser movie – or maybe a video review, I don’t know – where you saw a realistic-looking cop get out of a police cruiser to accost some maniac with a gun in the middle of the road; the maniac shot the cop in the throat and the cop screamed mutely and collapsed, hands around his neck.

    That was too much for me, and I’m not a prude: I shoot people in the face with glee in Fallout.

  63. Greg says:

    So far the only game that has offended me is Pong. It upsets the creative side of my brain.

    Seriously though, games don’t really offend me. I guess I’m in the minority with the other 100 people who know that video games are fiction, therefore not real. Its the same minority who still uses whole words and correct capitalization and punctuation in their emails and text messages.

    I don’t think banning games helps the matter at all. We can’t even get people to pay for the games that actually make it to the store shelves. What makes you think that banning a game will keep it off of the internet and torrents? Especially if it DID make it past the censors in another country.

    The problem that I have with censorship is this: Why does someone/some group get to decide what offends me? I’m all for the rating system we have now. There just needs to be a way to enforce/educate people on this matter. I’ve worked at Gamestop for two holiday seasons now and it baffled me how some parents could pick up games like Grand Theft Auto and even ask if it was ok for their 10-year-old home-schooled child to play it. I kindly pointed out the shiny black-and-white box that said Mature and showed them the back that has the ‘ingredients’ per se, and let them make the call themselves. Everyone and their dog knows that a rated R movie is not supposed to be suitable for kids. Why is it so hard to understand that M means the same thing for games? People are just uneducated on the matter.

    On the matter of movies having more lenient censorship, I feel its because the footage isn’t ‘real’ in most cases. There could be a scene about rape or torture of a child and people would say, “Oh its just CG.” or “Its just acting.” Well what the BLEEP is it in a video game!? Real computer generated people creating real computer generated footage?

    </rant>

    Sorry about the mini-rant. To sum up my post in a statement or two: Video games don’t offend me and people need to be better educated about the already-in-place rating system for games.

  64. Plasma says:

    In the spirit of full disclosure: I take a sadistic glee in turning great bombards on helpless villagers in Age of Empires 3, and in stabbing scantily-clad women in City of Heroes/Villains. To be fair, the scantily-clad women are trying to mind-rape your character to death, and killing villagers is one of the best ways to cripple an opponent. Also there is no blood in either game, only screams.

    On the broader censorship topic: I can only think of one instance where I really support censorship. It’s not the already-mentioned situation where a game or other media is made with illegal acts; the law (in the US, anyway) forbids a person from profiting from criminal acts (it’s why you don’t see as many prison memoirs as you might expect), and I don’t really have an opinion on that particular law either way. I don’t support it or oppose it.

    The one instance of censorship that I wholeheartedly approve of (this is where I may be straying dangerously close to off-topic territory): it should be illegal to fill the head of a child with proven falsehoods. Lying to an adult is fine because adults supposedly possess the faculty of critical thinking. But children are predisposed to trust the word of authority figures, and if an authority figure lies to a child, the lie may become entrenched in their child’s mind. Certain kinds of entrenched lies can ruin their whole life and make society in general that much poorer.

  65. Kristin says:

    I’m also curious about the people who draw the line between #4 and #5.

    To those people, I would like to propose Hypothetical Scenario #7: Same as #2, except that the enemy soldier is a woman? Does it still work at #3 if the enemy civilian is a woman? If it didn’t at #2, does it work at #1 if the mass murderer is a woman?

    Personally, I draw the line for “I would buy this” probably between 2 and 3 – a soldier being tortured is actively supporting the enemy, while an enemy civilian (if it’s a true civilian and not a civilian working with the government/military/organization) is just a person born in the wrong place. For what I think should be available: between 4 and 6 (I object to 5 being a separate option so I’m lumping it in with 4). For what I want to see censored: absolutely nothing done legally.

  66. Namfoodle says:

    I haven’t played enough “edgy, realistic” games to hit on anything that actually offended me. I mostly play RTS. No Prey, no Survival Horror, no FPS, and 99% of the foes in Morrowind were jerks anyway. I managed to get all the way through Fallout 1 without hurting any kids. They were just part of the background. In Fallout 2, my party did splatter one of the pickpocket kids because I was trying to “discourage” him and his friends from stealing from me everytime I walked by. I was just going to bop him one on the nose, but I forgot to drop off my allies before I did and they dog-piled the little shit and reduced him to a stain on the floor. I regretted it a bit, but the pickpockets left us alone after that.

    I don’t think I would ever bother seeking out a torture simulator game myself. But I don’t think there is any point in trying to ban it completely, because there will always be a way for stuff like that to get passed around. But it’s also not realistic to expect anything above 2 or 3 on Shamus’s list to have even a remote chance of making it to a mass market retailer in the USA.

  67. Sydney says:

    Anything which gets banned will only attract more followers.

    Let me try a drug analogy:

    Marijuana is banned outright. But people smoke it, at least in part because the illegality of the act makes it “cool”. Cigarettes, however, are not banned outright. Banning them outright would likely have made THEM “cooler” too, especially considering that cigarette-smoking had long been associated with rebellion.

    But banning the advertisement of cigarettes cut sales a ton.

    So I propose this: A game which is “banworthy”, according to whatever criteria you select, is still allowed to be sold. However, any promotion of the game is heavily, heavily restricted. You can have a website for it, but you aren’t allowed to advertise that website, except on the internet. No TV trailers, no magazine ads. Those who really want to play games like this will form fan websites, sort of like Twenty Sided or Chris’s Survival Horror Quest, but if those websites advertise the game using non-internet media, they’re shut down the same way child porn sites are shut down.

    People who really want games like this can have them. The rest of us aren’t exposed, even to the hype. Everyone wins.

    Except – and this is the point – the developers. They lose immense sales because they can’t advertise. Who wants to bet these games stop being made after one or two failed attempts?

  68. Gary says:

    I actually LIKE it when game companies offer “self censoring”. I think it shows a mature decision on the part of the producer, rather than an immature glorying in the baser realms that some games get into.

    While I don’t think we can (or should) BAN things that we don’t like, because then people tend to get BAN-happy, I do think that either:

    A. More restraint should be shown in game making
    or
    B. They should offer a censored mode for people who either don’t like that kind of stuff or for kids.

    A big problem in this is that producers assume that if you are adult, you like ‘adult’ (read graphic/distasteful/bloody/sex-filled) themes in your entertainment. This is simply not true. Believe me, I’m an adult, and I don’t like them.

    So, any way…self censoring…. I cannot understand why that would but people, but it apparently does. I prefer my games without the F word, nude scenes, etc.

    Duke Nukem 3d was nice in that it offered a switch to let you turn on Parental mode or not. When engaged, this mode took out all the swearing, censored the nudity, and toned the blood down slightly.

    I LOVED this feature.

    I think that games should offer not only difficulty levels but also a self censoring feature.

    This is (I think) the BEST happy medium that we can com across.

    Not all adults are the same, just as not all skill levels are the same, so it makes sense that they should let the game differentiate.

    Not only would it make ME happy, but I think they could actually sell more games that way.

  69. Scourge says:

    @28: That game was most probably Bloodrayne. There you fight nazis who try to taake over the world with the GGG (GegeGeistGruppe) by summoning some ancient devil or something.
    It has a story and the combat is fun, yes, there is lots of blood but really not to excessive where I thought, alright that is ridicolous. Dismembered arms or so only happen rarely or with high powered weapons too, so, most of them die before.

    “So, you would be okay with someone selling a game where you would have to torture a mass murderer – in gruesome realistic detail – to find out where the (say) bombs are planted? Like, the better you are at torturing this guy, the better you win the game.
    Same gameplay, but now you're torturing an enemy soldier to save the life of your squad.
    What about an enemy civilian instead of a soldier?
    What about just torturing a guy for revenge or money?
    What about a woman?
    What about a kid? For no good reason? ”

    The biggest question about that is. Would anyone buy this game? Would anyone even produce it for that reason?

    We had a similiar argument once here in germany where they tried to band killersimulators and one politician argued that games where you would need to torture someone and get more points depending on how good and horrible you tortured him would need to be banned.
    I fully agree with that but there has never been such a game. Never Ever! And I doubt such a game will ever be produced where the main focus will be upon the torture aspect.

    On a sidenote, I ehard 24 is quite nig with torturing people but no one complains there or anything.

  70. Bryan says:

    @#69: please understand that I am not saying that no one should buy/play that game, only that my personal gore resistance is pitifully weak, so I won’t buy/play games like that for myself. Unfortunately, this limits the titles I would be interested in.

    Also, the GGG sounds familiar, so you’re probably right about the title.

  71. Yar Kramer says:

    Hmm. I wouldn’t support banning something someone else liked (if nobody real was harmed at any point in the process), because if you allow that, there’s nothing to stop anyone else from banning something I like that doesn’t harm anyone else. As for the game where you rape the mother and her three daughters (I think I saw a review for that on SomethingAwful once) … all I’ll say is, at least people who play it aren’t going after real women.

    (As an aside, I’m still waiting to see someone loudly decry a game for its moral/idealogical content, or for subverting its own core reason for existence i.e. “Marvel vs Capcom 2 supposedly allows you to play as your favorite character, but you can’t actually win unless you play as the developers’ favorite characters”, and then add “And it has bad graphics/screwy controls/clunky mechanics, too!” as if improving that would have excused the other bits.)

    Prey … managed not to emotionally invest me enough to think of it as “killing kids” per se. The “ghost kid impales the other kid” sequence sort of made me wonder if this kind of thing was going to turn significant (it didn’t), and the bit where you kill the ghost-kids managed to be obnoxiously difficult and infuriating enough that I thought of it as “that one sequence you hate in the game” purely from a gameplay perspective. In other words, Prey escaped seriously offending me by mishandling it. (I’d also like to mention that there’s one scene much later on, surrounding a boss fight, which was … rather well-played, I felt.) I suppose I only got Prey on Steam to begin with because it was on sale for $5 …

    I guess on the whole, I tend not to get this kind of “offense,” because I don’t play games like that. I mean … I think it was Too Human which managed to scare me away with just the graphically-violent scenes in the trailer.

  72. Jeysie says:

    My take… a creator is free to create an extremely offensive game… and I’m just as free to not buy it. Simple as that.

    I don’t think it’s the government’s job to play moral police, and I don’t think it’s my job to play moral policeman for anyone old enough to make their own choices about their entertainment. People need to just go ahead and actually take responsibility for their own tastes and actions.

    As for a specific offensive example, I really can’t think of one… I mostly play adventure games and turn-based RPGs (which tend to be less violent on the whole), and I generally don’t play games where the reviews make the content sound like something I’d get uppity about.

  73. Tarous Zars says:

    Hostel was an “edgy” movie, but if it were a videogame then concerned parents would have erected trebuchets in the Wal-Mart parking lot and reduced the place to burning cinders before they allowed them to sell such a thing.

    Would I lobby to Lobby to have the government ban such a movie/game? No. Do I think parents have every right to let Wal-Mart know that they find it unacceptable and Wal-Mart had better get in line if it doesn’t want a huge media catastrophe and a bunch of it’s customers going to Target? Absolutely. (Dunno what it would take for this to happen, I’m certainly to lazy to attempt it, but I guess my kids don’t play video games yet.)

    I guess I’m too “easily repulsed” as well. Too much gore is usually enough to get me to quit a game. No reason to get into how the gore happened. I honestly don’t understand everyones fascination with gore anyway. I don’t know how making the Koopa’s bleed as Mario stomps on them would make the game more enjoyable. Yet that seems to be the trend with a lot of games these days.

  74. Colin Lacey says:

    I don’t think I’ve ever been overly offended by a video game, likely because I simply avoid potentially offensive games altogether. I will however say that I find it hilarious (in a sad way) that people would in any way think of using such an inherently violent, coercive, and offensive institution as the state to ban violent and offensive material.

    It’s like the difference between rape and lovemaking, one is a voluntary exercise of individuality and person hood, the other a forced violation thereof. The voluntarism is the difference between goodness and evil, in other words, the violence present or absent from the system.

  75. kat says:

    I play very few games. I do remember being mildly offended by one fight game, a long time ago. My brother had talked me into playing it and I was almost enjoying it until the second or third cutscene, wherein I realized that whenever a man was beaten, we got a five-second scene of him bowing his head, whereas whenever a female fighter lost we were treated to a full 45 seconds (yes, I timed it) of her grovelling on the ground, chest heaving, sobbing, utterly destroyed. It took me considerably less than 45 seconds to figure out the sexual politics.

    Not, mind you, a squick or “HORRORS! Innuendo!” level of offended; just a “wow, this game wasn’t written for me, doesn’t respect me, and I now have little interest in playing it,” response. But as I said, I don’t play many games.

    But I note that the last fight game I saw didn’t seem to have varied the formula much.

  76. Ben says:

    You cannot ban games. I’m surprised and disturbed anyone would even advocate it. It’s ficitonal media- what’s next, books? It’s a slippery slope, and you have to draw the line somewhere.

  77. Rival Wombat says:

    Just to play devil’s advocate..

    For the last, worst example, let’s look at a hypothetical game where you play a police investigator, and the serial killer he is hunting. The game shifts perspectives between the two as the detective arrives at crime scenes and rebuilds what his nemesis did. The more evil, depraved the torture of the monster’s mostly young, mostly female victims, the closer you are to the “truth” of what happened, and the better you advance the plot.

    So example six becomes a way to shock and sicken you, to make the player share his detective avatar’s uncomfortable journey into the mind of a monster.

    Should that be banned? I don’t mean “would it make you uncomfortable enough not to play” I mean, would you approve of legally restricting the sales of it, and if possible having every copy destroyed.

    Now the same thing.. but this time, simply remove the context. The game now consist only of the snapshots of the serial killer’s torture and murder of his victims to fill a sick sexual compulsion. Should that be banned?

  78. Frank says:

    There were some moments in Call of Duty World at War that made me think to myself “Wow, am I really doing this?”. The first time I saw an enemy soldier getting his clothes, then his skin, then his muscles fried to a crispy, brownish pulp by a flamethrower, I thought “Wow, that’s pretty realistic. Glad it’s not really happening.” But then in the next level the game puts a flamethrower in my hand and tells me to do the same. I just thought “I’m not doing this” and I just dropped the flamer and finished the level using my just my rifle. That and the moment where you can choose to either shoot fleeing enemies or let your comrades burn them with molotovs.
    I don’t think all games should bar the player from doing evil things though. I think that good games however should be designed as to make you feel bad when you do evil acts instead of just making it “just another way to play the game”.

  79. Colin Lacey says:

    It wouldn’t be moral to ban it, if that’s what you’re asking. A government isn’t real, its a concept composed of a bunch of violent people who assert some sort of moral prerogative over the rest of the population. However, moral rules are universal throughout individuals in a species. The state is just a group of individuals with violent and extortionate tendencies, thus this organization calling itself the government has just the same moral prerogative to restrict individual freedom and or property rights as do I or any other human. Would you say I have the right to ban another individual from intellectual property, or to extort protection money from the individual? If no, then neither does the state.

    Of course people try to justify the state violence with the mention of democracy as though it were a swooping Deus Ex Machina, come to save this nauseatingly corrupt system, but I ask you this: if a group of men descended upon a defenseless woman and voted upon whether or not to rape her, does that transform the rape into a moral act? of course not, and neither does it justify the rape of the enslaved citizenry by their masters.

    This of course only deals with the philosophical side of banning such material as it deals with the state, the practicality of such a measure, entailing police forces and prison is an entire other issue.

  80. Arndt says:

    I absolutely believe in censorship.

    I cannot think of a game I would censor… except some games offend me for being… oh…. Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro for making me fail to put out a flaming car with web fluid.

    I love Spider-Man 2 for PS2 but I hate that my punches can be blocked by these thugs…. dude! I punched a hole in a car! Your fist should explode!

  81. Arndt says:

    I would censor Hostel because it looks like gay BDSM porn to me.

    But not Hostel 2 because even though I won’t watch female BDSM porn…. I will allow its existence.

  82. LintMan says:

    Despite that fact that we have yet to have the “Citizen Kane” of the gaming world, I consider games as equal to movies, in terms of their being protected “speech”. As such, I don’t think any game should be banned, regardless for how vile it is, just as I would say the same thing for a book or a movie. I just don’t approve of government-enforced censorship in any form.

    Now, I don’t approve of that sort of “torture porn” stuff, but I think it’s best to just ignore it rather than sensationalize it, make it forbidden fruit, and risk a slippery slope where others are deciding that the things I think are reasonable must be banned.

    Interestingly, I played through Prey, and don’t even recall the “killing ghost children” stuff you mention. Not at all. Maybe they didn’t seem like children to me? Maybe it’s because, as someone said, they were shooting at you?
    On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to “harvest” a Little Sister in Bioshock, not even once for a “try it out and see what happens, then reload” test.

  83. Jim says:

    I’m not sure I’d play anything that encompasses any of the 6 points. Though I think there might be scenarios where #2 could be more acceptable than #1. For instance, if #1 means saving a town of people you never interact with otherwise, while #2 is saving NPCs you’ve met and worked with already in the game, I could potentially see myself going through with the act for #2.

    That said I don’t really have a problem with these type of games being created or sold. They have to be very cleared labeled to indicate their content and I think its a good idea to make people purchasing them to show ID to prove their age.

    As for a game going too far: in Oblivion I went through the Dark Brother storyline, and regretted even starting it several times. When I finished it I felt so miserable that I completely deleted my (140 hour) character and started over. There were several Daedric Shrine Quests I refused to do as well

  84. Arndt says:

    “Wow, that's pretty realistic. Glad it's not really happening.” But then in the next level the game puts a flamethrower in my hand and tells me to do the same. I just thought “I'm not doing this” and I just dropped the flamer and finished the level using my just my rifle. That and the moment where you can choose to either shoot fleeing enemies or let your comrades burn them with molotovs.

    But what if it already really happened?

  85. Dannerman says:

    Hmm. This got me thinking.

    The only game I can think of which made me uncomfortable with the gore was the Monastery level of Diablo II where you see a lot of ‘evidence’ of torture in the background. I just figured one of the artists had a bad falling out with his girlfriend or something. I find depictions of women being tortured more disturbing than men being tortured… so I guess I need to see that shrink that Dys mentioned. ;-)

    In RPG’s – I typically dislike taking the evil path. However, I rejoice at being able to play as the baddies in an RTS – read into that what you will.

    Would I wish to ban a game that made me uncomfortable?
    No. No point. It’d only make it more popular. I feel that advertisements for a hypothetical “Womanslayer 2: Violater” game should be HEAVILY restricted, however. I agree with Sydney (above) on that whole issue.

    About free speech in general; I like the idea of anyone being able to say anything – but I also wonder as to why they’d want to.

  86. ehlijen says:

    Censorship, no (but then again, book burning started what eventually caused me to be taught all the way through school how bad that start was).
    Effective age content control? Yes please! Video stores keep their explicit content videos away from the regular section, let alone the kiddie section! Yet most game stores have GTA right next to the latest pokemon if they happen to both be in the top ten.

    If the gaming industry in general (including shops) could manage to consistently keep adult games in adult hands, maybe the concept of ‘adult games’ would become known and accepted in the general public, resulting in less hysteria anytime a kid is found to be playing an 18 title. I mean, parents who catch their kids with porn don’t want to ban all movies with love story subplots, do they?

    Anyawy: Where would I stop? At any torture that is required to proceed. If it’s in an optional ‘evil’ path, fine, I won’t play the evil side. But torture should stay away from ‘good guy’ stories.

    Things that put me off:
    The worst would be the second Alien level in AVP2. Objective: Chew your way out. There is no challenge. No obstacle. No ‘not chew your way out’ action is possible. No new information either. There is simply no reason for that piece of disgustonia to be there. All you need(?) to know about what happens in between lvl1 and 3 you get to see in a cutscene right after this level anyway.

  87. Cronus says:

    Censorship of games is practically pointless. There will be a way to acquire the game if you really want it. However, limiting the amount of advertisement for games that push the envelope too much would be enough to keep some kids (not all) away from the games.

    < ...rant Unfortunately, parents are failing when it comes to limiting exposure of violent video games to their kids. It doesn't even have to be the kids buying the game. I've seen parents buy games such as GTA for themselves, and then play the game right in front of the kids. Its not exactly the same as the kids playing the game, but the exposure is similar. Parents have to step up and except responsibility that what they do (or don't) has consequences on their children. Parents have been doing it for years...but lately, I've been seeing more parents passing the buck, which in most cases should have stopped with them. .../rant>

  88. I’ve never played a game that offended or insulted me (unless being childishly simplistic and poorly written counts as an insult). In addition, I’m opposed to any and all bans of art or any other form of communication *on principle*.

    It is not the government’s job to dictate the public taste. I retain the right to refuse to deal with anyone whose activities and interests I find disgusting. The right of free association obviates against any need for government controls–which is good, because we NEED freedom of speech to keep this civilization going.

  89. Alex says:

    “What about a kid? For no good reason?”

    Hmm… Depends on how one defines “torture”. That word springs to mind acts of simulated drowning and physical violence, but I think an episode of Hope and Faith will accomplish the same results.

    Hell, structured the right way, a scene like that could be funny!

    Yeah, I’m pretty much a terrible human being…

  90. Fosse says:

    I share the opinion that as long as the content was legally produced we should not seek to ban it. At no point along your numbered list would I agree to banning or censoring a game like this.

    Also, I could not have less interest in playing a game like this. I can’t recall every having been offended by the content of a game, but I imagine I’d treat it just as I do when I find the content of a book or movie goes beyond the pale: I’d not buy, read, watch or play it.

  91. Somekindofthing says:

    Phantasy Star 2, when you have to get over the bridge early on that’s guarded by some guy attacking travelers and so he can pay the ransom to get his daughter back. The quest is unavoidable and you need to do it to go beyond the first couple of towns. When you do find his kid and return her to him, he accidentally kills her and then commits suicide over what he has done.
    Very tasteless and also a bad ending to a long (2 dungeon) quest.

    EDIT
    Banning and censorship is not the answer. As video games, and indeed all artistic mediums, are hard to classify along strict guidelines, it would be almost impossible to enforce a fair treatment of the materials.

  92. Noble Bear says:

    When I game, i play for story and character development (not always, as with platformers, but often) If there is no context provided for why any of it is ocurring then I wouldn’t have enough interest to play in the first place; I agree with Shamus that one should have the option to avoid it. In something like a Bioware game, I would actually welcome such a moral exploration; if you want to be good how can you avoid it and still acheive objectives? If you want to be bad then how far are you willing to go to assume a truly evil and corrupted alignment?

  93. ShadowDragon8685 says:

    I’m offended by a game, whenever control is taken away from me in a situation where, in a role-playing game, I would have a legitimate chance to do something different.

    The cutscene in Fallout 2 that Arcanix mentioned, for example. I wouldn’t wait it out. As soon as I heard the threatening tone of the big guys, I’d be telling the GM that I’m rolling to Join Battle (or Rolling for Initiative for you who still play D&D) and that I’m going to go for an eye-shot on the big guy to make him unable to use that minigun effectively on me.

    Another thing that pisses me off (though it can work well if done right) is when Named NPCs that I’ve grown attached to die. Like Eli Vance, for example; that shocked and horrified me.

    Now, remember, I’ve just come through a giant slog-fest of killing combine, zombies, antlions, and crowbar-knows-what else. I’ve splatted men and machines and bioman-machines over the fender of my muscle car, seen a Combine Advisor at close-range on a barrel and a corpse…

    And seeing Eli get it, while saying “Don’t look, honey!”, that was wrenching.

    To a same extent, and perhaps this may be mysigonistic of me, I HATE hearing/seeing females get killed. Don’t ask me why, don’t bother yelling at me about it, it may be sexist, but that’s the way it is. I hate it, and if at all possible, I’ll go to some seriously unreasonable lengths to prevent it.

    (Open tangenital Note to Gabe Newell: If I am compelled with no alternative watch die, or worse, to kill Alyx Vance in Episode 3, you will never, ever sell me another Half-Life title again; or indeed, anything on Steam.)

    Content does not offend me, the dying women thing aside, I can’t recall a time I’ve been offended, really, except this one time, back when they had The Sega Channel that could stream you a Sega Genesis game, where I was playing some anime game and the ending featured a girl’s graphically, ritually slaughtered and sacrificed corpse, I’m hard to offend, and I would never, ever say “ban this game”. If it’s something that has actual, graphic sexual detail in it, then I would think it should be labeled as such, but it should not be OSTRACIZED, and it should not be banned, ever.

    Games are free speech, too. The proof is that games have no negative impact on the public health; therefor, they may not be silenced under the First Ammendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

  94. Zanfib says:

    It is my opinion that this game is less likely to be banned then one with pornographic content.

    That is all.

  95. Miral says:

    I think none of those game ideas should be outright banned (though they definitely need an AO label). However as presented I personally wouldn’t buy any of them.

    Now, if the torture were presented as a cutscene or even a QTE scene rather than “direct” participation then I would probably be ok with #1 and #2 (and maaybe #3, depending on how it’s presented), but #4 and up would make me uncomfortable. I’m not really sure what that indicates :)

    (Having said that, in some games that have a good path vs. evil path dynamic, I’ve sometimes played the equivalent of #4 [and possibly higher]. But usually I play evil-path quite detached, both because I have trouble empathising with the character choices that way and because the evil-path choices in most games are just silly.)

    I didn’t really have a problem with the child-ghosts in Prey (they’re presented as obviously-not-real-children), but (and especially after visiting their “home” towards the end of the game) I didn’t and don’t think I ever could go for the “harvest” option in BioShock.

    And I agree with ShadowDragon that I hate seeing NPCs I’ve gotten attached to die, especially females. (The HL2:E2 example he cited is one case; another I remember with sadness is Shinatama from Oni.) But I know that this is a common storytelling element — they get killed off because it has this sort of impact on people.

  96. Yohann says:

    Im most offended by people posting Half Life 2 Spoilers all willy nilly, then by people wanting to censorship stuff, thirdly by tainting peoples minds with lies and finally by graphic violence against innocents. No game that ive played or heard about has been reprehensible to me. And the only thing i would call torture porn that ive seen is the passion of the christ.

    I think I just cant empathise with video games, I thought Manhunt was funny, I thought the Punisher game was awsome, I loved the AVP games, and the onlygames I can think of that made me feel anything is like Diablo backround corpses and Jericho mabe (Fun game btw). Plus if the children are zombies and ghosts your doing them a favor really.

  97. Corsair says:

    Plenty of games have crossed my line – I took a look at that Torture Game a couple months back, no idea why, and I felt like I needed to go take a shower and then watch something family friendly, like Dirty Harry.

    As for any of those games, I’d be done before we even started. The prospect of killing evil men is not abhorrent to me. The prospect of making them suffer before they die makes my skin crawl.

    On the other hand, I wouldn’t support banning these games. I don’t see it as the Government’s place to do that. If we’re a well balanced society, the games won’t sell and the market will drop out. If they do sell well, then we’ve learned a little something about just who and what we are.

  98. Sem says:

    The first time I played KOTOR I was a goody two-shoes Jedi. The second time I tried the dark side but after an hour I stopped. I felt slightly bad about all the things I was doing.

    It usually depends on how ‘real’ the persons in the game are to me and how deeply I’m emotionally invested. If they just are a bunch of faceless mooks I have no problem mowing whole swats of them down but I would have trouble hurting a party character that I traveled 40 hours with and know his/her whole back story.

    It also depends what you mean by insulted/offended. Something can indeed go to far for me but that doesn’t mean I’m insulted or offended. To compare, I would never eat insects but lots of people do it and I don’t feel personally offended and insulted by it.

    From that point of view, it is hard to insult or offend me. (You can do it however by starting a discussion with me, give up after half an hour because you’re getting tired and they say ‘You’re right’ in a tone that implies I’m not but you’re only saying it to stop the discussion. That really get’s me going.)

    And no, I wouldn’t ban any game (or other media content), even your torture examples.

  99. Dev Null says:

    Couple of quests in the latest WoW expansion kind of bugged me. There’s one about torturing someone, and another about stealing children from sentient – if somewhat primitive – beings. I’m not saying I’d ban the game, or even that I didn’t complete the quests, but they didn’t feel right.

    Which is odd, really, in a game whose primary gameplay revolves around systematically committing mass-murder for cash…

  100. Josh says:

    No video game has crossed the line for me, but I haven’t played Prey.

    The movie Taken made me uncomfortable at one point, when the protagonist deliberately wounds an innocent. However, since the entire movie is a ham-handed revenge fantasy, it doesn’t bother me too much. I mean, it wasn’t that good of a movie anyway.

    As for the urge to ban… no. In your list of examples, #6 does not come close to needing banning. There are far worse things that a video game could do.

  101. Scourge says:

    @70: I only pointed things about the game, my later comment was completely unrelated to the first part. Sorry if it came over that way.

  102. Mephane says:

    Well, the aforementioned “torture game” definitely crosses the line of “I won’t play that, it’s both violent and pointless”; I’ve enjoyed Postal 2 and I am looking forward to Postal 3, but those games are not pointless, but rather a satire on society.

    But I have never encountered or heard of a game where I would say it should be banned, forbidden or whatever. Since no one is forced to play the game, I don’t mind what is in it, as it is all bits&bytes, in the end. No one is going to get hurt in a video game, it’s just polygons and pixels!

  103. John SMith says:

    To me video games get more of a bad press for 2 reasons:

    1. They are viewied as little boys games and not mass market entertainment.

    2. Ratings; it does not matter what raiting a game has. Little Tommy’s mummy will always buy Little Tommy the game he wants (Lets say the game as been rated an 18 for arguments sake) as games are for little boys. Then mummy sees the content of said game one day and throws a fit and she goes around blaiming everyone from the developers to govnernment when infact she is the one to blaim for buying a game that was clearly marked as not sutiable for children.

    I think making age ratings (The PEGI system is a good rating system I find) legally binding (like movie ratings) will solve a lot of these problems since parents (as its mostly them that complain the loudest) ignore them when buying games for their kids anyway.

    Other then that I don’t really care what type of content people produce (I’m all for freedom of speech etc (Although some age groups need protecting until they are old/experienced enough to not be unduly infulenced by said content)) so long as the content in question is clearly labelled so I can make an informed decision before buying/viewing it)

  104. John SMith says:

    I’ve just read the self censoring comment by Gary (Comment 68) and I have to say that I completely agree with you. I recentally bought The Witcher EE in the January sales and although I like the game I would have prefered a switch to turn the swearing, sex, nudity and excessive blood off. I remember thinking at the time that if Duke Nukem 3D could do this over 10 years ago (or is it over 15 now?) why can this game not.

    This would have provided people with choice. For example those who pefer the game without all of those ‘features’ could have turned them off easily and those who had kids in the house and did not want them to see that sort of content could have turned those features off without having to resort to hiding the discs and the install etc.

    In my opinion the Vista parental controls would have been better if depending on whether you knew the admin password or not it either ran the game in full mode or in censored mode.

  105. Noble Bear says:

    @Half-Masked (#93)

    I am aware that I failed to answer the question. I did it on purpose because the time where a game has offended or annoyed me is because of the political statements being made (overtly and perceived). I didn’t want to bring my politics to this thread. I would add that part of why gaming is fun for me is because I can avoid such things.

    I have yet to play a game that has offended in any other way mainly because to me what is happening in a game, while it may be immersive, is never real. If I had to engage in the sorts of act in real life I do in some games I would be disgusted shaken and deeply effected. But I don’t have to worry about that because what happens in the console, stays in the console.

    EDIT: I am an idot for not having recognized the difference between a trackback and a direcect responce…time to go back to bed.

  106. SolkaTruesilver says:

    Many examples here of the “bad” things that can happen in a video games seems to either be optional (based on a choice of the player), or to depict a very, very vicious NPC.

    The Enclave killing children in Fallout 2, the very evil quests in KOTOR, or in Oblivion… Even Bioshock is all about making the player make choices, and decide wether he’s a nice or a bad fella.

    Now, I don’t have any problems with the most horrible ways you can send your character down to the monstruous path of morality, if it’s a conscient CHOICE. Make it the most incredibly horrible possible (it would even be better if it becomes gradually more and more horrible… so even hardcore players could at one point have their fill).

    However, as said above, a game entirely aimed at performing horrible things…

    “Come and buy “Concentration Manager II: Gasing up!”. In the new edition, you will be given the new options to set up machine guns points to fire INSIDE the camp against possible rioters, making a catapult to send flaming bodies at incoming soldiers to demoralise them. There is even the new feature “Confort Woman/Girl” where your soldiers can contribute to increase the camp’s population over time, and let scientists learn more about the human race!

    Cannibalism among the inmates will be included to those who buy Special Edition!”

    Now, I’m all into RPGs, but a game ENTIRELY devoted to.. Well, you know, it stepping over the line. I wouldn’t like to ever see a Klan-Simulator RPG neither. “Fun with Crosses and Fire”.

    Now, I remember accusation of rascism made against GTA : Vice City, about a mission named “Kill the Haitians”. You were a clear criminal in that game, but you still could NOT DO missions like that if you didn’t felt like it. Not to forget that it was within a – sad, but understandable – context of a gang war. Not out of pure rascism.

    A game that is entirely devoted to immorality(where the game features only about doing totally immoral things in an immoral context) should be.. unnacceptable.

    In your examples up-there, Shamus, I like the idea of a game like that. IF (and only IF) the player would be given the option to NOT do it. If a game depict events of horrible torture that you could do in order to get informations, you should be given the opportunity of NOT doing the torture, taking more risk upon yourself, but at least suffering – in game – for your morality standards.

  107. Squash says:

    I found chopping down female villagers with my knights in Age of Empires 2 hard to do at first. But then I got tired of trying to discriminate. No, really.

  108. Omar says:

    What a lot of people don’t seem to understand:
    Freedom of speech has side effects.

    Crude offensive crap designed to be poor offensive crap is a side effect. Not the purpose of Freedom of Speech. It is a shame we have to put up with it, not a compliment that we do.

    It is utter lunacy that we see people criticizing Protest (a legitimate form of freedom of speech) over sensationalist crap (Like the above game), while praising the game for being the pinnacle of freedom of speech. They are demeaning that freedom, and failing to practice it all at the same time.

    “This is why we need freedom of speech, to protect Christ in a barrel of urine, torture and porn”. No. It’s main purpose is (I hope “is”, and not “was”) to allow discourse on political topics without fear of retribution from the government. “Our taxes should be lower” “King George is an ass” “Maybe blacks should have rights”.

    *********
    On government controls, and our rights:

    Speeding laws, dunk driving laws, and so on are all limitations on our “freedoms”. Laws can exist to protect people by limiting freedom, even when no direct correlation exists. (It is possible to drive drunk, or to speed, or to own a nuclear missle silo and not hurt anyone). However, allowing it is a danger to society, so it can be curtailed as a protective measure, even though you are not demonstratively hurting anyone at any point…. until you have a bad day.

  109. Zaxares says:

    Call me a boring moralist, but I disapprove of any game that glorifies violence, abuse, torture, rape or murder for its own sake. I ADORE games that include these topics (like the Witcher), but make the player think HARD upon their acts, whether such acts are truly necessary for the greater good. Any game which pushes the player into making a decision that violence, abuse and killing for its own sake (“Killing solves all problems! Be cruel and ruthless just because you can!”) is a game that I will not buy.

    Would I ban these games though? That’s a tough question. My logical mind states emphatically that somebody playing and enjoying games like those hasn’t done anything wrong, just like somebody who made a movie about terrorists killing a collection of world leaders, or a somebody who writes a novel featuring a graphic scene of child rape. Yet I can’t shake a distinct feeling of unease and suspicion for somebody who creates/enjoys such media.

    I don’t think I would ban the games though. I still believe quite strongly in freedom of speech, and while I think a great many morons out there in the world would do well to learn when to shut their mouth, I don’t believe in forcibly telling people what they can and can’t say. That starts taking us down a very slippery slope.

    On a related note, I’ve actually played a number of Japanese hentai games. Like any other game genre, they vary widely in terms of story, artwork, characterisation and quality. Some are shallow sex-fests that are little more than gratuitous sexual imagery featuring the same characters. Others are incredibly well put together stories that I would recommend to any gamer, their sexual content (even rape occasionally) notwithstanding.

    There’s only one game in recent memory that really made me lean back in my chair and go, “Ugh.” That was Hitman: Blood Money, in the very first tutorial mission.

    Now, bearing in mind what I said right at the start about games glorifying violence, I actually love the Hitman series because almost without exception, all of Agent 47’s targets are scumbags who deserve death, but are protected from justice by virtue of wealth, political power or any number of reasons. In cases like these, Agent 47, you, are the person that’s sent in to see they get their just desserts. The game DOES allow you to kill innocent civilians (and in pretty gory ways, no less), but you get penalised pretty badly for doing so, and it’s perfectly possible to go through the game without harming a single innocent.

    Going back to the scene that made me pause… I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but I was really torn over whether to deliver the death blow to my target. He was GUILTY, no doubt about that, but as I stood over him as he pleaded for his life, I wondered if he truly deserved death as punishment. I didn’t have a choice though; you HAD to kill him to progress through the mission. That grated on me pretty badly.

    EDIT: Oh yeah, the last ‘secret’ level of Hitman: Blood Money also made me wince. That one involved a large amount of self-preservation though, so it wasn’t as hard to stomach as the first mission was.

    I think guys begging for their lives just gets to me. It’s easier to kill enemies when they’re trying to kill you with nothing but a snarl on their face.

  110. Shamus says:

    Over 110 comments now and I haven’t had to nuke a single one, or even step in and break up a flamewar. There are few places on the web where you could have a discussion on this topic go on for this long with this many people and not end up with a mess.

    You people are class. Thanks for a great discussion.

  111. henrebotha says:

    I do believe the epilepsy-inducing Pokemon episode was pulled.

    My view on this is the following: if there were a video game which inflicted physical harm (disease, disability, injury, death – whatever) on the majority of its players, would that game get banned?

    I say, take the same stance on psychological harm as on physical harm. If you would ban a game that causes broken bones in 95% of players, ban a game that causes schizophrenia (and is scientifically proven to) in 95% of players. (And I would move that a game that causes physical harm be banned, so there you go.)

  112. Narkis says:

    I skipped most of what was written before, so I don’t know what the discussion looks like after 110 posts. Serves me right for not checking the blog every day. :)

    Anyway, to paraphrase a man greater than I: I don’t like what you play, but I’ll defend to the death your right to play it. So, I’d be A-OK with all 6 of your hypothetical torture games. I wouldn’t play any, of course, but I see no reason for anyone to ban it. Playing an “immoral” game or not is a personal choice, and should stay so.

    Now, to answer your question: I tried to play Baldur’s Gate 2 with a pure evil character. I stopped playing entirely at one of the missions you’re given by Bodhi in the second (I think) chapter. The one where you have to kill a merchant crossed the line when the innocent man started pleading for his family. I had to kill him to continue the game, so I never did. Even deleted the save, for good measure. Similarly, in Knights of the Old Republic there was that one woman in Tatooine whose husband was a hunter who died in the line of duty, and left her some thing that could be sold for a lot of credits, if only she had a hunting license. With those credits she could leave that hell-hole and start a new life, iirc, and without them she’d rot on that planet, if the sandpeople didn’t kill them all first. I was playing a not-so-good jedi, who kept doing all sorts of bad things to not-so-bad people, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to click the “take the thing and laugh at her misery” option. Helping her didn’t impact the game whatsoever, other than the goodness meter, so in the end, my Revan was a mass-murdering galactic dictator who helped a poor widow in some forsaken planet in the middle of nowhere.

    Remarkably, I found such uncomfortable moments in all of the good RPGs of old. I’m not certain if the fact that no game I’ve recently played fazes me is a matter of the genre getting watered down, or me getting less sensitive as time goes by.

  113. ShadowDragon8685 says:

  114. Viktor says:

    On the list, I’d play any game with the torture, as long as it wasn’t just a cheap gimmik. If the rest of the game is good, and especially if the torture is a plot/character point(even KotOR had torture sequences of women and teens for no reason), I’ll continue playing. My line seems to be set at betrayal rather than torture, though, because the worst moment for me in a video game is the “purification” quest for the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion. I was perfectly fine getting locked in a house and convincing others to go on killing sprees, but killing the assassins and murderers I’ve worked with was just a bit to far for me. At no point, though, would I advocate banning a game. If stores want to refuse to stock it and people refuse to buy it, that’s fine. But the government has no right to ban any media in the USA.

    I agree with everything the previous poster had to say except the part about the GOP. Offense of minorities is more persecuted than of majorities in the US, IMHO(and if this is too close to political, Seamus, please just nuke this sentance, not the whole comment).

  115. Spider Dave says:

    I’m much too squeamish for such things. Still, torture has been seen in movies, why should games be different?

  116. Greg says:

    I don’t remember ever being offended by a videogame in this way, if something felt sick and wrong then it was probably because that was how it was meant to feel and that’s an interesting thing to explore inofitself. A person might watch a horror movie to experience things that they would normally find unpleasant (such as horror), why do they do that? I can’t pin it down exactly, but I think it’s the same sort of reason I’ve never really been able to be appauled by a game on this level. Perhaps if a game did something suddenly out of character, like having a graphic torture scene in the middle of pikmin, I would have that reaction. I’ve never played a game that did something like that.

    On a side note I don’t think that the effects of videogames are that difficult to study. There are plenty of means to studying it, getting individuals to play games and measuring their response (through test, brainscan or observation in society), looking at relationships between how much people play games and aggression (or perhaps history of violence) in random samples, comparing samples of violent criminals to samples of the normal population for gameplaying, comparing countries (across different countries or the same country across different time points) level statistics to look at relationships between things like censorship laws and crime rates…I’m sure there are more I can’t think of at the moment. A lot of people are doing a lot of work to find out what’s going on here and some are motivated by simple curisoty rather than having an agenda one way or the other. Sure each one of these methods has its problems and any one study can be dismissed for its flaws if you don’t agree with the conclusion, but the sum of the reasearch performed generates a body of literature which I think has a lot to tell us, not just about videogames, but about censorship in general. I think it’d be a shame to disregard it just because most people can find a way to dismiss a single study.

    Edit: I’m also a lil busy today and didn’t read the comments before posting. This time Shamus wins his bet ;)

  117. Shamus says:

    ShadowDragon8685: Sigh. I explicitly said not to go there.

    The last thing I want this thread to turn into is “my chosen party of thugs and crooks is better than YOUR chosen thugs and crooks.”

    I hated nuking it. You said a lot of great stuff until that point.

  118. TehShrike says:

    Just read through the whole thread. The commenter I most associated with was Cuthalion (#46) – I’m not a fan of any content being banned by the civil government, in part because I realize how easily I could be next.

    Also, I’m intrigued by all the people who don’t support banning possibly offensive content such as a movie or a game, but are perfectly willing to ban the offensive content that is an advertisement for the game. Where does that come from?

    If it’s not the government’s business to regulate, it’s not the government’s business. And I think that most things are not the government’s business.

  119. Noble Bear says:

    @ henrebotha (#112)

    If I’m mistaking your piont, please correct me, but it seems you’re arguing that 1)some video games cause a severe and measurable degree of psycological harm and 2) should be banned accordingly.

    I tend to view this as an over simplification of a game’s net impact on an individual. Unlike an impartial physical result what’s impact can be objectively observed and measured (playing this game has resulted in a broken arm) the psychological impact cannot be measured the same way and drawing a line is nearly ipossible because there are too many factors, almost none of which can be standardized. An individuals background, past expirience, mental and emotional maturity are all brought to bear on a game before the power button is turned on.

    if you’re arguing that some expieinces should be restricted from some, then I van tenintivly agree, that why there’s the ESRB so Parents have a fair warning not to buy thier 8yr old GTA, but if your arguing that some games should be banned outright because you percieve them as being hrmful to anyone who would play it, then I must disagree and ask that you reconsider your point.

    Again, if this is incorrect, please clarify.

  120. Leonardo Herrera says:

    On a related note: my son and his friend were avid GTA players since they were eleven or so. At first I was kind of shocked when I found them doing car maneuvers over helpless civilians, and when a cop showed up, they just beat him with a bat. And they laughed a lot over it.

    I was… troubled, as you may imagine. But then talking with them and watching them carefully, they were really disconnected from the “reality” in the video. For them it was just a game. It wasn’t real. It was pointless to get bothered over moral or ethics: those things on the screen were just that, things.

    Now they are fourteen years old. Guess what? They play the game in a different way now. They are less disconnected from it, so you can tell there is a certain amount of ethics in the decisions they make while playing. I still talk with them about this, and they agree the game is kind of different now.

    I find this fascinating.

  121. Jeff says:

    I’m perfectly fine with everything listed there. Censorship is a huge no. I’m from Hong Kong, my family left there to escape China’s ’97 hand over. Censorship thus is directly tied into a totalitarian government like that for me, and I have nothing but the utmost contempt for it.

    That said, I’m a huge nerd and tend to be very empathic towards my little digital friends. I dislike being mean to them, but at the same time while I would never actually BE evil, the inability to be evil would annoy me quite a bit.

    Shooting a digital kid in the face is the same as shooting random nobody to me. Perhaps I have a total disregard for the “OMG our kids!” thing, and think everybody’s equal. Fricking pickpocketing kids.

    The closest thing to pushing my buttons was in FO3 where it’s literally impossible to get a good ending for Tenpenny Tower. I just want everybody to be happy, is that too much to ask?

    @henrebotha:
    I would argue that games have a CONSIDERABLY lower impact than other media that glorify violence. Music and movies, specifically, have considerably greater penetration. While a game is a game (“Turn on the X-Box and pwn some noobs!”), music and movies are a part of life. The US culture where violence is promoted as The solution to all your problems (at least in pretty much every movie) and a flash of a single boob is OMGWTF can be blamed more on lax parents using the TV as a babysitter than Dungeons and Dragons. Er, I mean video games.

  122. ShadowDragon8685 says:

    @Shamus: Then don’t.

    Don’t be afraid to call a spade a spade, a shovel a shovel, and a pack of crooks and liars a pack of crooks and liars.

    I didn’t say the other party was without flaw – they are legion, including being spineless despite having enough of a majority and enough public support to drive the (other other party) out of Washington as more than a rump for the next decade. They flimflam, and when they go corrupt, they REALLY go corrupt, as seen by the attempted sale of ex-Senator Obama’s seat in the Senate.

    But this topic is about censorship. And I am not afraid, nor should you be, to call the party known for censorship attempts out. If we can’t be frank, AND civil, in discussing a topic, then the whole topic should be shut down and locked, for there’s no point in trying to discuss something whilst tiptoeing around naming and blaming major contributors to the problem being discussed – censorship.

    It would be like trying to discuss racial prejudice and lynching without mention the South, Texas, and the KKK, or financial meltdowns and fraud without mentiong Wall Street and naming banks and executives involved in the situation.

    At that point, all you’re doing is venting steam and blowing the whistle, instead of turning the wheel. If you restrict those whom you have invited to discuss the topic from calling out that which they hold culpable FOR the topic of discussion, then there really is no point to it. You can blame moral guardians all you want to, but the fact is that moral guardians only really get traction from one of the two major pollitical parties in this country. There may be some sympathetic to their cause in the other party, but if you can’t call the spade a spade to it’s face, there’s no point in discussing it at all.

    And, Shamus Young, I name you a hypocrit. You invited a discussion about censorship – which is what banning any form of speech, be it a videogame, Jesus in a Barrel of Urine, or the KKK holding a ralley – and then censored me when I choose to contribute to the discussion.

  123. Tom says:

    I take the stance that computer games are a legitimate art form, and one of the most important functions of artistic expression is to take a stance on various aspects of humanity, to challenge conventions and make the audience think – and games have much greater potential in some respects, because they are an active medium in which the user participates; they have the ability to directly ask the player “What would you personally do if you found yourself in this hypothetical situation?” Might the interactive, simulatory nature of a computer game not be very well suited, for example, to an “essay”, for want of a better word, on such topics as the Milgram experiment, arguably one of the most important ever performed, and of which a widespread awareness would surely benefit society, especially in the current global political climate?

    Granted, most computer games don’t even begin to approach such a position, but that is much the case in any artistic field – always remember Sturgeon’s law. There have been a few crude, relatively feeble efforts in that direction, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, for example, and I do believe some of the better written games where you play a morally ambiguous character and guide his interaction with a moral world do cause one to empathise and begin to contemplate such matters – Hitman 2, for example, or VtM:Bloodlines, both got me musing on such matters as basic humanity, personal rights, justice or fairness, the balance of one’s social obligations and personal needs, and so on. Thief 3 also contains at least one instance where the level is deliberately designed to make you stop and think hard, for a moment, about the real implications of the criminal exploits you’ve been reveling in up to that point. Surely computer games could, and therefore should be allowed to present such material as necessary to make a genuinely provocative artistic statement, which necessitates, at the very least, the ability to provide exemptions to a blanket ban for reasons of presenting a valid, valuable opinion or provoking serious thought or discussion (and, particularly in the case of games due to their direct involvement, self-examination.)

  124. Shamus says:

    ShadowDragon8685: The previous 100 commenters managed to weigh in and discuss this topic without taking the political swipes you did. No, you didn’t need to bring party politics into this. (Particularly American politics. This issue is bigger than the US.) Oh, and you admit your party has flaws, the chief of which is their reluctance to oppose the OTHER party? How magnanimous of you.

    If I wanted this site to be about politics, it would be about MY politics. If I will abstain from such discussion on my own site, then you can do the same. If you want to post petty screeds against the other guys, do so on someone else’s site. The whole wide internet is lousy with that sort of thing, and I run this place as an alternative to reading another tiresome thread of playschool-level political sniping.

    You know, cheap shots like this one:

    http://www.gamespot.com/news/6145659.html

    And you have the audacity to call me a hypocrite? YOUR party has no more allegiance to freedom than the other. You just disagree on which freedoms need to be curtailed “for the common good”.

    Last warning.

  125. ShadowDragon8685 says:

  126. Shamus says:

    ShadowDragon8685: I made a simple request to you as a guest, and you have now broken it three times, as well as insulting me. (Twice.)

    This is the third time you have dragged party politics into this thread. Needlessly. You have shown contempt for me and the work I do here and the time I put into this thing. I have no desire to officiate the flamewar you want so badly to start.

    Go away.

  127. briatx says:

    ETA:
    And to answer the actual question: I think I would be bothered by any torture scenario. I was uncomfortable with the torture quest in WoW which pretty much just involved hitting the “1” key and the NPC saying “no I won’t tell you anything!” “okay I’ll tell you everything.” I think I would only find torture in a game offensive if the character was portrayed as good and the game seemed to endorse the characters’ actions.


    Censorship:

    I haven’t had time to read the whole thread yet so I apologize if I’m repeating things that have already been said. I have a few thoughts.

    1) I don’t think we should ban any speech that doesn’t directly incite violence, etc.

    2) Nonetheless, I am in favor of limiting minors’ ability to buy this kind of thing. Mostly because I think such limits help protect the rights of adults by answering “but think of the children!!” concerns.

    3) Also, I think there’s a good chance that the most harmful media is not the media we find most disturbing. Viewing ’24’ is probably more likely to affect a person’s opinion about torture than watching ‘Hostel’ though I probably couldn’t stomach watching the latter.

  128. Omar said:

    “*********
    On government controls, and our rights:

    Speeding laws, dunk driving laws, and so on are all limitations on our “freedoms”. Laws can exist to protect people by limiting freedom, even when no direct correlation exists. (It is possible to drive drunk, or to speed, or to own a nuclear missle silo and not hurt anyone). However, allowing it is a danger to society, so it can be curtailed as a protective measure, even though you are not demonstratively hurting anyone at any point…. until you have a bad day.”

    This entire argument is entirely pointless. Laws have existed in the past that allowed people to own other people as slaves–does that make such laws right?

    The only right laws are ones that protect individual rights. Society is a conglomeration of individuals and has no rights, desires, wants, or needs apart from the rights, desires, wants, and needs of individuals.

    Traffic violations are a poor choice of example simply because their existence depends on the underlying assumption that the roads ought to be publicly owned and the terms of their use set by the government. In a proper society, it could be illegal to drive drunk and speed–not because the gov’t says so, but because the owners of the road say so as a condition for using the road. You are breaking a contract by breaking their rules and they can rightfully refuse to allow you to make use of their property, just as a store owner can chuck you out if you decide to poop in the display toilet.

    A private citizen owning a weapon of mass destruction (I hate that term, but oh well) is another situation altogether. Citizens of a country delegate their right of retaliatory force to the government as a necessary part of setting up an *objective* agent to enforce the rules that civilization requires. While we retain the right of self-defense in an emergency, (and thus the right to own weapons FOR our self-defense) there is no conceivable situation in which the use of a nuclear missile could be considered an act of *personal* self-defense. The *only* personal use of such a weapon is to initiate force against others (which no one has the right to do). It is therefore legitimate for the gov’t to enact legislation that prohibits individuals from owning such a device–while the gov’t can still legitimately use them in general self defense against other, aggressive nations.

    Freedom of speech, by its very nature, cannot be restricted simply to political speech, because all speech can be construed as political and vice versa. For a principle to work, it must be upheld universally, as an absolute (in its proper context, of course, but still, absolute within that context). That means that freedom of speech must encompass even speech that you–or anyone else–finds ugly.

  129. fhg1893 says:

    Censorship is always a tough issue. While I personally oppose censorship, there is no denying that we as a people have a major problem with certain acts being depicted.

    Shamus appears to be trying to locate the proverbial “third-rail” of what ought to be accepted in art. For the most part, we tend to draw the line, at least on a personal level when it comes to harm or violence against children. And while it is certainly legitimate to ask the questions, “where do we draw the line?” and “how do we decide?” it occurs to me that this is probably not the right way to construct the problem. It is the easiest and most accessible way, but there are no good solutions to this problem as long as we approach it in this way.

    Asking those questions yields no good answers for three reasons.

    First, everybody has a different standard of what they believe is acceptable. While we can move to general very broadly defined standards, it’s difficult to develop specific standards. Take torture as Shamus mentioned. When is it okay to show torture? Is it okay to show torture for no good reason? If so, then who are you allowed to show being tortured? Everybody answers these questions differently, and sometimes, opinions are wildly divergent as to what is okay, and what is not okay. Furthermore, it’s pretty clear that even when we do agree on standards, those standards can shift over time. We see this all the time with movies – especially with reference to ratings standards.

    Second, is the aforementioned “slippery slope” argument. When you start banning one form of art, or one particular thing to please one group, when do you stop? Take the LittleBigPlanet controversy. We got rid of one song to please one group, how far do we go to please that group? Should we stop making video-games with music because music is sometimes considered haram (forbidden) by Islam?

    Third, asserting freedom of speech, sadly, isn’t enough. This is probably the most controversial of my points, especially given the libertarian nature of the internet, but hear me out. Those in favor of censorship will not be swayed by the claim that games are an art form, and must therefore be protected. And indeed, while I believe that games can certainly have artistic content, and many have artistic merit, the powers in favor of censorship have an ace in the hole – video games are still largely a business. If you doubt that video games are a business, then read the EULA.

    You see, for this reason, we must approach the problem differently. We can talk endlessly about what ought to be acceptable in video games, but we’ll never get a good answer that doesn’t amount to a popular opinion poll. It’s only of interest to statisticians, and is not a good way to resolve this problem. Opinions are just opinions, they are not solutions – and moreover, an opinion will always be representative of a bias. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with bias, however, bias is not a solution.

    It may be of value to first establish where business comes to an end and art begins. This might not be possible though I suppose the simple answer is in the content. All content could be considered art, but this is leading us in the same direction – what content is objectionable, and what is not?

    So perhaps the first thing that has to happen is for more public leaders to begin viewing the content of games as an art form. This seems to be a certainty over time – I think it goes without saying that Mr. Roger “Games will never be art” Ebert is representative of a dying breed.

    Perhaps games are “better than art.” Their interactivity, their demand for engagement is in my humble opinion something which sets video games apart from really, all other forms of art. No other form of art is as interactive, and as immersing as a well constructed video game. A person can watch “Dawn of the Dead” one thousand times, and it will never quite measure up to a single chapter of Left 4 Dead.

    And that scares people.

    There’s a reason for that, but it’s not a good one.

    Whenever something becomes very popular it always attracts its detractors and its emulators. When “First Blood” was released, I’ve been informed that sales of “Rambo Knives” soared. And as much as we hate Jack Thompson, the fact is that it does seem like there were a relatively small number of Grand Theft Auto inspired acts of violence after the game was released. Of course, millions of us can play the game and have never committed a violent crime, and probably never will, myself included, (at least up to Vice City anyway.)

    I think what the censorship lobby fails to understand is that games did not CAUSE the crime – the PERSON did. Games are an easy scapegoat, the violence was already present within society.

    Of course, arguing about fixing all of society extends the scope of this discussion well beyond what can be reasonably discussed, and so therefore, I must confine the task before us as to suggesting a better way to construct the problem.

    And so, this is what I propose. It is not the public that needs to come to see video games as an art form, this is inevitable. It is the publishers and developers. And not all of them – clearly, many already do see games as art. For evidence, consider some of your all-time favorites – Half-Life 2, KoTOR, Mass Effect, Team Fortress 2, Halo, Fallout 3, etc. But do you really think that Electronic Arts sees the latest incarnation of Madden as art?

    If we desire a solution, then it is the developers we must convince to stand up for their own freedom of expression. Bethesda made a tactical error on this front when the released a sanitized version of Fallout 3 in Australia. Instead of doing so, it would have been better for Bethesda to demand its rights under the protections of freedom of speech.

    And that ladies and gentlemen is I believe our solution to the problem. EA and Microsoft need to be shown that games can’t be seen as just business anymore. Smaller studios like Valve need to resist attempts to be acquired by the bigger fish, and we as gamers need to support them.

    This might be self-regulating. While I know that there is much ink spilled about the boom in so-called “casual games” the fact of the matter is that the percentage of people who play games is only going to grow. As Shamus has pointed out, “casual games” are actually a boon for advocates of freedom of speech. Maybe not right now, but give it time.

    Think about your first experience with games. Casual gamers won’t be casual gamers forever – and who is more likely to punish someone like EA, and reward someone like Valve – the casual gamer, or the hardcore gamer? But we have to give newcomers some place to start – and as much as you may like Gears of War, that’s not a good starting point.

    So I’ve got a feeling that this isn’t actually a war between censors and freedom of speech – it’s just more generational strife. And if you see the problem through that lens, then all you need to realize is that the younger generation always triumphs. Time, ladies and gentlemen is on our side – at least for the moment.

    And so the next time you hear about the lack of “hardcore games” maybe try repeating “the younger generation always wins.”

    And we, not the censors, ARE the younger generation. Welcome to the winning team.

  130. RibbitRibbit says:

    I was taught that torture is wrong. As in morally reprehensible. Not only torture but other things as well. I’d rather not do those things in videogames.

    I might be a hypocrite, stirs the audience. Well, in a sense. I was inured to violence in games, and the graphic display of such violence had only become more and more realistic and abundant. This, I got inured to as well. So in time, I might get inured to torture in videogames. Who knows? After all, if a game makes noise in the media, and as a result sells more copies, then it makes more money and the studios conclude that “the audience wants games with more torture in them” – and the cycle continues. Maybe there is a point where people will turn away in disgust and stop buying. And maybe this point will arrive well after Shamus’ 5th item, or the 6th. Because the target audience was already trained that this is the way things are supposed to be in order to “be fun”.

    So, censorship? An interesting word, that. I am not against censorship (it actually can save human lives, as in the case of keeping military secrets from being exposed in the daily newspaper) but I am not for applying it to culture. What *must* be done IMHO is – going back to my first sentence – improving education. Not only labeling the games clearly and properly, but also conducting discussions like these in schools. Together with legislation, education is the government’s way of influencing the society’s moral development, and I think it’s a better way.

    (An aside: The Freedom of Speech, while a noble ideal, does have its limits. I will not protect anybody’s right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theatre.)

  131. Miako says:

    Yar Kramer,
    I decry that crazy Fundie video game, for being racist and utterly moronic. I hate the premise of the whole game.

    Culthalion,
    Presumably hate crime legislation should apply to all equally, or else the judges have a field day striking it down. but I do get your point. Oh, and although I oppose creationism, anyone calling that terrorism is idiotic. Terrorism is the Dover Trap, where fundamentalists convince school boards to put creationism in their science classes, and then stick the school board (and taxpayers) with the bill for fighting their legal fight for them. That imho is immoral and wrong. Creationism belongs in a philosophy course.

    Video Games have been known to cause physical harm. One Thief fan mission is known for causing heart attacks. I know someone who made a real-life haunted house, and then a third of the people who went through it wet themselves during the ‘entertainment’. I could see a video game doing likewise.

    I think at some point, they have to come with warning labels, and at another point, should only be attempted after psychological counseling and done within the confines of a secure medical environment.

  132. Texas says:

    I get the feeling I’m pretty alone on this, but FPSs based on historical wars (e.g. Battlefield 1942) have always seemed kind of offensive to me. It seems tacky to me to profit like this off of a war where people fought and died in real life. A game seems different to me than, say, a war movie, because a movie will treat the loss of human life with gravity and respect, while a game will wait a few seconds and then move you to the next faceless protagonist.

  133. TickledBlue says:

    Tough question that exists very much in the shades of grey realms. To my mind there is no clear cut answer. Its a bit of a soapbox issue for me and I could rant all day, instead I’ll just make a couple of points that I think are valid.

    1) Personally I don’t want any external agency telling me what I can or cannot do. Personally I don’t trust anyone (least of all a government voted in by the ‘masses’) to make a decision about the media I consume. I mean, if I ever got into government I’d probably ban all those Anne Rice vampire porn things (I will not do them justice by calling them books). I’m sure there’s a few of you out there that would be a bit peeved about that. Of course once this starts to extend beyond myself we hit trouble – obviously I should not be allowed to drag a 5 year old into my lounge room and make them watch me play My Little Pony online or something. Oh the horror!

    2) The flip side of this is that in order to live as part of a social structure then you need to conform to its social norms. This is why we have jails – it is not to punish the wicked it is to segregate those who do not follow our societies norms from the pack. Doing this is how a society protects itself and ensures it continues into the future. I may piss a few people off here but, as a society we determine what is good and evil (and no I’m not going to enter into a debate on any quasi religious beliefs that there is any universal morality or ethics). Look outside our little box just a bit and there is stuff which will ‘shock’ us – dogs as a valid food choice for example.

    3) Unfortunately we live in a society that due to rampant greed and commercialism, uses fear to ensure high levels of consumption. As the things that we are afraid of mount we are more and more willing to abdicate our freedoms to the government in exchange for a greater sense of security (regardless or not whether we are actually more secure or not – we just want to feel that ‘something is being done’). We casually hand our civil liberties to outside authorities and ask them to tell us what to do. Having said that, there are social misfits out there who would be more than happy to violate my civil liberties and I couldn’t stop them… so I like the fact that there are some checks and balances in place to discourage this behaviour, and in most cases exact some form of revenge.

    The upshot of all this is, that at the end of the day, while we may not have personally handed our decision making capabilities to a schizophrenic and conflicted government, we as a society have. All we can do is hope that the checks and balances in place (legal process, voting, peaceful demonstration etc) ensure that it never gets too stupid.

    Ugh – see told you I’d rant… anyway to answer your question. Most games give me some level of concern – First person shooter: I have to kill all these guys with these guns… bigger guns are better ’cause I can kill faster etc, roleplaying games: so I get experience points for killing another species and I have no way of completing this quest without the killing. Lemmings: I have to sacrifice a couple of them to save the rest.

    Having said that I still enjoy them, I’m capable of understanding the ramifications and looking beyond the window dressing to the mechanics or enjoying the story for what it is. I’ve yet to find a game I stopped playing on ‘moral’ grounds, usually it was because it was boring or frustrating or I’d finished it. But then I am a well informed gamer and I pick and choose my games with care. While I can’t say that I specifically did not play a game because it conflicted with my own set of ethics I’m sure that subconsciously I have decided not to buy games from just those reasons – for example I have almost no games based on real wars (Call of Duty, Commandos, etc) but I have tonnes based on fake ones (Quake Wars, Battlefield, Halo series). Those that I do have express a similar opinion to what I have (such as Defcon which clearly highlights the stupidity of nuclear war while being a good strategic challenge).

    So I guess at the end of all that incoherent rambling I’m saying that I have an internal censor that is so ingrained in my being that I don’t even realise it is there most of the time. Why should I need a government to try and help out? In fact whenever their version and mine come into conflict I become morally outraged and write huge blog comments to show how upset I am ;)

  134. Dave says:

    Nope.. no banning.. I know I’m late here.. and that I’m past the point where anyone will probably read this.. but..

    I played D&D back when people thought I’d start sacrificing animals.. and then children.. and then burn my town … or possibly just myself. _They_ said the game would turn me into those things… Not bad parenting.. not whining schools.. but D&D..

    Well.. none of that happened.. I didn’t even have Monopoly turn me into Donald Trump.. nope.. none of that.. turns out all those things I’d become had to have me chose to become them.

    I’m sure the opportunity to sacrifice the odd puppy was there if I’d looked for it.. but by playing D&D none materialized in my room .. no voices told me to wander into the sewers..

    Nope.. no banning.. there are no games out there.. NONE that can make you do anything. It’s even possible to put in a game you don’t like and not press a single button… the game can’t even make you push buttons!

  135. RibbitRibbit said:

    “(An aside: The Freedom of Speech, while a noble ideal, does have its limits. I will not protect anybody's right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theatre.)”

    It doesn’t have limits, it has *context*. While you have absolute freedom of speech, this also means that you accept responsibility for the consequences of your speech–and some speech (such as shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater) has direct effects of physical harm on people and property. You’ve violated someone’s rights–most notably, the rights of the theater owner.

    It violates no one’s rights to make a game depicting something they find horrific. They don’t have to buy the game. So it’s covered under the principle of free speech.

  136. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I dont have the will to read all of the comments,but Ill just answer your question.There never was,nor ever will be,a game that is too much for me.Firstly,Im a misantrope,so nothing done to a human(oid)ever fazes me.But,even though I love animals,and animal cruelty does bother me(postal 2,and the cat silencer),I still see it as just a video game and go past it.

    I dont see any point in public censorship.Sure,if a parent doesnt want their kid to play/view/listen/do something,its their right.But for a goverment to ban something from children is just dumb.

  137. Mari says:

    Do I believe in censorship? That’s a fine line to draw. In answer to all five questions my answer is “no.” But I probably wouldn’t play any of the games in question unless they had pretty compelling stories that included a reason for including said torture. But I do have lines on censorship. I believe anything depicting actual illegal acts should be hidden away in some dusty legal vault after it’s used to convict the participants of committing those crimes. That is to say a movie depiction of rape or torture (which is simulated) would earn no ire from me but home movie footage of say Jeffrey Dahmer engaging in rape and torture should never see the light of day. Make sense? As such, so-called “snuff” films would be right out as they theoretically show real people being really killed which is illegal in any instance except government-sanctioned legal execution.

    As to me personally playing games with “edgy” content: with a compelling story that justifies such content I would probably play along. Assuming it doesn’t involve children. As mentioned by yourself, MintSkittles, and others, Prey bothered me and I put it down because I couldn’t avoid harming children. It’s just my own line in the sand and pretty much always has been. I wouldn’t put a game down unless it forced me to cooperate with such an act, though.

    Honestly, I’ve played through a few games as a pretty psychotic character. And I enjoyed doing bad things. As Dave mentioned, it hasn’t yet turned me into a slavering death-dealing Satan-worshipping monster. Then again, playing as a paragon of virtue hasn’t yet turned me into one of those either.

  138. ClearWater says:

    The game moment that went too far for me was shooting people in Wolfenstein 3D. (Somehow in 2D it wasn’t a big deal.) But then I got used to it, although that fact sometimes worries me.

  139. DocTwisted says:

    I’m against governmental censorship in any and all art forms.

    However, that doesn’t mean I want to play the games in your hypothetical, or the RL example given.

    I believe it’s the right of the consumer to decide what they will or won’t expose themselves to, and it’s the artist’s responsibility to be upfront about what kinds of potentially controversial content their work contains. Of course, in some games it can be a selling point (Sexy Beach 3 just exists to be sexually explicit, No More Heroes is a slaughterfest to rival Kill Bill).

    Also, I believe that store owners/managers have the right to decide what they will or won’t sell within their own store… especially now, when any work can be purchased via the internet.

  140. Kerin says:

    Yeah, I guess none of it really offends me.

  141. Christian Groff says:

    ** What about an enemy civilian instead of a soldier?

    This is where I would draw the line on gruesome torture. If it was a mankiller, sure, let’s give him an eye for an eye – he deserved it, especially if he was unrepentant. If it was an enemy soldier, then there is no reason to assume that being nice to him will help – the Japanese armies in WWII were insane and usually would bite your jugular if you gave them any leeway. (Well, the kamikazes, I don’t want to offend any Japanese readers whose grandparents fought in that war.)

    But when you go to mangling people whose only crime was living in enemy territory, innocents who had done nothing wrong, that’s where I stop. All the options below, not an option – I do not believe in revenge in RL, it only hurts you worse.

  142. MattF says:

    I wouldn’t play any of them, but I wouldn’t want everybody else to be stopped from playing them. That just seems selfish.

    I find it interesting that you (Shamus) observe that movies and TV shows can “get away with” more than video games. Let me also throw in that books can generally “get away with” more than movies. (I’ve read more horrific things than I have ever seen depicted.)

    So why is this? Part of it, I think, is how much we “own the experience” of different kinds of media. When someone discusses their video game exploits, they rarely say something like, “And then I made the Hulk throw a tank”; instead, they usually put the experience in the first person: “And then, I threw the tank”. This level of “owning the experience” is not to be seen in movies or books. Perhaps, on a gut level, censors are afraid that this also means that the way video games communicate to players is more intimate and less subject to thoughtful analysis — not that I agree, of course.

    But back to censorship. I generally appreciate it if the producers of media are self-regulating (putting their own ratings on things so you can decide whether or not you want to see it or want your kids to see it), just so I know whether or not I will enjoy myself (which is the reason I consume most media anyway). As long as censorship remains at that level, and doesn’t trespass into “It’s illegal to even make this kind of media”, I’m happy.

  143. Tonko says:

    I’m another one who was made a little uncomfortable in the WoW expansion torture quest. Not explicit, beyond the text written expressing the target’s pain, but still. Though that other quest mentioned at some point far before this comment, where you steal children from a primitive tribe, doesn’t bother me at all–I found the lore justified it fine, since the pups were offspring of a tribe become tainted and evil, and were being rescued.

    Though I did find myself idly thinking, as I killed the caretakers and stuffed the babies into my backpack, that it would be hard not to grow up traumatized by what I was doing to them. I didn’t care much, though, I needed the rep, and like I said, the lore was justifying it, and, of course, it’s just a game.

    I wouldn’t do a daily “torture the prisoner” quest, though.

    I wouldn’t play any game with explicit torture for fun, but then gore and horror games, and FPS games, aren’t my thing, and I avoid them, unless I have to play them at work (I’m a video game tester). I actually think I would have no problem telling the resourcing manager I was going home if I had to kill children in a game, or torture anything. An FPS title I’ve been testing recently was hard enough to get into, it took a day before I was able to get through a level without wincing. (Two weeks later, I admit I’m pretty inoculated against the guilt, but playing the same levels over and over will do that, plus the people I’m shooting ARE all baddies.)

    I’ve had friends say how much fun the evil side of KOTOR is, and I don’t think worse of them for it, but I know I couldn’t play that because I don’t enjoy doing “bad things” in games. I play for fun, and if it makes me uncomfortable, I won’t be having fun.

    In closing of that somewhat redundant-by-now comment, I would not want to censor games. Age-restricting, yes, censorship, no.

  144. Daktylo says:

    The last battle of the first Persona game for the PSX. That stupid butterfly thing that would change itself from taking damage from magic to taking damage from physical damage, and healing whenever the damage taken was from the opposite type. Freaking lasted me an hour and a half irl. That was my most aggravating moment in a game.

  145. Viktor says:

    For those talking about age-restricting, are you saying companies can’t sell to minors, or are you talking about a system similar to the ESRB where it is just “recommended” for certain ages? IMHO, it’s a parent’s job to decide what their kids can and can’t play, and if they want their 4-year old to have GTA IV, that’s their decision.

  146. Snelf27 says:

    I think like most responders I wouldn’t have a problem with any of the torture options existing but wouldn’t want to play any of them myself .

    However I find that I am more comfortable with the options as they become closer to torturing a kid for no reason. I find that my general discomfort with that sort of thing in video games comes from the part of me that always looks for why I’m being taught something and how much I’m being meant to feel like this character is me. in the first two I could see myself getting into that situation and it being difficult to choose which way to go in the others it would never even be on the table. back in the 90’s a friend of mine was playing elder scrolls and he told me he wanted to make video games that molded people’s minds and made them become brainwashed to be better people. I don’t think that video games are currently any more of an influence on people than any other media but I also don’t believe that I’m not at all influenced by the games I play, the movies I watch, and the books I read .

  147. Hirvox says:

    I’m one of those guys who’ll just grab some more popcorn when someone is shot on the screen, so I could say that there hasn’t been any games that downright offended me. But one of my pet peeves is consequences applied badly or not at all: Either nobody cares when you kill a man in the middle of the city in full view of everyone, or the whole world knows that my character is a murderer and aggroes on the spot.

    Of course, there are some exceptions where the game designers added a little something to make you feel guilty afterwards. For example, Zone of the Enders. I was busy fighting some mecha mooks and threw one into a building. Amidst the rumbling, there was this sound effect of people screaming in terror.. oops.

    And that’s why I didn’t feel offended by the Torture Game 2. There is no feedback at all. Sure, you’ll kill the guy eventually, but he doesn’t even flinch. It kind of reminds me of a quote from Sin City: Hartigan was right about you. You can’t get it up unless I scream. You’re pathetic! You’re pathetic.

    Is it sadism if there is no suffering? Is it possible to torture a masochist?-)

  148. Miako says:

    A different thought.
    In Kulthea, going to the dark side (aka the undead side) is known as “the DM takes your character sheet away” You can play selfish, thieving characters, sure, but they’re still on the side of the light.I’m not sure if this removes depth to the game, or adds a different sort of depth.

    Certainly in Kulthea, you DON’T steal from your own party. That’s just likely to get you killed. monsters are REALLY dangerous there.

  149. ehlijen says:

    Viktor:

    Yes, it s a parents job. So it should be necessary for the parents to buy the games and give them to their children under the recommended age, just like cinemas will let anyone into any movie as long as someone of the appropriate age is accompanying them.

    One step in making parents responsible for their children is to remove the ability of children to circumvent that by buying things their parents should be aware of on their own.

  150. neminem says:

    A bit late, but: I wouldn’t want to ban anything. Maybe there’ve been games that went Too Far, but I would still actively protest them getting banned.

    That said, I think it’s sort of amusing that my first thought, here, was something from WoW: in the new expansion, there’re two factions, and you have to choose one. One is clearly likeable and just wants to do their own thing; the other goes around killing the first one just for fun. But the latter had items I wanted, so I had to choose that one, even though I hated them as a faction. That annoys me, when a game offers you a choice between actions that have nominal story effects, but forces you to choose between them based on external criteria like what rewards you’ll get out of them. I suppose, for the same reason, I could consider a game that mostly rewarded actions I would approve of, and then right at the end said, “alright, now torture an innocent kid for fun”, would bother me. But I still would actively lobby for it not getting banned; I’d merely say it was a horrible game for doing that, and tell people they shouldn’t buy it.

  151. Decius says:

    I am way late. But I read all of the 149 previous productive comments. Kudos to me.

    I would ban any and all of the listed “torture” games if, and only if, there was no way to avoid the tourture.

    In your example, where torture IS the game, there was no choice; the torture was the entire game. There is no moral choice in the game you described; the choice had already been made. I find the choice reprehensible, and I would totally ban any games of that type.

    If, instead, torture was an option that the player could choose to take or choose to avoid, then I would allow it, and even play it if its quality were up to par.

    Note that my ban is absolute, but covers only the area inside of my home.

    I do not trust anyone, even myself, much less the government, to decide what gets banned in any area larger than a household. Period. That includes all forms of speech that do not directly harm individuals. Examples:(“Fire”, which causes a panic and harms individuals: not protected. “We ought to send $RACE back where they came from”: Protected. “Lets go beat up those filthy $RACE”: not protected)

    Side notes:
    1) I played Super Columbine Massacre RPG. It is in generally poor taste, has poor gameplay, a difficulty curve like the Grand Canyon, and an incredibly well-researched and thought-provoking storyline. I recommend the first two-thirds to anyone who doesn’t understand the motivations of the killers.

    2) I know exactly what people I am willing to kill in real life, and for what reasons. That means I also know what people I am not willing to kill, nor allow to be killed. I have already made the moral judgments required in these cases, so violent games neither affect nor cause an affect in me.

  152. henrebotha says:

    @ Noble Bear and Jeff:

    My point is almost exactly as Noble Bear puts it.

    “if you're arguing that some expieinces should be restricted from some, then I van tenintivly agree, that why there's the ESRB so Parents have a fair warning not to buy thier 8yr old GTA, but if your arguing that some games should be banned outright because you percieve them as being hrmful to anyone who would play it, then I must disagree and ask that you reconsider your point.”

    Are you saying that if a game was harmful to anyone who would play it, it should not be banned? Because to me that sounds completely ridiculous. Also, I’m not saying games should be banned outright because I perceive them as harmful. Instead, I’m saying that if all of modern science perceives a game as harmful (with a high degree of certainty, following scientific tests and experiments), then ban the game outright. My perception has nothing to do with it because I am not a learned scientist in any of the relevant fields.

  153. Lupis42 says:

    I would not ban this, though I doubt strongly that I would play it. (I might be offended, but there also just wouldn’t be any fun. But I just don’t understand the desire to ban. If there is one idea in the world that I think should be eradicated, I would eradicate the idea of eradicating ideas. But that would be self defeating. My ideals are logical paradoxes, and so I must go and have a beer and watch TV.

  154. tricky11 says:

    I don’t think banning is necessary for as long as parents supervise and guide their children. A lot of negative outcomes for the game which includes grinding of wow gold.

  155. Tacoma says:

    A game, movie, book, piece of music, etc. can be bad enough that I don’t want to view it. Maybe I would suggest to friends that they not view it and give my reasons. But there is absolutely no reason why a fiction should be censored. Any fiction of any topic, period.

    Real stuff, yes. Generaly because the production of the nonfiction is harmful and the production should be suppressed – such as in child porn and snuff and such.

    And I believe it’s wrong for someone to commit a crime, write a novel, and make money of the story while in jail. But don’t censor him! Let him write it! But the victims or their families would own the copyright and all proceeds of the work. Sure this might discourage criminals from producing these works and so create a chilling effect on the art. But it would be far more wrong to let them profit from it because that might encourage the original crime in the same way allowing sale of child porn encourages production of child porn.

    But if you make something up, I would never want it to be censored. Yes that includes slander and libel against me personally. People can handle a few taunts and malignment of their reputations without getting the law involved.

    Absolutely no censorship of fiction. Almost no censorship of nonfiction. And that covers everything.

  156. Nefrai says:

    It’s not often I feel I game has “gone to far”. The one time I can remember is in Kagero’s Deception on Playstation one. You essentially play the “bad guy”, but when they ask you to make a trap to kill a kid that wanders in the castle I had issue with that.

    Of course, it turned out to be something else, but you fully believe you just set a trap to kill an innocent villager child…untill after you do it.

    You can also put Silent Hill one into a similar catagory…yes, the child was possessed, but still disturbing. I could not figure out how to save a single good person in that game, and felt bad having to eventually kill every single “friend” you had in it. But I would not consider it “bannable”.

  157. I’ve always found the racism and militarism in a lot of military games to be pretty deeply unpalatable. Games where you fight some racist simulacrum of the Chinese or Arabs or what have you don’t do it for me, thank you.

  158. rayen says:

    I wouldn’t ban the game at any point, like you i would be worried about the people who made and unlike you worried about the people who played it more than once. especially if it was the child scenario. as far as games that have gone too far i don’t think i’ve played any. I’m very choosey when it come to the games i play and i don’t play horror games so there isn’t anything morbid to see usually.

    and to shadowdragon because your big deleted posts caught my attention as i scrolled down,It isn’t hard to not bring politics into this. and it’s easy to talk about racial discrimination or coporate fraud without bring uyp specific examples unless your talking about specific examples of racial discrimination or coporate fraud. you are probably gone now anyway sio this is pintless but i still feel the need to talk about it.

    also shamus becasue i’ve been fighting it youe post editor thing is broken.

  159. Corsair says:

    How is fighting Red Chinese or Arab Terrorists racist? The implication there is that the act of being engaged in a war with a country dominated by a single ethnic group that isn’t the same as the country you’re from is inherently racist.

  160. Nathan Abrahams says:

    There was a level in Hitman: Contracts where you had to recover evidence that a certain mob figure had been complicit in the death of the daughter of a lawyer who had prosecuted him. You were supposed to find the girl, kill the mobster, his defense attorney, and escape undetected. You didn’t -have- to escape undetected, but it gives the most points, and a bonus weapon. My first runthrough, I was going for maximum stealth for the bonus. (For important context, it takes place at a fetish party being held in a meat-packing plant. Let that sink in for a moment.) So I find the girl (or what’s left of her) upstairs, body wrapped in a plastic sheet suspended from the ceiling by a meathook, with her dismembered arm on the floor beneath her (the ‘evidence’ I was to recover.) The walls were covered with pictures of her, and vile language written in blood, all illuminated by red candles.

    I was furious. What kind of sick person would put the player through this? I was required by the strictures of the mission to refrain from killing everything in the building that breathed, so I finished the job and got out clean. But I went right back in with a shotgun and did things the loud way. Most satisfying was killing the (literal) butcher who had personally killed the girl, who you’re normally not allowed to kill.

    After gunning down the mobster, his lawyer, his bodyguards, and everything in the building that moved, I swore never to replay the level again.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to Didacsoy Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.