And lo, Steerpike reappears on the front page of his own website. I’ve been super-busy! Thank heavens for Lewis and Mat and Gregg keeping stuff alive in my absence.
This month’s IGDA Culture Clash column was whipped up in a hurry. I had a whole other one done, but realized it wasn’t really going anywhere. And as it happened I’d just read an article I wanted to comment on. So while I had no intention of discussing the Dead Island trailer, I did. I do. Here.
Special Bonus Content! Just now a good friend of mine wrote a beautifully crafted email to me, reacting to the trailer. I’m including that at the bottom of this, because it’s worthy of discussion. Check it out!
Suffer the Little Children
By Matthew Sakey
March 20(ish), 2011
Originally published by the International Game Developers Association
Leftovers: last month’s morbid column dealt a lot with our reaction to death in games, and how some games are trying to expand their ability to affect us in this area. I got good feedback, so let’s discuss further.
For a while there all anyone could talk about was the Dead Island trailer. It’s cinematically skillful, ingeniously cryptic, and absolutely chilling. If the purpose of a game trailer is to get said game into the minds of potential buyers, then that one is probably the most successful in the history of game trailers. It took a game most people had never heard of and shoved it bodily up the rectum of gamer consciousness.
During the hubbub, CNN’s Omar Gallaga wrote an article. Among his remarks: “The Dead Island trailer wouldn’t bother me so much if it didn’t feel like part of a growing, disturbing trend in video games.” The trend? That developers seem to be getting awfully casual about endangering, harming, or even killing children in their games.
There is no arguing with Gallaga’s principal statement. Games that include violence against children have increased in recent years. Now, “increase” is kind of a tricky word here, since we’re talking an increase from zero to, like, five or six. Perhaps because of that it’s more noticeable. Still, it’s happening. Bioshock took a huge risk with the Little Sisters back in 2007, and prior to it, there were games about saving kids, and possibly games in which kids were hurt, but never by the protagonist and certainly never as a centerpiece of the game. Nowadays we have Dead Space 2, Heavy Rain, Dead Rising 2, and, I’m sure, others – not exactly a torrent, but more than none. As with all media taboos, the first step is the hardest and for better or worse Bioshock took it.
Gallaga’s issue was less that it’s happening and more how: in the case of the Dead Island trailer, in which a little girl dies pretty horribly, he argues that “[the preview] strikes me as exploitative and cynical, a successful marketing ploy meant to evoke shock and pity.”
I saw it as shocking and cynical but not exploitative. Then again, I’m not a parent. I also wasn’t as disturbed by the child’s fate as a good friend of mine [in this case our own Jason Dobry, not Mike, the friend who wrote the email that appears below -S], father of two daughters, one of whom is about the same age as the Dead Island girl. He described enduring her terrified final moments as evoking an emotional response so strong he felt it physically. Other parents have noted similar responses. He also reacted differently to Heavy Rain, as did many others, particularly fathers with young sons. I suppose my less emotional response marks me as an inhuman monster, but I already knew that. The key is that things strike different chords in different people.
Whether the actual intent of the trailer was merely a marketing ploy is hard to say. Did some advertising knucklehead say, hey, let’s kill a kid? I personally doubt it, and to be honest I think the trailer drew attention more for its cinematic craftiness than for the fact that a ten year old goes out the window.
Here’s a point we can’t overlook: that child’s mom dies, too. So does her dad. Some other guy burns to death. All the people who were chasing her down the hall were already dead and back up. Lots of people die in that trailer. And one of Gallaga’s arguments is that through sheer experience we’re not really bothered by grown-up deaths (or turtle cruelty in Super Mario Bros)… which may mean that if developers keep on with endangering children, we might become inured to seeing that in our games too.
This is where I have to diverge with him slightly. We’re not desensitized to the killing of adults in all games, just in games where we’re supposed to be. I still get emails from gamers lecturing me about how heartbroken they were when what’s-his-name killed Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. And I don’t think it would be particularly difficult to put together a game that made players quite sensitive to killing animals. Not every game is Black Ops, and gamers are not wholly desensitized to suffering or violence. In fact, it often seems that people get most worked up about the violence in games like Black Ops, without a thought to, say, Defcon or Fate of the World. In that latter example, one viable strategy is to allow global famine to control population. It’s nasty, but it cuts emissions. It’s far crueler – but far more detached – than the violence in Black Ops, and children certainly suffer most during periods of starvation.
Ask everyone what “the worst thing in the world” is, and I guarantee you that violence against children would be in the top three responses. We reflexively, instinctively react to children in danger like most other animals because we have millions of years of evolution telling us to protect our offspring. Thus when a creator comes along and puts a fictional child in danger, there’s no doubt that it’s done in part to take advantage of this instinct. This is where Gallaga sees the marketing ploy, and this is where he gets concerned about callous, careless, pointless, or gleeful use of it in games.
Big difference between using something shocking as part of a larger whole, within a context that makes sense, and using it gratuitously. You could argue that Bulletstorm is nothing but gratuitous, and I would agree. I’d also posit that it was fully in context. That was its whole point, and as such I cackled joyously through the entire game. Violence can be funny. Look at the Three Stooges. Look at Bulletstorm. But it always depends on how it’s used, and what the motivation is. While I’m a little troubled by the uptick of children placed at risk in today’s games, I see it less as a cause for serious worry and more as an opportunity to further underline the philosophy that doing things for a reason is okay; doing them because you can rarely is.
I send out a monthly spam announcing my column to industry people and others who have foolishly given me a business card. Mike, who we call “Scary” for reasons too complex to explain, is one my old friends, and naturally on the list. So he checked out the column and trailer for the first time and shared this with me a few minutes ago. I thought it was just too eloquent to limit to my own reading.
So I finally had a chance to sit down and read your article & watch the attached trailer. I was horrified and disgusted by it. The trailer, I mean, not your article (I actually liked that a lot, enough to do some thinkin’ and crack off a note on it). And I actually signed up for the site specifically to pan and vote down that trailer. I could go on for a bit about why but here’s the screed I posted:
Anyone who relies on harming and killing children to up the emotional impact of their game or trailer is (a) too lazy and/or stupid to come up with a genuinely clever concept to provide that impact and (b) monstrously indifferent to the real life suffering of some of the world’s most vulnerable and worthwhile human beings. Everyone involved with this game and trailer is on my perma-shit list, and not only will I never buy anything they make but I’ll actively advocate against anyone else from doing the same.
I feel the same way about this as I do about, say, rape scenes in movies. There are degrees of vileness and kid killing and raping are way up on that list. And they’re much more common in real life than knifing a terrorist in the throat or shooting a zombie in the head. I’ve always felt that using crimes of that magnitude for the sake of getting the audience’s attention is unforgivable. There’s enough ugliness in the world & subjecting people to that sort of thing as a dramatic device has always struck me as doubly ugly and deplorable as well as lazy. It’s the writing equivalent of throwing dog shit on your audience to get a rise out of them – sure it’s effective but it doesn’t take much work or imagination and it just makes everything around you stink. Very few forms of entertainment can claim to be using things like rape or harming children for the sake of some higher social end. Dead Island sure as hell can’t.
I would argue that the upward trend of violence against children in video games, minor as it might be, *is* troubling. I would hate to raise children in the kind of environment where seeing a little girl get chased out a window to have the life dashed from her on the ground several stories below becomes as common place as headshotting a dude in Counterstrike. That might be a bit overblown but I think you get my drift.
Aaaaanyway, I just felt compelled to sound off on this article in particular.
I go!
-Scary
Send an email to the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
This content appears under the author’s copyright at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).Views expressed herein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the IGDA or its members.
Tap-Repeatedly is not affiliated with the IGDA.
Idk, killed by zombies looks unreal enough to me.
Though is email is superbly well-crafted and well-reasoned, I couldn’t disagree with him more. The trailer did indeed upset me. It was horrible. Even so, it was an awesome narrative approaching a traditionally taboo subject with a novel approach.
It did at no point seem lazy or the equivalent of “throwing dog shit on your audience.” Some or even many people will be offended by it, but it came nowhere close to the desensitizing torture porn of the Saw or Hostel movies. They created an emotional response not merely because a child died but because I empathized instead of merely sympathizing with the father.
If they had indeed merely shown a child dying, I would agree with Mike, but if they were interested merely in whacking their audience in the face with child-violence, they wouldn’t have bothered adding that heart-rending scene of the father reaching for his soon-to-be-undead daughter’s hand at the end. I felt for that family and more significantly, I was that family for two minutes.
Was it graphic and an attempt at shock-marketing? Absolutely. But it was not lazy, nor was it callous.
I sobbed during the damned thing. And then I watched it again and it had the same effect. My principle reaction was grief and horror, not anger and revulsion.
Dead Island’s trailer makes me want to play it not so I can watch more children die but so I protect them.
Maybe this is a slippery slope, but it seems to me that if we’re going to put anyone who uses rape or the harming of children as a narrative device on our perma-shit list, let’s take it a little further and do the same for anyone who writes cursing into his or her characters’ dialogue.
Often impolite language is used as a lazy, offensive shorthand for getting across someone’s foul mood. But when done well it can potentially be moving, heartfelt, and liberating. (I haven’t seen The King’s Speech, but, yeah, I know how it ends.)
Even if the Dead Island trailer were only attempting to shock and disgust us, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that someone else could use the same technique to a better effect. I don’t think we should ever dismiss media purely based on its subject matter. It reeks of censorship to me and I think that stinks worse than dog shit.
Also, as an aside, has anyone thought about what making these subjects taboo might do the real victims of such crimes? As if rape victims don’t have a hard enough time talking about it…
I’d also underline Steerpike’s point that context is king here. Really, there IS a huge difference between exploitation and refined art. I like both to a degree but they can not be measured with the same stick.
I’d stick with Scary’s rape reference because it’s quite easy to discern between uses of rape in cinema.
There is rape in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and that’s pure exploitation, a black and white act to depict the gang committing rape as amoral, soulless animals so that we feel good when Max blows most of them to hell by the end of the film. The artistic methods here are cruel and crude, the intended effect simple and the artistic “value” of the film in question is obviously quite low. Then again, we have developed a whole new set of values in relation to exploitation cinema so we can discern between good and bad exploitation and Mad Max is obviously more artistically valuable (in the way it treats its motifs) than, say, Ilsa: The She Wolf of the SS, another exploitation flick that hands out rape scenes as if rape was going out of fashion. In Road Warrior you are supposed to feel both aroused and enraged by the rape scene at the start of the film. In Ilsa, you are encouraged to masturbate.
(Nothing wrong with masturbating, really, some of my best friends are wankers, but this is not high art and therefore has low spiritual value.)
On the other hand, you have this infamous rape scene in Gaspar Noe’sIrreversible that is supposed to take exploitation to a totally new level by giving you a ten minutes one shot scene of a rape the way it looks in real life. Almost nothing is stylised here, it looks extremely naturalistic and as a result its intent is not only to disgust you with violence of it but also to make you feel numbed with how long it lasts and how bland and ugly it looks by the end of it. Is Irreversible exploitation? Conventional wisdom says yes, but it obviously goes one step beyond and makes sure that the voyeristic position of the viewer, so important to classical exploitation is compromised by boring the viewer with how ultimately mundane this act of suprme violence ends up looking. Monica Bellucci is reduced to a sobbing pile of flesh by the end of it and there is very little erotic charge in this scene so I’d say its artistic value is pretty obvious because it challenges the common language of (exploitation) cinema and makes sure that the viewer is engaged with her or his own interpretations of (sexual) violence on screen up to that point.
Then you have Night of the Living Dead. A film that was exploitation even before the term became commonplace. There is no rape in this film, but a very obvious scene symbolising sexual assault by a sick looking older countryside dweller performed on a white, healthy, young urban female. This short scene near the beginning of the film carries more symbolism and sociopolitical commentary than most exploitation films put together. It is absolutely justified from the artistic point of view.
Then you have Pink Flamingoes. A film made specifically to disgust people and make fun of their burgoise values. If our societies are built to channel our natural impulses into not-destructive acts but they end up suppressing even the freedoms we are promissedby law, then art depicting people raping other people can be (and in this case IS) political if made well.
Almost the same argument goes for Man Bites Dog, a film about a guy killing people who is followed by a film crew. There is a rape scene in this film that is made at the same time disgusting AND funny (not haha funny, but still kinda goofy) and this scene perfectly fits the rest of the film (that is really about a lot of killing). It shows in no uncertain terms where the boundaries lie between being a thing of nature and being a member of the society. It shows how perception of moral shifts in large societies with abstract values. It doesn’t preach but it nevertheless criticizes. Here, rape is not just justified, it is pretty essential to the message of the film as it shows how voyers become perpetrators given proper incentive.
And then of course you have Bergman’s Face to Face. There is a rape scene in this film that is completely surreal and, given the fact that the film is almost four decades old, completely mysterious as people still can not agree whether the stuff we see actually happens or is it a dream or a fantasy of the protagonist. This scene is, as good surrealism usually is, absurd, scary, but ultimately funny (again, not in a haha way, this is a very cynical affair after all) as Bergman uses all his skill (and we ARE talking about one of the greatest auteurs in cinema ever) to show us how easy it is to destroy a person when the society stops being a collection of individuals and is just a bunch of titles.
So, I would say that, personal tabboos aside, rape, as any other act of violence or any other act that disturbs the agreed social code is a legitimate topic for cinema or any art. It REALLY depends on the context whether the legitimacy of the topic translates in the legitimacy of the use.
The problem with games is that their language, the way they deal with discourse, topics and symbols, it’s all extremely crude and primitive at this point in human history. We still need our Bergmans and (George A.) Romeros and Noes and, the truth is, we don’t even have our George Millers yet. Borderlands and Bulletstorm may share the visual ideas of Road Warrior but these games are nowhere near the elegance with which Miller used his simple motifs and symbols to craft his film. And, you know, BioShock is nowhere near either.
So, I am absolutely FOR killing kids in games, but there is a lot of groundwork to be done before it stops smelling of cheap publicity.
I was actually talking to MrLipid about this (sort of) just yesterday evening, and we collectively realized that while video games are 35 years old, it’s unfair to compare them to cinema at 35. For years – hell, even now – games are an expensive hobby. At the beginning they cost thousands of dollars. Now they cost hundreds. Cinema was always immediately affordable and thus immediately accessible. So gaming as an art form is naturally evolving a lot slower than cinema. Indeed, we’re perhaps at the equivalent of cinema in… 1916 or so, around the time of Birth of a Nation, an extraordinarily offensive exploitation film that is nonetheless considered important cinema.
As I was writing the column I thought about discussing rape depictions, but I’d hit my word limit. Child violence and rape are both things that make healthy people recoil. As such I think both can have a place in art, but like Meho says, context is everything. The difference between being gratuitous and trying to make an artistic point is miles apart. And I must admit that I feel that the Dead Island trailer was trying to do the latter, and did it effectively.
Aside from the fact that Scary’s argument was really eloquent, it struck me again that I am not a parent, and I have historically reacted differently to certain moments in games because of this. Dobry has two beautiful daughters; naturally he would react differently to a scene like that. In fact I’d worry about him if he didn’t. But we both still cackle uproariously when shredding Locusts with a chainsaw bayonet.
I know fathers of sons who simply couldn’t play Heavy Rain because of the way it treats the father/son relationship. And I enjoy hearing Ernest’s stories about how he plays games with his young son – Ernest is very choosy about what games they play together, but not in the way you might think. There’s a recognition that children are bothered by different things than adults, and I think he shows great wisdom in recognizing that. And once again, he as a Dad has different reactions to certain moments in games. Becoming a parent changes you, I think, like activating an instinct that exists in all of us but is perhaps somewhat latent in nonparents.
Scary’s comment that “there are degrees of vileness” is one of the things that struck me most in his email to me. There are degrees of vileness; short of genocide, rape and child endangerment are probably the most vile things imaginable. And because they tend to be on an individual scale rather than a massive one, we are in some ways even more sensitive to them. I do think all can have a place in artistic expression, but they must be used with great care. I despise people who do things because they can, taking a sort of glee in bringing low a medium they claim to be fighting for the freedom of. The School Shooter mod for Half Life 2 is an example of this. The creators of that mod aren’t exercising artistic freedom, they’re being assholes, and they should be called out for it.
There’s a difference between an Albrecht Durer painting and some yahoo drawing a giant cock on a brick wall in street chalk.
Now, I’m not saying Dead Island is going to be the equivalent of Durer (hell, as Meho points out, it’s unlikely to be the equivalent of George Miller), but I do think that there was an effort to manage an emotional, cinematic event there, rather than sheer crude exploitation.
What Dobry Said. What Meho said. What SP said.
Context is key. The trailer was devastating, but not exploitative.
I think if it had played in reverse order from what it actually did (i.e. chronologically) it could have been accused of attempting shock value, as the girl flying out of the window would be the finale. But from the beginning we know she has died. It’s the last scene of the trailer that beautifully and tragically ties it together.
On that note, I have to disagree with all those who said it was more effective when reversed (i.e. not reversed). Or when they said that, did they mean that they liked it as it was – reversed chronologically?
Man, so many great points made! I’ll keep this short cause you all have said everything much more eloquently than I can, so here goes.
I agree with:
1. Gallaga’s commenting on the trailer being “exploitative and cynical, a successful marketing ploy meant to evoke shock and pity.”
2. Scary’s comment about using this sort of thing being “too lazy and/or stupid to come up with a genuinely clever concept to provide that impact” and a little bit of the second point, but not as much as the first.
3. I wholly agree with Meho’s overall point about the artistic merits of rape and child-killing when in proper context.
4. I fully agree with Steerpike on that stupid, stupid, stupid HL2 school shooter mod in that “The creators of that mod aren’t exercising artistic freedom, they’re being assholes, and they should be called out for it.” They are retarded.
I don’t agree with:
1. The idea that at least some games haven’t advanced past the point of being “extremely crude and primitive.” I won’t bother pointing out specific games because this is somewhat subjective (I think anyway), but there are some real works of art out there, if not exactly cinematic, at least in the sense of videogames as their own art form. We can’t keep comparing games to movies (or even books or paintings and other art). They need to start standing on their own as their own medium, not just a new kind of movie or literature.
2. “There’s a difference between an Albrecht Durer painting and some yahoo drawing a giant cock on a brick wall in street chalk.” Sorry dude, but a cock is a cock. 😉
Yeah, don’t try to take our cocks away from us. We will fight you tooth and nail!!!
But, yes, Armand righteously makes a point. Some games are actually good examples of coming through with artistic merits within the language of the medium ITSELF. So, no, I don’t mean Modern Warfare 2 (No Russian) or Heavy Rain. I mean stuff like Braid, Today I die etc. When (or if) we come to recognise our Citizens Kanes and Seventh Seals, they will probably look more like Pac Man than like Homefront.
Well, take Citizen Kane as an example. What made it such an important film? (this is not in any order)
1. technology : the use of wide angle and deep focus lenses was very innovative for the time.
2. Performances: The acting was brilliant and evocative, with great chemistry, as one might expect from a theatrical troupe that’d worked together for many years.
3. Themes: CK has a number of complex themes, but to me it has always been the tragedy of a man who spends his entire life searching for something he threw away as a child. Not a sled – it’s represented by the sled, but what he is really seeking is his innocence, the simplicity of his life when he played in the snow as a kid… something he threw away before realizing what it meant to him.
4. Parallels: William Randolph Hearst sued to get this movie stopped, and it was a semi-attack on him. Kane is clearly a caricature of Hearst. But more importantly by providing real world parallels the film allowed the audience to recognize and attach to real-world similarities.
I’m not saying that “technology, performances, theme, and parallels” must all be filled in for a game to be considered great art, just that the reasons for Citizen Kane’s brilliance can be distilled into bullet points.
Interactivity changes everything; there’s no entertainment medium that does it before, and the auteur nature of cinema and most other art forms makes it difficult to allow, in their mindset, for interactivity.
We will have the Pac-Men Important Games – games which are tightly replayable, with outstanding mechanics, with near perfect balance. These could be compared to early 1900s cinema, where the camera was still being used to capture motion and display its own capabilities. But we’ll also have our Citizens Kane, though they may not look much like that movie. Shadow of the Colossus always stands out in my mind as great game literature. As does Thief and STALKER. Portal. Bioshock to a degree.
Many we won’t recognize for years to come, when we look back on what’s available now.
But the use of terrible things in this medium – violence against children, rape, etc – faces two challenges. One: assholes who think it’s funny or rebellious to throw that shit in. Very dangerous. Indefensible. Leads to censorship.
Two: the fact that even when meant to elicit some key emotional response from the player, very difficult to get right. But if developers take the time to get it right they could manage some heretofore unseen power in their games.
I think it’s still very valid to compare games to movies but we need to look at the kind of movies we hold up as examples. We usually compare/contrast games to dramatic, narrative-driven movies. Maybe we need to look at well-made documentaries instead. Maybe games have an untapped potential to plumb social issues in way that hasn’t been done so much. Issues of rape and violence against children are the tip but look at the focus that comes to play when these issues are foregrounded via gameplay.
My brain is not working so well right now (bad back/painkillers making Mikey a very dull boy) but bear with me.
Reading columns like this make me wonder if games will break through artform-wise , not as interactive dramatic narratives, but as a completely new way to explore societal and psychological issues. Like how are norms enforced and challenged? Obviously no one wants to play an overtly ideologically finger wagger of a game (ugh) or some digital version of a NGO campaign to save the whales (double ugh). But I’m beginning to wonder if this is a direction we’re going to see open up further down the road and open up in ways we can’t yet forecast.
Eh, I can’t find the words to explain myself so I’ll get out of the way and try again another day.
This clip was a spectacle, sure. It grabbed my attention, and evoked emotions. But I think true art does more, and should strive to do more. True art touches us and tells us a story and has a truth (or moral, or meaning, or education, or whatever). That’s ultimately what this clip lacks – truth.
It’s easy to watch spectacles. You see a car crash on the way home from work, and drive slowly by, drawing in the scene. You watch an ambulance race past, and tune into the news at nighttime. There is interest there. For the most part, these events have little bearing on our lives (unless, of course, people we know are involved).
Likewise, it’s easy to watch special-effects blockbusters. But the movies that shake our beings are those that resonate with us. They ring true, or have a greater meaning, and change the way we look at the world.
And that’s ultimately what this clip lacks. It is eye candy, and it does initially elicit emotion… but that is all it does. To be honest, it doesn’t make me want to run out and play the game, and aside from a small circle of friends, it hasn’t encouraged me to talk about it that much either.
I never slow down to look at car crashes, I detest when people do that and logjam the highway for no good reason!
Also, this was just a teaser trailer … I don’t think it has any specific duty to succeed at “being art.” Just saying, we’ve stretched this discussion about as far as it can go.
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