I’ve been saying this for years and now I’m getting so mad I’m about to slam my soapbox down into the biggest mound of sand on the hill and preach until the gooses all go home.
I’m talking about the overuse of offensive content in games and the game industry. People love to blame video games for bad things, and for a long time, I defended the video game industry. I can’t claim ignorance anymore. Video games may not be forcing kids to go on violence sprees… but the lack of morals and good clean fun is seriously endangering the case of the “harmless video games” idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good M-rated game as much as the next cargo load of lemmings, but how much violence, sex and fowl language can you pack into one year’s worth of titles? Do we REALLY need skin-clad hotties in Rock Band 2? Will the economy REALLY collapse unless we script in 3 or 4 dozen f-bombs in a strategy game? Are players REALLY going to be persuaded to slap down half-a-hundred bucks if you add in features like limb-detachment-via-rusty-chainsaw?
Really?!?! So, those few hundred… maybe even thousand… of us family-oriented gamers deserve nothing more than Peggle and Portal for our gaming dollars?
And, if this were just the games, I MIGHT overlook this as a developer’s bandwagon. But even the media insults us by ONLY targeting the lowest common denomonator; horny male boys. Just take a look around your favorite game news site and you’ll see what I mean. (The worst is GamesRadar who have made it blatantly obvious that they care nothing for the respect and descent treatment of females or families.)
Take a look at an article from ArsTechnica. This overindulgance of mature content is being mis-interpreted as kid content and causing much hub bub. But if a little more care and attention were given to the gamer who’s got kids on the sofa, one wonders if these court dealings would be an issue:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/being-better-gamer.ars
