On a different note - Morality and Video games

[orichalcum]

The New York Times just gave an incredibly favorable review to the new Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City (aka NYC) game. It praises the game's graphics, its sandbox design, its music, its variability, etc...

Nowhere in the review does the reviewer (Seth Schiesel) comment on the relative morality of the game or what age group it might be suitable for.

Keep in mind that, aside from the robbery, assault, carjacking, etc.. plots....this is a game in which you (_can_ - Edited for accuracy, thanks redhound) hire prostitutes, have sex with them, and _then kill them._ That's what women are for in the game context. Not one of the numerous characters mentioned in the review is female. In the preview, female strippers at a strip club talk about how stripping arouses them. The online dating club is called "The Twat."

So...my question is - should reviews in this case query the moral and age-appropriate content of a game? Admittedly, I don't necessarily expect reviews of, say, Sex and the City to condemn it for questionable relationships, or Deadwood to be slammed because of all the obscenity. But I'd kinda like to know about it in both cases.

GTA crosses the line for me where I wish, I really wish, that someone was devoting all that effort to making a game with content that I'd feel comfortable playing. But while it may have great gameplay, the thought of selling it to 10-year-olds upsets me.

Am I overreacting? Should this game just be evaluated on the basis of whether it's fun to play?

Comments

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Hmm...but most games don't get articles - and isn't the purpose of a review to tell you whether you should buy it, on a variety of levels?

[viking-cat.livejournal.com]

Well, virtually all triple A games do, particularly controversial ones.

Please don't mistake "the review shouldn't preach about the subject matter" with "the review shouldn't discuss the subject matter." The former is fine. The latter, in my opinion, is inappropriate in most game reviews.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I think you may have screwed up your former and latter references here (or possibly I'm just confused about what you're saying). Trying to untangle some negation a little, I would agree with the statement "a review shouldn't preach about the subject matter, but a review should discuss the subject matter." I take it that you are asserting "a review shouldn't preach about the subject matter, but a review can legitimately (but need not) discuss the subject matter." If so, our disagreement is relatively small.

All that said, I'm confused by your distinction between content for a review and content for an article. I would tend to think that a review should cover more than just gameplay-- it should be the full review of the game, including discussion of, for example, whether the story is good, whether the dialogue is well-written, and so forth. (Note that this was labeled as a review, not as a game-play preview or something like that.) And in fact, the content of this review goes well beyond gameplay, discussing the quality of the soundtrack for example. I would think that discussing the good and bad aspects of the story line would also be appropriate, including issues like gender treatment and degrees of violence. I agree that issues like "the controversy about the game" and whether, in fact, lots of 10 year olds are buying the game (as is sometimes claimed by the media) or almost none are (as is sometimes claimed by game manufacturers) would be misplaced in a review.

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough, though I think you mean the reverse of latter and former? Mostly, I felt there was a lack of information sufficient for me to make a decision about whether or not I wanted to buy the game, except that I knew about its content from previous versions and could assume the content of this game would be similar.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

I completely disagree, actually. Most "feature articles" are little more than free advertisements for the game, with crowing interviews with the programmers or designers or whatever and luscious screen shots. I have never seen a critical feature article of a game. (The same goes for movies, btw. It is often hilarious to read the glowing 10 page article about some new blockbuster movie and the cruel 500 word C- review in the same issue of Entertainment Weekly.)

The purpose of a review is to critique all of the reasons a person might or might not want to play the game. That includes gameplay, soundtrack, morality, gross imagery, interface, everything. Why would you exclude a topic that seriously affects potential purchasers from a review?