An Affront to the Gaming Industry

Edit: We are certainly not the first to pick up on this. The guys over at playstuff.net have created a petition calling for a public apology and have submitted it to Ofcom. I urge you all to sign it.

Recently, Alex posted up an article about how video games are portrayed in the media. This is more of the same. However, I am concentrating on a single instance of the media’s total ignorance of the gaming industry, which happened a couple of weeks ago on The Alan Titchmarsh Show. This was covered last week by Rock, Paper Shotgun, and so you might have already heard about it, but I am going to cover it anyway.

Before I begin, there are four main points that I want to make, which will be expanded upon later:

• Video games are rated in the same way as films.
• Some films contain much more violence than some video games.
• Every major console has Parental Controls built in.
• The majority of video games are not only kid friendly, but family friendly as well.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the video in question. If you haven’t already seen it, here it is for you to watch:

So first things first, out of the three ‘experts’ on the panel, only one has any sort of expertise in the topic area. What do you need to be an expert? Expertise. That says it all really. Anyway, Tim Ingham is a long time editor of CVG (Computer and Video Games) and so is well positioned to talk about video games. The other two people on the panel were Julie Peasgood, who I believe used to be on Emmerdale but is now a so-called ‘sexpert’, and Kelvin MacKenzie who I believe used to edit The Sun. How’s that for a brilliant start, having only one person who knows what he’s talking about on the panel. I can assure you it only gets worse from there.

Tim’s key points throughout the show are that the violence in some video games can be justified, and that it should be up to the parents to stop their children getting hold of games like Modern Warfare 2. He also clearly mentions the fact that all three of the major consoles have parental controls to stop children playing games that are not suitable for them. And to add to this, he makes the point that all gamers make – there is violence in films that far outdoes violence in some games, yet in the game you can skip the violence.

Julie Peasgood, on the other hand, has a very different opinion. She thinks that all games are blood-filled gore-fests where you get points for killing enemies and double points for killing civilians. She knows that films can be violent as well, but she doesn’t care about films because they’re not interactive like a game is. She thinks that a child who plays LittleBigPlanet for an hour each week will become as corrupted and disturbed as a child who spends every hour of a week playing through No Russian, and that parents don’t have any responsibility to keep their children away from violent video games. She doesn’t care that games have similar (or in some cases the exact same) ratings as films, nor does she think that Parental Controls are relevant. She just thinks that the entire industry should remove all violence from their games so that the children will be protected from corruption and the world will be a better place.

This, by the way, is the same Julie Peasgood who was paid to voice a character in the horror game ‘Martian Gothic: Unification‘ Can you say ‘hypocrite’?

Kelvin MacKenzie’s part in the ‘debate’ was much less pronounced. However, he said something that was completely unfounded, and which I am honestly amazed was not criticised on a larger scale. While I could attempt to use my own words for this section, I could not put it better than how someone else has already put it. The following is a direct quotation from an article on TheSixthAxis called ‘An Open Letter to ITV’:

MacKenzie was found citing that one of James Bulger’s killers (Jon Venables) had been “corrupted” by video games. This throwaway misuse of a murdered child’s memory for personal point-scoring was slightly bizarre given that the so-called corruption of Jon Venables by video games has never been referenced anywhere before. Especially so given that, at that time in the debate, a comparison was being drawn to movies which had in fact been cited numerous times as inspiration for the acts committed against James Bulger.

This is absolutely disgusting. And, to quote again from the same article, “This is the same Kelvin MacKenzie that famously ran the incredibly distasteful “Gotcha” headline after three hundred and twenty-three Argentine seamen lost their lives during the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands Conflict.”

So to refer back to my earlier four points:

• Video games are rated in the same way as films – apparently of little significance
• Some films contain much more violence than some video games – apparently of even less significance
• Every major console has Parental Controls built in – apparently of no significance at all
• The majority of video games are not only kid friendly, but family friendly as well – all video games are blood-filled gore-fests, stop arguing with the public opinion you twat.

Well done, ITV, you have successfully proved once and for all that Mass Media is a tricky S.O.B. It doesn’t just influence the public opinion. It IS the public opinion, and it loves pandering to itself. Oh, and Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare is not a game. It doesn’t matter if you made any good points at all, because your argument is automatically invalidated by the fact that not even your host could get a simple game title correct. That entire segment was an affront to the gaming industry, and their efforts to stop children playing unsuitable games.

My own personal take on this is an incredibly strong one. Every time I’m playing Modern Warfare 2 and I hear the high-pitched voice of a child over voice chat, I am simply amazed that their parents could allow them to play such a game. I am not debating the fact that there is no violence in video games, because there is. What I am, however, furious at, is that parents are bold (read: stupid) enough to blame the developers and the publishers for letting their children play such violent games when it should be THEM who control what their kids play.

Every day on my school coach, I hear children who are aged 13 (and sometimes even younger) boasting about the two AC-130′s that they got last night. It makes me want to go to their houses, look their parents in the eyes, and tell them that by letting their children play such games, they are effectively proving that they should not be allowed to raise children. When I see parents buying their children Modern Warfare 2, I am simply shocked that they should be legally allowed to do so. Stores aren’t allowed to sell the game to children under 18, but they are allowed to sell it to parents without so much as asking if it will be played by a child. Even if the child is right there with the parent, they are powerless to stop the sale.

Basic statistics tell us that, because there were many parents who watched that segment on ITV, and because there were many people who watched it who took the side of Julie Peasgood, there will be quite a lot of parents in the UK who took the side of Julie Peasgood. But when you take into account how many copies of Modern Warfare 2 have been sold in the UK, I can pretty much say for certain that out of the many parents who watched that segment, and who agreed with the anti-gaming argument, at least one of those parents will have a child who, while their parent was watching The Alan Titchmarsh Show, was playing Modern Warfare 2.

Angry Dan is Angry.

Rock, Paper Shotgun on the Video

CVG on the Video