Stop Banning Video Games

Start taking some responsibility.

One of the game's protagonists, Capt. Soap MacTavish (thatvideogameblog.com)

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 came out two weeks ago.

Even before its release, there was a negative buzz about a couple of issues. 1) The antagonist of the game and 2) one particular level in the game.

First off, the antagonist of the game is Vladimir Makarov, one of Imran Zakhaev's former lieutenants. Zakhaev was the antagonist of the first game. Makarov represents a group of terrorists that have taken hold of Russia. There has been speculation that the Russian government has banned the console version of the game due to the fact that Russia is made to be a terrorist nation and also in relation to point 2. Activision, the game's producer, denied this speculation.

The scene in the game that has many people sick to their metaphorical stomachs is one in which your character, a CIA operative and under the guise of a Russian terrorist, enters an airport in Russia with other terrorists. Your character witnesses these terrorists kill and destroy practically everything in the airport - civilians, police, etc. This scene of domestic terrorism is so touchy, the game's developer Infinity Ward included an option in the beginning of the game to skip all mature content and scenes. It asks you not once, but twice if you would like to skip this scene and level.

So why did they allow the game to include the scene at all if they realized it was so disturbing?

I understand it for a few reasons:

1) The game is rated M for Mature.

The British parliament, amidst a lot of unrest about the game in the UK, recently supported the game, despite the disturbing content. The Culture, Media, and Sport minister stated,

"This game ... is a certificate 18 game. It should not be sold to children and the government’s job is to make sure that adults - clearly labelled - can get what adults should be able to, and that children are not in danger of being subjected to adult content."

Of course, the speculators are saying that a rating has not stopped kids from stealing the game, getting someone to buy it for them or playing it at an older friends house. The point is, the company cannot be liable for these situations, just as you would not hold James Cameron responsible if a child snuck into Terminator and was disturbed or turned violent by its content.

2) The scene described above is meant to be disturbing. During the scene, your character is not allowed to run. You must simply walk slowly, methodically and watch the terrorists shoot down civilians in the airport. Like a murder scene in a movie, it is meant to be out of the norm. It is meant to evoke terror and fear in the user. The entire time I was playing the level, I felt awwwww-ful. The scene that is set up is meant to feel horrific. You are meant to feel awful. You are meant to feel like you are doing a bad deed. Because you are.

It's not as if before the scene, there is a black screen with white letters that says, "The next scene will include images of innocent people dying. Please feel jubilant."

Nor is there happy music setting the scene, or even cheers from your Russian comrades. They don't even talk to you the whole time. And to make things worse, they kill you at the end of the mission. They find out your true identity (as a CIA op) and kill you. Not only did you press on through the valley of the shadow of death, but now you have nothing to show for it. And you feel even worse.

This claim is corroborated by Activision, who stated in a press release regarding the scene:

"The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold-bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player's mission to stop them."

[...]

"The game includes a plot involving a mission carried out by a Russian villain who wants to trigger a global war. In order to defeat him, the player infiltrates his inner circle. The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism. "

(source)

No critic of video games accepts video games as an art form. To the critics, video games are simply products made for mass consumption, like a pogo stick or a gordita from Taco Bell. They are unwilling to see the cinematic beauty in a game like COD:MW2 or the cinematic quality in a scene like the one in question. The emotion it invokes is Oscar-worthy. But instead of analyzing it like a piece of art, they see video games as disgusting portrayals of useless violence and sex. Video games are art, and like all good art, they are not independent of society.

Again, speculation will speak to the fact that children or young adults might not feel so terrible gunning down people in a video game. The point again being, children should not play this game.

Some blurry screen shots of the scene in question. Above is one of the terrorists in body armor wielding an automatic weapon. Below is the first-person view the user would see when leaving the elevator just before the shooting starts. (gamespot.com)

3) You don't even have to shoot. You have a gun, but you personally do not have to kill anyone. Just throwing that out there.

So all the criticism out there about your character being forced to shoot civilians is false. Play the game. You are not required to shoot. You merely have to watch, which makes the scene more like a movie at its heart.

Also, Earth to Russia. If the speculation is true, and they really did ban the game, they need to think about something. And if you agree with that choice, think about this.

The argument could be that the Russian government (allegedly) banned the game because it portrays Russia as a terrorist nation. Here's the thing. Terrorists are often thought of as extremists. And when I say "often," I mean if you don't think a terrorist is an extremist you just might be an extreme terrorist. And what's the definition of an "extreme?" An outlier. Something at the far end of the spectrum. Not the norm. The game is not depicting Russia as an entire nation of terrorists, fundamentalists, commies, Nazis or anything of the sort.

It is portraying the bad people doing bad things. And that is how they should be perceived.

Fox News is not for Journalists

On the heels of a South Park episode mocking Glenn Beck, I have decided to look a little further at Fox News, and why people continually watch it and believe it to be a credible "news" source.

South Park just might be the greatest form of satire this generation has. Mark Twain would be proud. The latest episode, which aired Wednesday, Nov. 11, depicted Eric Cartman, the show's not-so-lovable loud mouth, as the newest reader of the morning announcements in South Park Elementary.

Cartman soon takes his position to the extreme and begins "asking questions," as he puts it, of the administration, especially Wendy Testeburger, the student body presidents. The parallels to Glenn Beck and President Obama are unmistakable, especially when Cartman opts to broadcast the morning announcements over TV, complete with rockin' intro music, an EC logo in the style of Beck's GB logo, and the infamous chalkboard.

Beck's response can be heard here, from his radio show:




The full episode can be viewed for free here, courtesy southparkstudios.com:

The issue at hand here is multi-layered, and I will do my best to describe each one.

First off, Beck finds it complementary to be made fun of on South Park. While it's true that South Park has made fun of some famous people in the past, anywhere from Phil Collins to Jesus himself, Beck misses the point. They are making fun of these people because they believe what they are doing is wrong. (If you don't believe it, watch Team America, in which a slew of movie stars from the Screen Actors Guild are killed in malicious and hilarious fashion.) It's satire, not a humorous jest or mere poking fun. Satire is defined as using humor to reveal the fallacies and falsehoods of some institution, belief, person, etc.

Second off, Fox News, by namesake, should be a news corporation. But in modern times, where new media dominate our lives, news has taken the backseat to entertainment, spoof and fluff. The entirety of Fox's primetime line up - Beck, Sean Hannity, Fox and Friends, Bill O'Reilly, etc. - is not news. It's punditry. It's entertainment.

That's not only my opinion, but it was stated by Fox news officials. The hours of programming they consider "News" are 9am-4p.m. and 6p.m.-8p.m. And the rest? Well, people certainly know when something is opinion and something is actual, legitimate, researched, sourced News, right? (Watch this clip of The Daily Show that covers this.)

According to the novel American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media, they don't.

"Shortly after the 2004 presidential election, the University of Maryland reported in a survey that more than 70 percent of those who voted for George W. Bush in the November 2004 elections believed wrongly that the administration had found proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. These same voters believed wrongly that world opinion supported the American invasion of Iraq. These voters also were convinced that Saddam Hussein's regime had a direct link to al-Qaeda terrorists and the 9/11 attack on America, despite all official evidence and widespread news coverage to the contrary on each point. This poll showed that millions of these voters relied heavily on Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, as their chief source for news and information...

The researchers reported that viewers of Fox, today the nation's most highly rated news channel and the news source most closely aligned with Republican Party interests, were nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue views about the circumstances surrounding the war in Iraq as Americans who relied instead on National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)" (41-42) (emphasis added).

Another survey took place in the spring of 2005. 1500 adults were surveyed and of those polled, 27 percent considered Rush Limbaugh a journalist, and an even higher 44 percent considered Mr. O'Reilly a journalist.

The point isn't that Limbaugh, O'Reilly and the likes claim to be journalists. I don't think they necessarily do. But, they certainly don't argue it when people say they are.

Again from American Carnival:

"Limbaugh reacted by saying he was 'not surprised' by the findings and claimed that it reflected the public disenchantment with the performance of traditional media" (266, footnote 72).

The issue, I'm afraid, isn't the public's "disenchantment" with traditional media, but rather, their inability to discern between what is JOURNALISM and what is ENTERTAINMENT/OPINION.

It is frustrating to think that there are people out there so uneducated that they believe Fox News is just looking out for the little guy, that they are "fair and balanced," when they couldn't be any further from it, and that they are "news." Fox is not news. It is a charade.

"To the average American citizen, a Journalist is the television talker who is paid a considerable retainer to regularly make noise on cable news programs, arguing any questions of the day regardless of whether he or she knows anything about the topic or not. The figure who hosts the show is a Journalist, too, paid a high salary not to seek out and report the news but to entertain an audience with a certain glibness and an argumentative personality" (American Carnival, 55) (emphasis added).

Some analysts on Fox argued that Obama's administration, by attacking Fox News, is inhibiting "freedom of the press" (here, I quote a clip from the Daily Show). It's hard to attack "freedom of the press" when Fox News can hardly call themselves "the press."

I refuse to argue that MSNBC does the same thing as Fox. Not because MSNBC isn't biased. It is. Not because I agree with MSNBC, which I do generally. But rather because, MSNBC acts as an editorial. They present journalistic fact, and follow up with their opinion (typically from the left). Fox does not operate under the standards of journalistic editorial. Instead, they act the same as any random 13-year-old with a blog and a poor attitude - ranting, raving and with no remorse or responsibility for what they say.

To paraphrase both Beck and O'Reilly, they refuse to honor certain points or answer honest questions because those asking the questions are "pinheads."

This doesn't create a center for debate. Instead, it gives whoever has the microphone thirty minutes or an hour to simply say whatever they want, and those naive people watching, those a part of the percentages listed above, believe it to be "News."

To tie it back to South Park, you don't have to listen to Beck because he has a microphone. He's just a guy with a microphone (and a stupid chalk board) who thinks he's doing America a favor by just "asking questions," when in reality, Americans need to be the ones asking the questions of all entertainment "journalists."