Five politically incorrect moments in recent computer gaming history
Sidin Vadukut -
Thursday, October 30, 2008 3:06 PM
Hope, dear readers, that Diwali was mighty nice to all of you and, like me, your brother-in-law bought you a brand new PlayStation Personal as well. This shiny new portable gaming device combined with the iPod, PS2 and Asus EEEPC means that my marriage is pretty much going to hell.
Sigh. Anyways gaming aficionados amongst you will have noticed that the financial crisis gripping the globe has done nothing to dampen the slew of games and hardware that is being launched. There is a new PSP, Nintendo DS and several new games to look out for. But more than one launch has been hampered by bits of content that seem to be offensive to some or the other section of society and has led to patches and relaunches... We've pulled together five of the most recent gaming controversies that rocked the gaming world and upset all types of elderly politicians and social leaders who, in reality, are just jealous that we youngsters can use joysticks with more than one huge red button.
1. The Hot Coffee Mod
Take one popular video game already derided for violent game play and throw in a thinly hidden simulated sex scene. Fun for the whole family! In 2005, when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was found to have this little naughty diversion coded in lawmakers exploded and obscenity hawks exploded!
More details here.
2. Resistance: Fall of Man
In R:FoM the world has been taken over by an alien species and you must go around 1950's England destroying these highly unpleasant creatures. For the game on the PS3 Sony recreated several locations all over England including Manchester Cathedral. A cathedral on the face of it seems like a decent place to stage a battle between good and evil. But when the battle involves a bloody gunfight between you (good) and horrible (aliens) a cathedral suddenly doesn't sound that appropriate.
Add the fact that Manchester has a gun crime problem and you can imagine the furor the Church of England raised over the issue. Details here.
3. Bully
Oh I love this 2006 game for PS2 and Xbox! Winning Bully involves enrolling in a boarding school as a completely psychopathic young kid and then bully-ing your way to the... well, end of the game. You can roam around randomly punching up other kids, kissing the girls and shooting stones with a catapult at the school sports teams. Children of all ages would love this game no doubt.
Parents were not so hot about it. Details here.
4. Little Big Planet
If you've been reading our paper you know that we here loved the massive new Spore game. But it now looks like Sony's new Little Big Planet might even out do Spore in terms of ambition. We won't go into the details about LBP but alas, some gamers were annoyed with some of the music used in the game. From a post that brought up the issue on the PlayStation online community:
While playing your latest game, "LittleBigPlanet" in the first level of the third world in the game (titled "Swinging Safari", I have noticed something strange in the lyrics of the music track of the level. When I listened carefully, I was surprised to hear some very familiar Arabic words from the Quran.
The controversy was enough to delay the game by a week. Details on Salon's Machinist blog here.
5. Fallout 3
And finally we have a domestic issue that Microsoft thought was so significant that they've decided to actually cancel a game launch altogether. Fallout 3, an action role-playing game in a post-apocalyptic world, was supposed to be awesome and certainly did live up to all it's hype. It received superb reviews. But no chance of seeing it in India. Microsoft had this to say:
Microsoft constantly endeavors to bring the best games to Indian consumers in sync with their international release. However, in light of cultural sensitivities in India, we have made the business decision to not bring Fallout 3 into the country.
But what exactly was this culturual boo boo? Apprently in the game players use two-headed mutant cows called Brahmins as pack animals to carry around luggage. This in political incorrectness terms is tantamount to standing out side Raj Thackeray's house wearing a Lalu mask.
More details on Fallout 3's cultural moostake in this previous Play Things post by young Krish Raghav.
What do you think of all this controversy? Should games be censored for content? Are we reading too much into such things? Does blowing up a herd of virtual mutant cows qualify as cultural sensitivity? Drop us a line.
Image courtesy Wikipedia.