Warren Spector gets on his Twitter soapbox regarding violent video game showreel

Gemini73

"everyone associated with the games on show should be ashamed of themselves, as they hurt the industry."

:roll:

https://www.mcvuk.com/business/spector- ... themselves

Who?

Lagamorph wrote:Who?

Oh nobody, he only worked on Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, Thief and created Deus Ex.

Who's got time to watch credits and keep track of all these names?

Lots of people Laga, if you like the content of a game youll be inclined to try and follow those who made it and play the next thing they make.

But Mr Spector is wrong in this case, theres nothing to be ashamed of in there, as mentioned in the article the clips are all taken out of context so its easy to be shocking when you do that. The same could be done for movies but everyone is a bit more grown up about them and realises violence in movies can have context and artistic merit, the sooner people realise the same applies to games the better.

Gemini73

Lagamorph wrote:Who's got time to watch credits and keep track of all these names?

Spector, like Kojima and Myamoto, is a bit of a 'star player' in the games industry so is quite well known.

Trelliz wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Who?

Oh nobody, he only worked on Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, Thief and created Deus Ex.

Don't forget Epic Mickey!

OrangeRakoon wrote:
Trelliz wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Who?

Oh nobody, he only worked on Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, Thief and created Deus Ex.

Don't forget Epic Mickey!

Why not? Everyone else did.

(I did quite like the first one mind but I don't remember much besides liking it at the time I played)

Lagamorph wrote:Who's got time to watch credits and keep track of all these names?

Don’t be ignorant.

You’d expect better from someone like Spector to take violent scenes in games wildly out of context. I’m frankly aghast that idiots in high places are still pointing fingers at games after all these years. Takes me back to the Night Trap/Mortal Kombat debacle in the early 90’s.

Lagamorph wrote:
OrangeRakoon wrote:
Trelliz wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Who?

Oh nobody, he only worked on Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, Thief and created Deus Ex.

Don't forget Epic Mickey!

Why not? Everyone else did.

(I did quite like the first one mind but I don't remember much besides liking it at the time I played)

It was definitely just okay, terrible camera killed any chance of it being better imo. The classic 3D platformer curse, especially on wii

The problem is violence sells and it always has.
Westerns in the black and white days were hugely violent and I'm pretty sure it didn't result in people buying horses and rounding up people in Ipswich to scalp.

Violence will always be a part of entertainment and it has nothing to do with the actions of the people viewing it as those people are intelligent enough to know the difference a story or video game and real life.

Thing is this did happen with films before, look at the dpp72 and with comics. This is just another moral panic in a line of many. The shame is that as a society/world we all look for Scape goats instead of dealing with issues.

*escaped goats

I think the issue is being looked at the wrong angle personally. The issue isn't so much that excessively violent games exist, the issue is that they are the face of the western AAA video game industry, the only industry where this kind of content is at the forefront and centre of the AAA. Furthermore, not only are a lot of these games excessively violent, said violence lacks maturity, a game like Resident Evil Remake may have decapitation (something ironically absent from the Japanese versions of this Japanese game) but there is still a maturity in how that game dishes out the extreme cases, something very much missing from later games in the series. If there is one thing Spector is right about it is that these AAA games do hurt the medium because they give ammunition for this blame game to continue.

Dig Dug wrote:I think the issue is being looked at the wrong angle personally. The issue isn't so much that excessively violent games exist, the issue is that they are the face of the western AAA video game industry, the only industry where this kind of content is at the forefront and centre of the AAA. Furthermore, not only are a lot of these games excessively violent, said violence lacks maturity, a game like Resident Evil Remake may have decapitation (something ironically absent from the Japanese versions of this Japanese game) but there is still a maturity in how that game dishes out the extreme cases, something very much missing from later games in the series. If there is one thing Spector is right about it is that these AAA games do hurt the medium because they give ammunition for this blame game to continue.

Erm, pretty much all the most popular films have vast amounts of violence.
Super hero films are hugely popular and contain so much of it it's hard to imagine a super hero film without ultra violence.

Yeah film and TV are just as much violence driven, it's not a feature unique to videogames at all.

I think taking a load of random violent scenes out of context and splicing them together doesn't help anyone. Sony and Microsoft both have a habit of over-emphasising the violence at E3 as well. You know everyone will be watching and you play one of the most unsettling scenes possible (The Last of Us 2) with no warning.

It's just skirting around what the real issues are though, whether that be THE GUNS, the parenting or even the ratings system in the US. And the culture in the US has always been the same - they'd rather show you a guy getting murdered on normal TV than a pair of tits or bad language.

Just as with any type of media for every violence filled game there's a puzzle game or story game with zero violence they just get less attention.

My game of 2017 was Tumble for example. A VR puzzle game costing £7 :toot:

.

Trelliz wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Who?

Oh nobody, he only worked on Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, Thief and created Deus Ex.

IGN wrote:"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

OrangeRakoon wrote:Yeah film and TV are just as much violence driven, it's not a feature unique to videogames at all.

I think you miss the point. There are a lot of violent films and TV shows but they aren't solely pushed front and centre as the mediums top draw like is often the case with video games where the likes of Sony and Microsoft will, KK said, empathise violence (and other power fantasies such as fast cards) in selling their games to the audience at shows like E3. People could throw the argument that Nintendo put out AAA titles that aren't that but Nintendo have shown time and time against to be the exception, not the rule.

That there are good, alternative, non-violent games out there is irrelevant to the issue, the issue is that the games getting pushed the strongest are violent, sometimes excessively so. It is an industry with the reputation of being obsessed with violence on a level that the other two industries are not.

Warren Spector gets on his Twitter soapbox regarding violent video game showreel

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