I love you back, as well as anyone else who helps me fix typos!

I think this post conflates issues of charity with political issues.

“Many games that do violence and sexuality do it poorly.”

Yes.  But how does
that happen?  It’s possible that the
developers set out to do it well and they just fail on execution.  Okay, that’s a quality problem.

But what about those who start with a deficient, distorted,
or let’s just say vicious sense of violence or sex and they want to portray
that?  As with No Russian, they can
execute that vision with extreme quality and precision.  Is that the same thing?

It’s absurd to think that what we put in our minds doesn’t
affect what we do and what we think. 
Look above at your Red Dead Redemption post.  Some people think of John Huston, but you
think of Rockstar.  Did you check your
own thought processes like a responsible adult before you came to that
conclusion?  No, your mind spit out what
you put in it.

I don’t think I disagree with your two statements.  But in delineating the proper content for
children and adults, you have to deal with some immense gray areas.  Including those adults who still think and
act, in some large or small corner of their minds, like children—possibly because
they have been absorbing adolescent worldviews from mature rated games.

Now I personally wouldn’t object to legally banning
particularly egregious examples of such, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend
it either.  Such an effort would be
fraught with complications.  But I
certainly would love it if we still lived in a culture that would stigmatize
products that demonstrated a vicious values. 
Looked askance at them, and at those who propagated and played them.  Unfortunately, that genie doesn’t really go
back in the bottle, either.  What are we
left with?  The best we have are
developers, publishers, and players with consciences.  And journalists who won’t apologize for those
without them.

I think the important part is that we have a wide range of gaming options to choose from.  I don’t mind that we have Hitman as long as we get Kings Bounty and Peggle too.  Ultra violence may be as appropriate for Hitman as it is for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie or Clive Barker’s Books of Blood novels.

Personally I don’t have any desire to play Hitman and I was a bit sickened to hear about the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2, but I never tried it.  I don’t want to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre either, but I love the Books of Blood series.  That’s my own personal demented line in the sand.  I don’t begrudge others theirs.

As an industry as a whole, I agree with Spector that the trend is going too violent.  As a gamer I want a broad spectrum of games.  I wouldn’t want every AAA movie to have bloody death scenes, I don’t want every AAA game to have them.  Let the studios make the best game they can, let them explore every option, and let them remember that variety is what makes gaming great.

“If Spector doesn’t believe in the effects argument — namely, that witnessing acts of violence makes people violent — then why is there an issue?”

Because something can be in bad taste and also not signal the end of civilization as we know it.

He could just be stating his perspective on gory violence. I don’t assume from what’s in the interview or because the words are coming from Warren Spector that he’s calling for no one to be allowed to make games in poor taste. 

But, of course, if that is his point then he’s nuts.

I do notice that the role of PR people is often misrepresented, and this interview is a good example. The goal is not often to keep the communication bland. It’s to keep the communication clean, unable to be misunderstood or mischaracterized. Media training focuses on those methods more than it focuses on memorizing bullet ponits.

If a group of friends were sitting around saying these same things, “it has to stop,” it’s easy to imagine they didn’t mean it literally. Conversationally, he could just be adding weight to how he feels about it – he’s happy to not be doing that kind of work.

I don’t mean to get all anecdotal, but do you really think the trend is going too violent?  I agree that E3 is really dopey and the stupid neck-stabbing is a cheap and easy way to make noise.  Which, really, is what E3 is all about.  But on the whole, I think that’s just noise and not a meaningful trend.  

Consider Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, and Modern Warfare, all of which have been poster boys for the “too much violence” argument.  When you take the games as a whole, when you put the neck-stabbing, hooker killing, and No Russianing in their context, when you look at the complete experience offered by these particular games, do you really feel the trend it towards too much violence?

It seems to me we’re getting that variety you’re talking about, and Warren Spector’s call for the ultraviolence to stop is an overreaction to marketing noise instead of a meaningful look at the games themselves.  When I think of the games I’ve played so far this year, there aren’t that many that are defined by being crassly violent, and few of those that are worth playing or that have much commercial impact.  Prototype 2 and Max Payne 3 are really the only crassly violent games I can think of off the top of my head that aren’t simple trash.

I think Warren Spector has been talking to press long enough that he knows what he’s saying. :)  When he says the ultraviolence has to stop and that we have to stop loving it, I think we can take that at face value.

You’ve embodied my thoughts on Spector’s words to the letter.

That said, the problem I have is escalating violence to the exclusion of all else. For instance, with Splinter Cell: Blacklist we are looking at something pretty far and away from Splinter Cell of yore (I appreciated Conviction as something one-off, like a Splinter Cell Gaiden of sorts). What happened to the days of pacifist and even no-touch playthroughs of stealth-action games? Sure, you could probably do it in Conviction, but it required playing in such a way that you knew the scripting of the levels to the level of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

Ha, that’s awesome. Quarter to eight? What kind of lightweight figures 7:45 is so late that it means the game you’re playing is really good? I’ve played some real stinkers to 7:45.

In many ways I don’t think games are getting more violent, I think they have become so realistic and visually engaging that the violence is more visceral and for some people disturbing.