I've been playing with pixels since I was around 8 years old, beginning with what has to be the first commercial home video game system - the Odyssey -through Ataris, Apples, Macs, and PC games...my youth was filled with Ultima and Wizardry and Crush, Crumble, and Chomp...as well as the coin-munching machines which filled arcades in the heydays of the 1980s (Wizard...is about to die.) My wife also has similar credentials, playing Rogue on her Dad's PC and playing many games alongside me throughout our marriage and evolution into MMORPG junkies.
Therefore I can speak with some perspective about the latest missive from our electronic entertainment overlords, i.e. Grand Theft Auto IV. I played one of the earlier iterations - the top-down version, before the days of 3-D first person - and, yes, the no-holds-barred freedom to be a Bad Guy has a certain playground bully appeal. Steal a car! Run over the owner! Ram police cars! Be a bad guy!
The series, however, morphed into something grittier, more "edgy," taking cues from gangster movies and immersing itself in the Hollywood version of the "gangster experience," which includes, apparently, a lot of prostitutes, random murder, and fuzzy-lens off-screen sex.
A lot of commentators have objected to any discussion of the game by claiming just that - it's just a game. Well, it is...but it's the 800-pound gorilla of games. It's the game that attracts mainstream attention, the one which shapes the publics' view of the industry, and what do they see? Violence, murder, sex, and hookers.
But back to the objection...it's just a game, right? True. I wouldn't be so annoyed, however, if there were more options. Almost all of the major video game offerings have only one type of protagonist - male, white, and murderous. Why not whip up a couple of character models? Why not have the same story line option for a black man, or a white woman, or whatever? How would that destroy the "immersion" to allow the player to "be" him or herself?
Take another couple of examples, Portal and Team Fortress 2. Both are popular and critically acclaimed. Portal has a female protagonist - which doesn't seem to bother any of the reviewers. True, it's not a shoot-em-up, but do all games have to be shooters? Team Fortress 2 is an unabashed multiplayer shoot-em-up, with sly humor and excellent graphic design - but why not give the player an option of a female character model? How much more would that cost in development or voice acting time? I know my wife doesn't mind playing almost any type of video game, but it's harder for her to be interested in one which doesn't allow her to connect with the character.
MMORPGs are on the cutting edge of this...almost all offer customizable character models ("toons" in the parlance) so that the player can change the skin color, sex, height, and so forth of their avatar or persona. MMORPGs are big sandboxes, with lots of options, so I think it wouldn't be that much more difficult to add options to "traditional" video games.
I'm not calling for censorship or restriction, but it seems that the majority of the games being offered out there have one perspective, one type of protagonist, and one type of goal, accomplished with big guns and lots of bloodshed. A lot of gamers argue that that's what the market wants, but by not offering options the market is by definition restricted...and there are breakouts, like Portal or the Wii games, which prove that almost all gamers want different choices.
So here it is, gamers and designers - why not dip your toe in the big pool and just start by offering some avatar customization or plots which can apply to all sexes or races? Why not give the players a few more options, a few more choices, before plopping them in your world? It certainly couldn't hurt...
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