2 Online Articles

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2181/ethics_of_game_design.php

This first article immediately puts forth the argument on how far games are entitled to go by definition of the first amendment and the responsibility’s of the game designers to not abuse that right. The article brings in the legal action politicians have taken to muzzle some of the content of games and has show that the first amendment has so far throated any attempt to accomplish that. To me this is a good point that game designers should address as to how far the should go as to portraying sex, drugs, and alcohol as well as violence in their attempts to make the game seem “realistic”. It gave the example of the game “Men of Valor” and the attempts of the game designers to make the game realistic with the use of language and violence but limiting it as to not offend people enough to harm the games sales. I think this is a good example of responsible game design that shows that the industry does have insight as to how far they can go. But this also brings up a question, if game designers continue to try to push the envelope to try to develop more intense games then little by little will games become more graphic to violence and crime as to influence us all to accept it more in our daily lives. To me although we don’t have any standards or boundaries to the games content we mush each look inward and decide for ourselves what is acceptable to portray in games.


http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=196237
This article sights a specific problem with a game in an international sense and how our games could be viewed by the international public. Mercenaries 2 takes place in South America and its opened to destruction and mayhem as if we are in real life going to do just that. At least that’s the argument of Hugo Chaves, this was also brought up when Ghost Recon chose to base its game in Mexico. We have to look at our games and realize that they speak for our nation and we have to try to find a way to balance our fun and our view of the world. After all we kill Germans in our games on WW2, we even kill our own police men in some of our own games and I ask how much of these games can we allow to showcase and should we at least consider how others view them. To us they may be fun but for a war that ended 60 years ago is it really necessary to continue to produce games where you can decimate legions of German soldiers or is it just to much fun? Our video games do have influence over us and we have to be careful as to how far we can let them go.