Ubisoft: Controversial Topics Need Polish

[Jack Rascal]

Anyone else feel like Jade sort of... said nothing? Interview seems largely pointless.

Did you read the actual interview or just the few sentences above? She said quite a lot in the interview, here's the link [http://www.oxm.co.uk/44714/interviews/jade-raymond-male-fantasies-innovate-or-die-and-gaming-for-grown-ups/?page=1] if you'd like to read it.

Ubisoft's Jade Raymond explains how to walk the line between controversial and offensive.

I don't mean to offend and I hope I'm not modded for criticizing, but you took another sites churned article, churned it again and presented it here? I find this amazingly lazy. You could have read the interview and then made your own summary of it instead of rewriting Gamasutra's. I know Escapist does take their news from other sites, but I thought they would at least read the original interviews and base their articles on those. She had good points and ideas, it would have been nice to see those presented here as well.

 

[Evil Smurf]

Anyone else feel like Jade sort of... said nothing? Interview seems largely pointless.

maybe there was more to it but we are not being told?

 

[Schadrach]

"At Ubisoft we have studios all over the world, and there's a very fine line between what you think is interesting and what someone else may think is not respectful - you don't want to offend anyone," she said.

...and this is the fundamental problem. Having to avoid offending everyone places some tight restrictions, because someone can always find something to be offended at, if they look hard enough (including third party mods changing ESRB classifications, disabled content from removed game features, in-house skill titles only found by digging through code looking for a single never called debug statement that mentions it, that kind of thing), so you can't just sanitize the game versus anything that anyone might potentially be offended by, you have to carefully sanitize every single mention of everything and every debug statement, and every word out of every employee's mouth just in case... Why? Because some people are thin-skinned and will hunt for reasons to be angry, and they must be catered to.

Also, having Tomb Raider's rape demo and Smite's depiction of Shiva - two obvious instances of one dude deciding he totally can deal with sensitive topics like rape/Hindu religion and then proceeding to give solid proof he had never even been in the same room as a rape victim/Hinduism follower - and Six Days in Fallujah - a game about the horrors of war written by those who wanted to tell their real story - even share a sentence, let alone the implication that they are held back by the same thing, is the kind of odious, insidious ignorance rarely seen outside of an IGN editor-at-large.

Aside from the fact that Tomb Raider and Smite are pushing ahead despite it, are they not being held back by precisely the same thing, that thing being people being offended by the content and demanding it be stopped? That two of those are cases where you agree that the content in question should go away and one isn't is beside the point (I'm sure army recruiters and strongly nationalist folk probably feel Six Days in Fallujah is incredibly offensive, as well as some subset of veterans who assume it won't do it justice).

One thing I'm missing is what exactly is so bad about Smite's depiction of Kali, and why only Kali's a problem, and not any of the other Hindu deities. I mean yes, I think I'd rather she be a bit more true to the iconography, drop the bikini top, pick up a necklace of heads and a less revealing loincloth and such, but she's not terribly far off. See: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Kali_lithograph.jpg http://www.touchofclass.co.in/Vintage/Ravi-Verma-14-20/RV-040.jpg http://www.ipcny.org/images/india_prints/Kali.JPG

Compare to: http://www.smitewiki.com/File:T_Kali_Default_Card.png http://www.smitewiki.com/File:T_Kali_Default_3D.png

Personally, I'd rather them add Jesus as a "Melee, Mage, Support"-type character (give him two stances like Hel, call the transitions "Prince of Peace" and "I bring not peace, but a sword", you get the idea) then decide to scrap the project because a few Hindu are angry, because once they get their way it will be a few Asatru who are angry, and so on until there's nothing left. And frankly, the concept is kind of awesome if viewed in the right light.

Sorry, I just think "must not offend anyone" is a thing that should even be considered a goal, I'd rather content creators offend everyone than no one, or even better not be concerned who they might offend and just create what they want to create, but that's a pipe dream.

 

[Something Amyss]

lol My exact thought, too.

Something about offending people being bad and you shouldn't offend people and an indie group could make a game about environmentalism.

*slaps forehead* D'oh! Shouldn't offend people! I had it all backwards!

It's a shame, though. This is an issue that should be talked about more by the gaming industry itself, because it's a real issue. It does impact how gaming develops as a media. Unfortunately, the lot of us can flap our gums until the sun burns out, and it's meaningless unless there's some level of dialogue from the gaming industry.

 

[Something Amyss]

Aside from the fact that Tomb Raider and Smite are pushing ahead despite it, are they not being held back by precisely the same thing, that thing being people being offended by the content and demanding it be stopped? That two of those are cases where you agree that the content in question should go away and one isn't is beside the point (I'm sure army recruiters and strongly nationalist folk probably feel Six Days in Fallujah is incredibly offensive, as well as some subset of veterans who assume it won't do it justice).

TRO clearly argued isolation from the actual material. This is kind of a big deal, and this is from someone who doesn't care whether or not Shiva is in some MMO. Fallujah was being made with direct input from soldiers who served. While TRO can't exactly prove the lack of interaction or dialogue with the type of people who might have a problem with this, it's pretty unlikely that either bothered to get any input from their respective prospective offended parties.

Fallujah would have depicted combat as experienced by actual people. Smite and Lara Croft would not have depicted their controversial topics through the eyes of the people who have experienced it: Lara's "rape" was a hollywood rape, one which we were told would be character defining. Smite is not depicting Shiva as adherents to the religion understand him.

Whether TRO approves of each case or not, this is a salient point about understanding the nature of the suject one is tackling.