There are roughly 40 new video games being released this week. That is not unusual for this time of year — at the peak of the holiday season, with two new consoles due in November, there will be two or even three times that number shipped to already overcrowded stores at the mall. But parse this week's list, Google a few names and a picture emerges, a snapshot of where this medium sits in the wider popular culture. With any luck, that picture will have just under 1,000 words so I can get back to playing and reviewing those games before the stack topples and kills me.
Bully for you
It was created in Vancouver by Rockstar, the company behind the Grand Theft Auto series. It features a private school called Bullworth Academy and a young teen named Jimmy Hopkins who has to fight off bullies and gain entrance to closely guarded cliques.
This combination — Grand Theft Auto maker plus schoolyard — caused a great deal of concern in the buildup to the game's release. There were public protests as early as last year, when it was still in the design stage.
With Rockstar and its parent company, Take Two Interactive, coming off a financially strenuous scandal involving naughty hidden scenes in GTA: San Andreas, an attempt was made to head off the Bully controversy. In Europe, its name was changed to Canis Canem Edit, or Dog Eat Dog, the Latin motto on the Bullworth Academy crest, and this summer portions of the unfinished game were made available to mainstream game writers in the United States and the United Kingdom.
That last step was very out of character — Rockstar has mostly ignored the media in the past, even erecting a menacing chain-link fence around its display area at the industry's trade show E3 two years ago — but the positive stories that subsequently appeared did seem to quiet the alarm bells. The game was rated Teen, for age 13 and up, instead of Mature or Adults Only.
Late last week, there was one last-ditch effort to block Bully's release, but it was just Jack Thompson making more noise. The crusading Miami anti-game lawyer asked a Florida judge to declare Bully a public nuisance and to ban its sale in the United States. On Monday, Judge Ronald Friedman announced that he had seen nothing in the game you wouldn't find in a night of television and sent Jimmy Hopkins and Bully out to recess.
Thompson responded with a typically vitriolic letter addressed to Judge Friedman and sent to media outlets. It compared the judge to duped nuclear inspectors in Iran and included the endearing line: "The way you conducted yourself today helps explain why a great Dade County judge, the late Rhea Pincus Grossman, could not abide you."
I am no legal scholar, but that seems like a bad move, strategy-wise, for a lawyer to make.
The sad thing about how much attention Thompson gets is that there are issues involving games and violence that society should be dealing with — not with blind censorship, as he advocates, but with rational discussions between individuals and groups with different viewpoints. In my experience, people who make and play games love talking about them, but they are sick of being vilified in some quarters as potential psychopaths because of their hobby.
Rockstar has a proven record in getting people talking about games and morals and how they intersect, and let's hope this conversation continues and gains substance beyond Bully's launch this week.
Battlefield 2006
As it is most weeks, industry giant Electronic Arts is well represented on the release list. There is the annual update of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour franchise, an expansion pack for the bestselling PC game The Sims 2 called Pets, which needs no explanation, and Battlefield 2142, the third instalment in the multiplayer war series.
Nothing all that surprising, but then I saw the ad line for the latter game: "The future of war looks good."
What? I know they mean the visuals — the graphics in the game, but they obviously have not been reading the same things I have. That goes on the discussion agenda, a notch above Bully.
Licence to slightly entertain
There are games based on the following entertainment properties heading to stores this week: Family Guy, Desperate Housewives, Kim Possible, SpongeBob SquarePants, Scooby Doo, Strawberry Shortcake, Barbie, Garfield the cat and Nancy Drew. Plus, there is Justice League: Heroes, which features Batman, Superman and other vigilantes from the DC Comics universe.
These are called licensed or tie-in games and they can make a lot of money for game publishers because they have built-in audiences and parents are more likely to buy a game for their children if they recognize the name from their TV screen or bookshelf. These tie-ins often serve as introductions to video gaming for kids and for people taking tentative steps from other mediums. I don't imagine, for example, that a large proportion of the people who tune in to Desperate Housewives each week are regular gamers.
After years of burning these potential bridges to a wider range of demographic groups with substandard, often rushed games, publishers are beginning to make better licensed titles. That is good from a critical point of view — I typed that list above with far fewer cringes than years past — and it makes good business sense for the industry as a whole.
As they (probably) say in the restaurant trade, you don't win customers with yesterday's soup.
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