The purple dildo in the room.

JAMES

Watching this week’s episode of Good Game I witnessed a fairly rare phenomenon; game reviewers critiquing a game on a moral, political and ideological grounds. This almost never happens, the closest you get is the outrage amongst the gaming community that Australia is currently without an adult classification for games, leading to some games with extreme or high impact themes being banned outright.

The game in question was Saints Row: The Third, a sandbox, open world, absurdist and hyper-real parody of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Hex, one of relatively few women employed in the industry, while largely enjoying many aspects of the game, took issue with certain elements contained within. Namely, the ability to commit extreme acts of violence against women arbitrarily, that is, not as part of the story or with any necessity.

I should note here that I think any depiction of violence, extreme or not, being perpetrated against women in the medium of games should be critically examined regardless of its inclusion in the main story of a game. In this particular instance it was the carelessness, callousness and lack of consequence (or presence of reward directives) for the character that Hex took particular issue with. (A post on acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence within games and the spectatorial investment and gamer complicity within game violence is forthcoming).

The content in question involved the character being able to grab any other character, including civilian women, by the hair and face-slam them into the ground, the ability to beat people to death with a giant purple dildo and a mission where the goal was to ‘rescue’ prostitutes being held captive in shipping containers by either pimping them out yourself or selling them back to their original ‘owners’. This is hateful and gratuitous violence that obviously revels in the rape, abuse and torture of women. This is further compounded by the fact that the character, when opening the container doors, often finds the prostitutes grouped around ‘fisting machines’.

Hex was seriously unimpressed with this content, more so than Bajo—Hex’s male counterpart—who, while obviously finding the content distasteful, predictably disavowed the spectre of game censorship by defending the developers’ right to creative licence. He stated that even though this type of content is in the game, a gamer can choose whether or not they partake in it. Although I haven’t played this particular game, I have played enough to know that such ‘choices’ are illusory; within games there are innumerable directives (both subtle and explicit) that reward the player for engaging in all aspects of the game-play.

Bajo’s arguments were not enough for Hex, although her capacity to further express her distaste and what was possibly anger, appeared limited. Whether this was due to a lack of ability to cogently express her opinions on this matter or a restrictive set of review criteria is unclear. The expression on her face throughout the latter half of the review suggests to me that she wanted to say more.

What is both interesting and disturbing about all this is that despite this the game received an overall positive review, achieving a composite score of 16.5/20. This is suggestive of the locus that politics and ideology inhabits within the gaming world; essentially that if you don’t like something, it’s your problem, not the game’s.

Game reviewers get full license to slam a game for shoddy game-play, poor mechanics, a stupid premise or terrible sound and dialogue and yet a game that offends or crosses moral/ideological boundaries (to even gratuitous extents) somehow remains critically out-of-bounds. The question  Hex posed at the end of the review, “What’s next? Violence against children in games because ‘it’s not supposed to be taken seriously’?”, is a question the gaming industry does need to start asking itself.