Talk about violence in video games...

Check out this game, mainly it's trailer... now I would never condone censoring a game, even thou I'm personally not fond of cop or citizen killing games, and I don't with this one, but I can't help thinking that in this day in age where anti-police and anti-government is as strong as ever in society, someone with a similar attitude or feelings, and an emotional problem or two, might see this as a "training tool"? Thou in real life, he might kill some unarmed citizens, but he wouldn't last an hour or two on this killing spree.

That said, for a healthy gamer like me... it looks pretty F'in cool... BTW, Unreal has asked for their logo to be removed, they won't sensor either but they don't want their logo on it.

http://www.hatredgame.com/

what's your thoughts on it? Keep it respectful.

I view PC games the same way I view movies, music and tv shows. When minors are concerned, parents need to be involved and make sure that their kids don't play games that they deem are too violent.

Concering adults, if there's a game that you think is too violent then simply vote with your wallet and don't buy it. That's the single most powerful thing you can do as a consumer.

Does it have coop?

Walk around killing civilians? Almost as bad as walking around an airport doing it ala Call of Duty

I'll just leave that right there.

COOP is always nice. I see no problem with it. The whiners already complain that COD and BF4 type games are training aides. You can kill cops in GTA.

I think it's absolutely disgusting rubbish.

But then I'm probably not the target group anyway.

You can also do that in ArmA 3 and several of the Clancy games like Raven Shield and Ghost Recon.

Definitely in bad taste, and I'm sure some groups out there will point it out as a bad influence at the first chance they get.
It won't create nutcases IMO, but will attract them. It doesn't spread a positive message that's for sure. My kids won't play it if I have anything to say about it.
Can only hope other parents will keep their kids from it too so they don't get into it at someone else's house. The problem is that most parents buy/rent games
without checking them out and just assume things are ok. I guess this picks up where Postal left off.
Odd how we couldn't get Fight for Fallujah, but this can come out no problem.

In a properly designed mission it's also a point of failure, not a goal. The whole purpose around the groups you play as is that they're there to help people.

Someone who would enjoy something like this has legitimate mental issues on some level.

I stay away from violent games just like i do violent movies and I do not attempt to use the deck guns of my submarine in Silent Hunter 4 to take out the people in the life boats of some ship i just sunk. Plus that's a violation of the Geneva Convention.

The owners of game development companies decide what is appropriate in their opinions and i do not know the regulations for the industry regarding content

Made by psychopaths for psychopaths.

Yes in reality not in a PC game.

To be fair the deck cannons were indeed used against sampans, and as a defensive weapon and backup to poor WWII Pacific torpedo performance. I don't ever recall them being used to hit lifeboats but anything is possible.

Regardless, mass murderers =/= military submarine commanders.

Well SH4 seems to be a good WWII sub sim ....so might as well simulate what we can in game including adherence to any rules of humanitarian treatment just for the effect

You stay away from violent games yet you play a war game?

Wow that looked quite good... and what a terrible waste of talent. Hire those guys to work on wasteland 3 instead.

-C-

Well i guess it depends on your definition of what constitutes a violent PC/console game ...... i don't consider SH 4 to be a violent game ....most of the war game simulations i/ve played over the years i don't consider to be violent either ...but that's my opinion. Like SH 4 , most of those involved blowing up hardware rather then showing people

Some idiot is going to imitate this irresponsible game, and kill a bunch of people...

Then we are going to have just about everything super-scrutinized and restricted or over-regulated.

Say bye-bye to the 1st and 2nd amendments as we know them now...

This game is gonna f*ck it up for all of us.

-Skater

-- What regulations are there for the game industry with regard to violent content besides the label
-- Does the content violate any regulations

What the hell. Ya no thanks. Well that game will be banned it quite a few countries. Most certainly going to make a stink in the US.

What am I doing wrong, here? The only thing I see is something about the 20th birthday of the ratings board.

Society is offended way too easily these days.

Don't like it? Don't play it. Pretty simple concept.
Can even avoid the trailer.

To the best of my knowledge, there has been no significant link made between violent video games and any sort of gun-wielding rampage to date. Not that the media will care.

Usually I'm not skirmish.. but the shots of him putting the gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger is just over the top for me.

Just like movies .... there are good games and there is total rubbish.

Significant? Maybe not...but ultra violent games have caused troubled kids to snap, mostly not in mass shootings, but more for the individual communities, effecting behavior, violence towards parents, siblings, or even class mates... so violent games DO have a serious impact on already troubled kids... I've responded to a number of domestic calls where the troubled teenager is threatening themselves or others... my problem with all this is most of the time the parents say something like "he sits in his room and plays those killer video games all day", my Q. (which I'm not allowed to ask IRL, lol) Why the F are you letting him then? Take that crap away! Be a parent.

I don't believe violent games cause normal kids to snap and go on killing sprees, but I do believe troubled kids who play these games, can and do snap and cause local or family issues. imo

And your post addressed the fundamental issue. Parents need to be parents and step up and monitor what their kids are playing. This is not the responsibility of government but of parents.

It's a step above the GTA series in the violence animations department.
Would I buy it? No, Am I shocked by it? Not really.

The GTA's have a story-campaign to it. They call this pure no holds barred
entertainment using the latest Unreal engine and Physx technologies.
Pretty weak marketing technique IMHO. Don't see any sales records in the future.

Believe it or not; the data and many studies strongly suggests the direct opposite is happening.

Video games, violent or not, provide an outlet for frustration and boredom for many troubled kids.
An example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Violent-video-games-reduce-crime.html

You can actually observe the same effect with pornography and various instances of sexual crime (also backed by studies), where pornography provides a legal and safe outlet for deviant behaviour.

I agree.

Studies? maybe so... but I know what I deal with, and trouble kids who are allowed to sink themselves in theses games most of the day, display and act out IRL, I know this because I handle the calls in my city.

Speaking of violent games:

Hahaha!

Considering the storyline I think it's nowhere near bloody enough. Very "Rated G" version of Hell.

And three words: Not For Children.

troubled kids playing violent video games != violent video games making kids troubled

Well hello TIPPER GORE.

You misunderstand what Brun is saying. Correct me if I'm wrong Brun.

He's saying that just because the kids play the games, they aren't the reason they're troubled. Basically the OPPOSITE of what Tipper's position on games and music.
If these games didn't exist, these kids would still have their issues. They probably do find games like this attractive though, just like torturing animals or whatever their other hobbies are.
The game/music isn't the cause of their issues.

No regulations, in the US at least.
The video game industry self regulates. ESRB is their own creation to avoid regulation. There is NO penalty for selling an M or NC rated game to a kid. It's JUST a recommendation for parents.
Any refusal to sell under a certain age comes from the retailer.
If anything, retailers are the ones that regulate. This game could get created for consoles, but when Walmart, Amazon, Gametstop and Best Buy all refuse to stock it, for fear of tarnishing THEIR image, it will fail. And I doubt MS or Sony will put it up for digital distribution for the same reasons. That's one way consoles are a little superior to pc gaming in the eyes of a parent. If its a PC game, they can distribute freely on their own.

So they remade postal with modern graphics. Big deal...It's been done before

Actually Magnum, this studies have something you lack in your job. And that's the perspective to see things from a broader picture. Your job only lets you see the cases that you have to deal with. You never heve to deal with the kids that play the hell out of this games and have no issues at all. The ones you get to deal with are the already troubled ones that happen to play this games as well. And pherhaps becaused they are troubled this games hold a special appeal to them.
Studies done with proper data size and gathering allow us to reach reliable conclusions, one person daily experiences do not, specialy when it's their job to deal with trouble.

thanks RK

It is interesting that many people - a great many possibly - would not think twice about letting their kids play very violent video games, but would throw an almighty righteous fit indeed if in the middle of all that violence and murder their was one single graphic virtual sex scene. Even if it showed consensual and non-violent sex.

An impressionable child is an impressionable child. Keeping my kids away from graphic violence is just as important as keeping them away from graphic sexual images. People spend decades as adults, exposed to the real world and all it's vices - they spend only a few precious years as kids, protected from that world and allowed to enjoy a formative environment of their own and their parent's making. Filling that world with violence and murder for the sake of entertainment is highly questionable at best.

Thank you for posting this. Postal and Postal 2 were supposed to be the worst thing ever and the downfall of western youth.

This game was practically made for pissed off parents.

That said, it looks kinda dumb to me. But, then, they probably didn't have me in mind when they made it.

If "pure gaming pleasure" is being a sociopath, count me out.

I've been thinking about that recently, why people react so differently to sex and violence in games, films, etc.

Now, I'm not sure if it's because of hypocrisy or the result of a thought out reason, but my take on it is this: In a game, you can find both violence and sex. There is a difference in how these things could potentially influence children in the wrong way. Violence is something that most people will not be called upon to do, and those that are tend to be properly educated on it as adults (as part of learning to be police officers, soldiers, etc.), whereas sex will be different IRL. All of us will do it during our life, and most will start before we're even adults. As such, I do feel one can make the case that sex and violence should be treated differently in games.

It's common sense that we shouldn't kill someone else out of boredom, just as it's common sense that sex is something that inevitably will be part of life. If violence in video games teaches kids something wrong about how to impale a guy with a sword IRL, that's not really the issue; They shouldn't kill people to start with. If they start doing something that is wrong and/or harmful when it comes to sex, that's an issue because everyone is expected to do it sooner or later (more and more people sooner), they can definitely pick up bad lessons from media growing up.


With movies there's a few differences: Everyone knows that the violence, gore etc. is all faked. No one believes that that's actually some guy getting his head split open, or some Jap machine gunner being burned alive on Iwo Jima. Sex and/or nudity however is very rarely faked.

There's truth in what you say, no question. Fortunately there is a much greater propensity in life for people to have sex than to kill people. (Though I wonder about my wife at times, at least concerning me... )

That said, the glorification of graphic violence and murder for entertainment, for profit, and designed to denigrate those deemed allowed to be denigrated at the moment, cannot be seen as a healthy way for a kid to spend his time. Perhaps it is a question of degrees or of lesser evils, but "it's not as bad as..." cannot be the guiding light by which moral conduct is judged. If it's bad, it's bad all on its own. And if violence and murder are bad, and are perhaps the worst of all bad things, one wonders how exposing a kid to massive amounts of violence and murder in an interactive scenario can be seen as anything but bad. Sure, perhaps a kid playing GTA V "Is not as bad as...", but it still must be considered bad on its own.

Being a bad thing, the question then is why parents allow their kids to do it.

training tool ? a shooter in isometric view ? this is a much training and carmageddon, a game i personally dislike, did hit and run increased after that game ? you have better killing training in cs and battlefield

Oh so its not the violence what matter but the subject ? so if i were to change the models of the protagonist to say, the punisher or a american soldier, and the civilian as terrorist, gang banguers, the game would be palatable ?

lmao.....



How many people got more violent becouse of 80s and 90s "action" movies aka murder wankers ?

Also is anyone playing shadow of murder ? oh sorry shadow of moordorrr, you can do plenty more violent finishers on the orcs,they dont beg but you can see terror in their eyes and face, also any mortal kombat game , a game i particulary dislike for excessive and unecessary violence FOR ME, but draws in a lot of people, many o my friends played the first two games when we were only 12. None of us murdered anyone....yet

Soldier of Fortune was pretty graphic and brutal in its day. We played that one alot. None of us have mutilated anyone.... yet.

By that standard almost anything could be permissible to children and young adults unless overwhelming proof was offered that this or that was guaranteed to ruin their lives at a later date.

And it is guaranteed beyond a shadow of any doubt that as soon as this and that are in fact offered as acceptable endeavours for children and young adults, those who think violent video games are fine would, as mentioned, throw a heinous and almighty righteous fit decrying the person who offers this and that to children and young adults as the very incarnation of immorality itself.

But when put to the question of definition of immorality between this, that and the other thing, ambiguity, superficiality, and personal bias would reign supreme.

Thats for PARENTS to control....my dad didnt allow me to play the original splatterhouse becouse i was 12, only my sister aged 15 could, sure you can't control your kids on a friend house, but it would not matter if THEIR parents were responsible as well...i wouldnt allow a bellow of 14 years old to play MK if it were my kid, i wouldnt exactly allow them to only play rainbow and good stuff games, i always was an action gamer, killing ninjas, monsters, soldiers, etc, but they were not violent games, even EA knows this, thats why you dont see blood or gore on battlefield games, they know children are going to play it regardless and make a bulk of their "not intented but hey, who cares" target audience.

Take for exemple dragon age origins, do you consider it violent ? it has blood, it has gore and it has IMMORAL choices you can make, i belive morally is a bigger issue then the explicit violence, and its why we acept infanticide in mario (hey im saving the princess), or the fodder terrorists in cod, becouse they are evil and you are fighting for a free world.

No interest at all in this game.

It looks more like something a 15 year old kid who's angry because he can't get a girlfriend would find interesting.

It looks to me a lot like gratuitous violence for the sake of it - shock value, added publicity, media exposure, more sales, etc.

The problem being the next time a teenager goes on a murder spree you can bet the media will get wind he had this game on his Xbox and that will be it, calls for tougher regulation and censorship of video games etc. It's all the fault of video games.... nothing at all to do with the parenting (or lack of), naturally.

One thing I have noticed with my teenage nephew (now 14) is how many of his friends - when they were 10 or 11 years old - had stuff like GTA and other very inappropriate games on their consoles. Parents thinking it's just a video game, and video games are toys, must be suitable for children.... Just lazy, bad parenting.

In my nephew's case my sister takes a big interest in what games he has on his console, often calling me to ask if the latest game he wants is appropriate. He's allowed COD, HALO, stuff like that, but no GTA, Saint's Row, etc. He has only recently been allowed to have a TV in his room. Previously he had to play his Xbox in the living room where they could see what he was playing, and the amount of time he could play was heavily restricted. Ditto with the internet, only allowed to use it supervised and is not allowed to have a Facebook account or any other social media.

I've got a feeling if more parents were like my sister and her husband there wouldn't be so many delinquents.

I don't care how much violence they pile into this Postal 3 equivalent. Without Gary Coleman, I ain't buying it.

Magnum: there is an old saying "The plural of anecdote is not fact"

I don't like these games, nor would I let my kids play them. I tried playing GTAV but returned it. Just wasn't my thing, my 13 yr old son wants to play it but I won't let him.

I will bring him to war movies and let him play war games, but when it comes to killing cops or even civilians its not happening. I made them skip the airport scene in CoD.

Good man, actual parenting is in short supply these days.

It's funny, some years back when he was probably 10 we were in front of the games and some 14 yr old kid asked for the most recent GTA at the time. My son shot me a look stating "he's to young to play. Another parent also looked at this kid Mom and her response was "he's bored with all the other games"...

My Son will ask to play it while at friends house, but I still say no. I give on most things, but not this or movies with drugs and sex.

It's the old question again- does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

Whether you like the game or not, there has still been a failure to actually correlate violent crime rates with violent or sexual content in video games and other forms of entertainment. Even when the violent crime rate is generally on the decline, there is just some kind of cognitive bias which refuses to concede here. It seems logical that they would be connected, it does seem reasonable, but generally, that still is not the case. And then you can go the other way, without going into too much PWEC- some of the most repressed, puritanical societies that we've ever heard of have the most brutal behavior and cultural norms from our perspective. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you've never seen what passes for kid's TV and entertainment in Japan- some of the most violent and sexualized content considered appropriate for children where the two are often combined- yet without the same kinds of violent crimes for one reason or another.

This stuff has been going on for ages. Never forget man is work in progress, man is a primate whose closest relatives are chimpanzees, which are violent and impulsive and aggressive animals to begin with- and it shows. It shows in man's cultural development and attitudes. Early laws and religions and mores were outright brutal and severe and harsh. They've had blood sports for as long as there has been recorded history. Typically, I think there is more to the problem than playing games in and of themselves, I guarantee you that America's worst neighborhoods from a crime perspective have nothing to do with video games.

Doesn't really matter in my eyes, you're either sufficiently messed up in the head to enjoy this game or you're not. I'm not looking for an excuse to reduce crime rates but I'm sure as hell judging people for playing the game

There's no way you'll really know. You could be sitting next to someone at the pizza shack and the guy next to you has been up all night playing Grand Theft Auto. You might have a reason to talk to him briefly, you'd never detect anything out of the ordinary.

This is like a form of thought crime- judging people not necessarily by their actions, but just the kind of fantasies they play out in video games or something. When someone actually makes a move to do something like that in reality, then that's a basis to condemn him, for sure. I'm not so sure it's that easy when there are actually no warning signs or no actual behavior to condemn, other than playing the game itself.

I am indeed very much judging their fantasies based on my own moral compass. It's certainly their business and right to buy the game and live out whatever moronic fantasies they have, but I'll still think anyone buying this game has issues. I don't think it's a singular catalyst for actions in reality, they're just mentally twisted in a way I don't care to relate to.

I don't blame video games for violence, I just don't enjoy having tools as company.

If someone does indeed commit to some negative action in reality I'm not worried, I have a fast car and a sidearm for that crap

I think the argument rests on the slippery slope- and it goes both ways. Back in the 1970s, there was an arcade game that came out- I think it was called Deathrace, where players scored points running over characters. It was appalling to parents and the other usual groups, even though the game's graphics were quite primitive. Then there was the Dungeons and Dragons thing, and people thought that and heavy metal were turning kids into Satan worshippers. But ever since then, if you let in some little violence, gradually, little by little, you open up the door to let in more. Highway to who knows where.

Likewise, on the other side- if you censor something, you open up the door to censor everything. If it's a tug of war, that might describe a kind of dichotomy, but which few people are strictly on one side or another. This is what probably boils down to taste- one form of violence and killing depicted, yes, another form, no. Taste will come into play here, which is probably a difficult thing to control.

I don't even like most video games, graphic or not- they are a complete bore. But for my taste, I think musicals like Singing in the Rain and The Sound of Music are in bad taste for other reasons. Practically designed to oppress people. It's like stuff that passes for art in a totalitarian state.

I don't think so. This type of game doesn't train someone to survive in an all out war on society. A first person shooter or a simulation like ARMA would teach better skills than this. Perhaps people might believe it may desensitize or unbalance someone enough in the attempt (which is debatable), but imparting the skills to do it- not really.

Even the player's alter ego is just a caricature of violence and evil personified- not a real thing that could really be emulated in the same sense. Evil is usually more banal than that, it's the person who lived the normal life and you would never have expected it who turns out to be the mass murderer. Or it's the totalitarian society where its leaders are actually quite personable and affable at a party like a lot of psychopaths. There are much fewer examples of a guy dressed up and talking like that and going out and doing stuff like that, it's a bit melodramatic.

I think players will actually get bored of it after playing it for so long. The first hour or so, people will show it to their friends and get some laughs because of the shock value, then it just gets old.

I wondered how long before someone else here saw this and posted it. Just awful, people begging for their lives and all the realistic gore. Really Sick

There is nothing redeeming about this existential nihilism.

I don't even see the designers claiming that it's supposed to have some kind of virtue- I don't even think that's supposed to be a debate. They come right out and say what it is, and they make no references to that. I think they are saying: "You want to do this kind of stuff and you're entertained by it?, ok, we want to see some cash."

If anyone here stands by the free market unflinchingly and holds it up as the most pure expression of humanity and innovation and purpose, here you go.

I really don't get all the over-sensationalism about this. C'mon you are making this out to be something its not.

Whining about the gore, well we have had plenty of that in games which are almost 10 years old. I have an old fps title that was hailed as excellent back in the day. I hacked with a knife into a person (to check out the physics) and as the skull and face faded away the brain popped out.

But we are whining about murdering innocent people, well this game probably won't even come close to the amount of ways you can hurt innocent bystanders in a gta title (that also scream and beg).

But what about ethics, the game in question has no ethics. My answer, what about games like pay day etc, where you intentionally rob things and shoot countless innocent police, but we like that game.

Oh, I could go on for pages over the hypocracy (is that a real word) of this thread.

However at the end of the day, the sane ones of us will just say "its just a computer game. Its not real, its deigned to fill someone's idea of fun. Maybe even designed and marketed in a way to gain notoriety for itself, and if this appeals to me great. If I don't like the content, meh no worries I have better things to spend money on"

Will this make me have a rampage down a random street...... no
Does playing a boxing or fighting game make me want to punch random people...... no.
Does playing playing a shooting game make me want to be a sniper on top of a school building.... no

I am sane, I can differentiate between reality and not, abnormality and not fantasy or not.

I certainly won't go poo-pooing a nonsensical computer game which can't hurt a soul simply because of distasteful content. If i was to get my knickers in a twist over content, then most games + movies + toys + advertisement +most things in the world would also be under scrutiny for abolishment.

Grow up guys.

Where's the Goat Sim debate? I mean, you can become a Satan Worshipping Goat!!



The Jedi Master

Never ejaculated from playing a video game. Poor comparison imo.

Eh, a little over the top (sarcasm). Seems they're simply making the game to see what they can get away with.

that's nothing. a video link wouldn't be appropriate so here is a Wikipedia article instead

Rapelay

" May contain content
inappropriate for children"

A guy I knew stationed in Japan in the 1980s brought back some stuff stateside, lots of manga and cartoons. If you've never seen this stuff, it's a little difficult to properly describe. From the point of view of being imaginative, I've never seen anything like it, certainly it is imaginative. From the point of view of it being sadistic and masochistic, it is definitely that. Like very creative, surreal and very sexually violent.

One cartoon in particular he showed me had some evil guy who had built a machine for the purpose of raping women- it was a giant wheel with lots of artificial male members attached to it, capable of raping lots and lots of women at one time, and the odd thing about it was the women were transformed into demons in the act. They seemingly burst open and explode from the violence of it, and then for some reason were converted into monsters. And it doesn't stop there, there were scenes like some girl was tossed off of a large high-rise building, and one of these demons materialized in mid air and proceeded to rape her on the way down to her death, lots of other scenes showed weird scenarios like that, and what was really odd was even the camera viewpoints would change to show the act of rape from inside the women. It gets weirder still, but that's all I'm going to describe. So, the apparently the Japanese have been a little bit ahead here for awhile.

Holy crap. No way around it- this is wrong and horrible.

Why would whoever make this? That's not meant to be answered.

Here it is anyway, from the developers:



Dispensing with the economic reasons that people are in business in the first place, let's assume there is some particular passion by the game's creators, the pride they take in their work.

Maybe this explanation is very much sincere, I can't really offer much insight into what that actually means. I don't know what "giving the gamer pure gaming pleasure" is really supposed to be saying here that is supposed to be distinct from any other game. It's a vapid response, but maybe the people are vapid. Then it seems to actually pretend to provoke a meaningful question for the player himself (what would make him want to play our game?) This could be a bogus question, or it could be a real question asked by an idiot, like someone saying something stupid like, "Whoa, what if like, reality isn't really as it seems?"

I don't know if the answer really explains anything much more than: "Hell yeah! Get some." If you are going to make this type of game, I can't really see what kind of thought provoking answer would suffice, any attempt would be to pick the most sensitive guy out of the group and give him the assignment of coming up with something to explain.

Might be they're just complete tools looking for publicity......

Certainly. You want to make a game, you want to sell a game. Asking for any other reason beyond that would at best be dressing that point up.

I stand by the free market, its a red herring. I didn't call for banning it, but I do believe that moral individuals wouldn't give this developer money for this crap.

Not for me.. There is nothing entertaining about it at all. IMO it is kind of sick, the notion that something like that would be entertaining... It seems like it is just random violence for the sake of violence.. Having a label saying "not for children" is worthless... There is a reason why our society is the way it is.. and it has a lot to do with what we allow in our heads ..

In all seriousness, what makes a person immoral for playing it? Since the action is entirely fictional, since the characters in it are not real, since it's a game, if a person plays it and never commits an anti-social act, what have they done wrong? Who have they harmed? What moral precept have they violated? Other than taste, what is the offense? Can it really be boiled down to a real idea, or is just a vague idea that it is immoral? I can explain why buying diamonds for your sweetheart might support some evil people who control the diamond industry, but what can you show that's comparable here?

Here is a question for you: If someone made a game about the joys of pedophilia and child sex slavery, what would you think of the person's moral compass who played that game?

What about a KKK game about lynching blacks, if someone played that game, would you feel the person doesn't have a messed up moral compass?

So you don't answer the question. If you want to think about it and get back to me later, I'd be perfectly willing to listen to your ideas. But if you don't explain where morals come from, then I'll have to take it up.

So a moral is a rule of thumb, like, "The moral of the story is people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"- it's something that has been learned out of experience. It doesn't mean that it's always true, and not all morals are necessarily good. But I can't think of a moral that's being violated, unless you propose one.

In other words, just saying it's immoral- that's what you have to prove, you still have all of your work ahead of you to explain why killing a video game character is in itself immoral if no real people are actually harmed in the act.

It's a different thing to say that someone messed up might be attracted to a game than to tar anyone who plays it as immoral. These aren't real acts, no real person is actually being harmed. There's no actual moral precept being violated.

It almost sounds more like what I said earlier about being a thought crime, that's dangerous territory, it also probably makes a hypocrite out of me to call one form of fictional violence a moral crime but not another. You might argue that there is the potential that the person being harmed is the person playing the game, maybe it would damage their psyche, but you can't argue that it actually harms anyone else.

Let's say you wouldn't play this game if it were given to you, but let's say someone offered you a million dollars to play it- I doubt that you would turn that offer down just in order to prove a point, so let's assume you played the game for ten minutes, and let's assume you went on with your life afterward with no repercussions. What moral wrong in and of itself did you commit?

Making a tasteless game to stir up controversy as free marketing is almost as old a strategy as computer games themselves, and as a general tactic predates the computer age by a wide margin. That doesn't make it any better, though. And these guys even suck at that, given that the title will apparently need another six months to get finished. Until then the current discussion will be water under the bridge, and I predict that it's neither entertaining enough nor otherwise meritorious to stand on its own legs.

Irrespective of the legitimacy of this "game" I think it is poor in concept and will probably be poor in execution. Irrespective of the design shortfalls I personally would neither want to play it nor be part of a development team that's working on such a thing.


With respect to all the highbrow morality debate, let me just ask you a single, simple question:
Would you buy this title for your kids to play it?

No, but I buy games for me to play, not them... Well, when they were young, 19 and 21 now.

I bet if they replaced the civilians with terrorists, it would not get this much hate even with all the gory animations. Or replace main character with vigilante who wants to punish criminals violently.

Terrorists are totally the same thing as random normal people, and just chill out in public places ready to be killed...

Except there is huge difference between just killing the bad guys from killing them in some violent ways as in game trailer and to find enjoyment in that, or gain more points for more violent kills. Yet game where you kill some bad guys you are likely to get away with almost any violence.
It might be year 2014 but people love violence, before it was watching public execution or someone getting ripped apart by lion at Colosseum. Now people actually enjoy watching movies like Saw, or TV shows such as Dexter... This is probably why game developers think that their Hatred game will not only get released but there will be people who will buy it.

A game is entertainment. If people don't find it entertaining, they won't buy it or play it.

I think this is an overly obvious attempt at making publicity for themselves because they have to know it won't sell well. Might get pirated quite a bit, though, as people will say "I won't pay for something so disgusting, but I want to see just how disgusting it is." They go through it for like an hour and that's it.



The Jedi Master

I think that's a good point, and that is something I could actually demonstrate and show to someone. Likely, something like this really is just like a lot of lame things to waste your time on.

Connecting the content to morality is a slippery slope- maybe it seems counter-intuitive, but if I tried to do it honestly, I would have a difficult time.


I'd have an easier time explaining why supposedly consenting adults in pornography is more immoral, I could argue why perhaps there's exploitation or unequal bargaining power which might be involved. There's nothing like that here unless I wanted to argue that the person being exploited is perhaps the player. That's a slippery slope, it's the potential that the person playing might be harming themselves rather than someone else, that's the path to Big Brother, if people cared about that.

Seems like a pretty aimless game to me. Does the character get experience points to level up and gain access to better skills and weapons? If there's no 'plot', other than the hate of the character for all people, and there's no 'Levelling up', then the game is also pointless.

As for the game causing someone to go out killing, well, I'm not sure I've heard of any game in which the player plays a character in the IRA, ETA, the Baader-meinhoff gang, the Contras, Al-Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL/IS etc.etc. and they all have or do kill people, including 'innocent' civilians.

There will be murderers going about killing people and that game will be blamed, but the press and public always link violence with games even if the game has nothing to do with it.

When people help others, we are not told "It's because they've been playing 'Theme Hospital', or 'Hospital Tycoon'.

When people help animals, we're not told "It's because they've been playing 'Catz 5' or 'Dogz 4', or 'Pippa Funnel:Take the Reins".

Buying it and playing it are two things that are demonstrably distinct:
- Playing without buying: Plain old piracy
- Buying without playing: Buyer's regret

Sometimes intense playing can lead to more sales (like, if a game is really good and becomes popular), but the causality link is mediocre at best. I still have a couple of games lying around that I spontaneously purchased but never found the time to actually install, let alone play them.

These guys try to boost sales figures by scandalizing their hollow product.