Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.

by Jamison DeLorenzo

One does not necessarily beget the other, but in this case I thought it was particularly amusing that the time it took to put my next mini-rant here together, while it felt like an inordinate amount of time, was still microscopic in comparison to the amount of time it took the Church of England to file suit (or at least threaten to) against Sony. For those of you not in the know, suing Rockstar has become much too passé.In the Resistance: Fall of Man PS3 game the Church of Manchester was a setting for one of the many in-game battles. Naturally this serves as grounds for a lawsuit because that area of England is plagued with gun violence. Now that the game has sold over a million copies worldwide it’s time for a baseless lawsuit against a company for a successful game. The wide array of specious reasons include bad taste complaints from anti-gun campaigners (because pixelated guns are always evil and promote actual gun violence) and slants against Christianity (because the gaming industry is always anti-Christian but pro-Islam and Judaism).

Using bad taste as a reason to complain about something is the current mechanism for professing an inability to deal with reality. That statement is probably far too discourteous but using that type of language is my way of saying that people really need to come to grips with reality and accept that certain forms of expression in the artistic world can be ignored. Just as most people can ignore an infrequent web article they can also ignore a video game that they will almost assuredly never play. Everybody can name something that greatly annoys them and wishes it would go away. Debra Messing is still around and I can cope with it. If you are unable to deal with differing forms of expression then there’s nothing this world can offer you.

We have been dealing with this long enough to realize that as long as a problem exists in the real world its depiction in video games is always cause for concern. Video games are the next major form of entertainment and society is going to struggle with dealing with this new entity for a long time. Stand up comedy had its era of ridiculous censorship and movies had it too. It should not be that surprising that people don’t know how to deal with gaming rationally yet. I understand what gun violence can and does do to a community, so my aggravation towards this situation is not out of a slanted view against those people in Manchester. The problem here is that people want to be protected from reality in almost every aspect of life. Video games have been a popular target for a while, so when game artists and designers were able to research and create a very impressive digital representation of the Manchester Cathedral their efforts had to be picked on.

Undoubtedly the anti-gun people would have been upset no matter what because the game is a shooter, so there’s not a whole lot that can be done there (other than ignoring people that are always going to be against gaming anyway). It’s not important that the guns are being used to take down aliens (because every living thing has rights- except vegetables and carbon, the basis of all life).  What’s important is that people think that the game developers are trying to make some high-arcing statement by using Manchester as a setting instead of some fictional world. Personally I always love how people feel the need to tell writers how to tell a story. Critics are often fond of telling writers how they should have told a story. In some cases people do have a point, but when taste is criticized instead of pointing out legitimate potholes the criticism becomes nothing more than self-promoting babble (to some this is known as The O’Reilly Factor).

In a game that is centered around the fall of mankind, which, by definition, requires that the game involve humans on Earth, the developers needed to pick a place that would allow gamers to suspend belief without going too far. Why England? I really don’t care. The developers could have hit England on a world map with a dart when making a decision about the story. In a couple different fictional stories, England has been the spawning point of dragons that almost wiped out human life (Reign of Fire), the land where zombies were attacking humans in another apocalyptic world (28 Days Later), the primary schoolyard for some of the world’s most powerful and evil sorcerers (Harry Potter), and the foundation of a horror story involving a relatively young woman (Bridget Jones). Fire-breathing dragons, cannibalistic zombies, and necromancy get free passes, but killing aliens is out of the question.

You figure it out.

Regardless, my point is that this lawsuit is just another pathetic attempt at trying to gain attention to a cause by using everyone’s current favorite whipping boy (video games). Aside from the massively delayed reaction to complain about the game (it does take a long time to research all Bible passages to see if some doctrine is violated by the execution of aliens in a video game), it becomes difficult to comprehend what the Church hopes to gain by making this statement against Sony. Maybe they feel Sony is too pre-occupied with other lawsuits or maybe they’re sweating over getting the PS3 to become a marketing success like the Wii. Such things can be quite difficult to understand, but one thing I can tell you with certainty is that believing that video game violence can cause more harm than real violence is far more dangerous to real victims than video games themselves could ever could.

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