Didnt see another thread so I thought I would create one to discuss the Sam Houser/Jack Thompson film that is on BBC2 tonight.

I have included a link to a short trailer if you have no idea what I'm talking about. (Could a mod embed please as I'm on my phone)

http://youtu.be/FyKDztRmiwA

I'm really curious how this will turn out as I'm not sure this sort of dramatisation has been done with video games before.

I'm curious to see how it is too, but I don't have much faith in it being anything accurate to real life events.

If it actually were a dramatisation of real events, it'd be about five minutes long. The script would go something like...

*Scene 1*

<A handful of people> Video games made me do a crime
<Rockstar> Where's your proof?
<A handful of people> Uh... Darn, I was hoping that'd work and I'd go free or something

*Scene 2*

<Jack Thompson> Video games make people violent
<Rockstar> Where's your proof?
<Jack> Haha I'm not listening lalala. Video games make people violent
<Rockstar> Let's just ignore this guy until he eventually goes away
<Jack> *Eventually goes away*

*Scene 3*

<Some guy> What about this Haiti line and the hot coffee mod
<Judge> Yeah, that Haiti line taken out of context sounds really bad. As for the clothed dry-humping scene that you can't access in the game, that is only suitable for 18 year olds, but your age rating was for 17 year olds. Sex is terrible unlike all this gang murder. We're suing you for a billion dollars.
<Rockstar> We disagree but okay *Pays a billion dollars*

*Credits roll*

"Arguably the biggest British coding success since Bletchley Park."

Nope.

@scarycrayons: I've been wondering that too. There didn't seem to be much interaction between Jack Thompson and the Housers at all, and while the whole Hot Coffee thing may have caused a bit of drama at Rockstar internally, it seemed more like a "shit, we left this stupid thing in, gotta damage control" than "IS THIS THE END OF ROCKSTAR GAMES!?!"

I'd rather have a movie that is more about modern game development in general, with crunching and having to deal with hype and hype backlash and clashing with publishers on project scope and whatnot, with something like the public "violent game controversy" that seems the focus here being more of a bit part.

(Or, you know, a Tetris Biopic...there seemed to be some interesting stories coming out of that, like Nintendo and Reps of other Companies travelling to Soviet Russia to basically have a business deal with a communist country.)

That said, given that there is a slight chance that this is a somewhat grounded portrayal about important events in gaming culture (The Biopic about the Origin of Doctor Who from the perspective of BBCs first female producer and the first Doctor who battles with aging as he finally breaks out of restricting typecasts was rather fun to watch), and given we don't get that alot (somewhat understandable because...you know...the gaming market is not THAT thrilling from an outsiders perspective), i may check it out somehow.

The story is a bit short (and said) from Pajintov's perspective, but the legal battles are still fascinating, with a bunch of companies THINKING they have the license to the game but no real clarity who had actual rights to the property.

Especially fascinating is Howard Lincolns (former CEO of Nintendo America) Account of the events, who after clashing with Atari over who's allowed to make console versions of the game, travelled in secret (even unknown by most of his own company) to Russia to make a deal with the then-licensing partner in Russia, ELORG fast enough to effectively stop Atari from publishing thier Tetris, wich let to a bitter defeat for the latter as they had more useless cartridges now than even from that time they rolled out the infamous E.T. game.

(Lincoln seems to have been a bit of a dickish guy back then, he later popped up during the senate hearings over violent videogames wich he used as a big smear campaign against SEGA while praising the self censorship Nintendo had over Mortal Kombat [and not offering Night Trap, not that they would've had any means to have this game on the SNES back then])

I'd certainly like to see that

@frybird: the BBC actually made an excellent documentary about Tetris. It can be found here. https://youtu.be/6ohCy4ktA5w

Unfortunately their documentary department is far, far better than their drama department despite the latter getting most of the corporation's budget, so I have low expectations for this. I expect ten minutes of explanation of what a video game is...

@deerokus: Cool, thanks for the link (although i still would love a dramatized version of this, the people involved make for interesting characters and some of the [legal] fighting during license negotiations between several parties and the russian sides sound like good entertainment ^^)

@dudeglove: I think at the end of most of Attenborough's nature documentaries they have a little 5 minute bit about how they filmed it, the camera crews in each locations and the technical challenges they faced. I don't know if those parts are included in the international versions though.

@dudeglove: Between Attenborough's camera team and the Top Gear camera team the BBC easily have some of the greatest camera teams in the world.

Presumably you didn't see the BBC Clive Sinclair drama starring Alexander Armstrong then? It was on about 6 years ago & thought it was pretty enjoyable. Considering it was also about a rather nerdy subject, the battle between Sinclair's Spectrum & the BBC Micro in the late 70s & early 80s, yeah, I'm pretty sure this won't immediately leap to patronising the audience by spending 10 minutes telling them what a fucking video game is. The BBC's drama department does a wee bit more than Eastenders & some of it is actually quite good. It's not as good as it was in the 1980s when we got things like The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness & the 2 George Smiley series, stuff like the Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh to the recent Wolf Hall, & even a series of Shakespeare historical plays done for TV (The Hollow Crown) have been well received. Thought the first season of The Hour was a rather good British attempt at the Mad Men thing, albeit it got a bit less interesting in the second series.

Scotland is British though. People from there are British and Scottish just like how people from England are British and English.

@dudeglove: Scotland is part of Great Britain.... For now at least.

At the weekend I read in The Radio Times (a prominent UK TV and Radio listing magazine somewhat equivalent to TV Guide in the US) a preview article about the drama which contained all of the usual "old media" prejudices about "violent video games" along the lines of "I've never played a video game and I don't have any evidence but I'm certain that the world would be a nicer place if these games didn't exist" (yeah, seriously) and including the specific claim that the GTA games "encouraged/allowed you to rape women" (I don't remember that being the case, but then I guess that's not something I would try to do even in a virtual world). Also, several other sources seemed to be playing up the notion of these games being created by "geeks" as if they were somehow a species apart from regular humanity.

However, for their part, the programme-makers do seem to be insistent on not necessarily pushing for either side in the debates raised by the drama but rather try to present a dispassionate, equivocal portrayal of events and thus allow the viewer to consider for themselves the complicated topic of what relations exist, if any, between media and social reality. We shall see I guess, but to the extent that the writer of the programme consistently referred to the GTA games as works of art in the Radio Times article (much to the consternation of the reporter who felt it necessary to put quotes around the term "art" even whenever it was mentioned outside of a direct quotation) it does seem that they're at least sympathetic to the GTA series and the medium of games in general.

According to the descriptions I've read, the drama is supposedly drawing on the court documents from Thompsons various filings against Rockstar. As mentioned in an episode of the Beastcast, Rockstar filed suit against the BBC earlier this year for trademark infringement in an attempt to ensure that footage from any of their games including the GTA series cannot be included in the drama, and depending how you choose to view it, maybe do whatever they could to derail the production and prevent the programme makers from telling their version of this story. So clearly this isn't going to have the benefit of the Houser's input in terms of relating the facts.

BTW Rockstar North might be based in Scotland, but the Housers are about as English as it's possible to be. They were both born and raised in London and went to a very exclusive private school there (St Paul's School, the same school that George Osbourne, current Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK government, attended).

The big question is will they get Bill Paxton as Jack Thompson to say "Game over, man!"?

Anyone else watched it? I've found the tone really weird. Even though, in true BBC fashion, they went out of the way to say "there's no conclusive evidence either way" that video games make people violent, there was a lot of scenes where Jack Thompson collects "irrefutable scientific evidence" and, in general, he's presented as nothing more than a very concerned citizen that just wants the best for the children.

@ratamero: To a lot of people that's all he was. I felt they left it up to the viewer to make their own decision.

I actually quite enjoyed it. They had to take a huge amount of artistic licence with the Rockstar stuff as they are a very secretive company but I thought it turned out ok.

@mister_v: Thanks for reminding me, I told other people it was on but forgot to watch it myself. Turns out it's still on iPlayer for download.

Didn't think it was much cop as a drama, and wasn't won round a lot by the tone of it either. All of the Jack Thompson stuff, particularly him gathering the evidence, seemed to be pretty at odds with what seems to be the reality of the man. The charitable interpretation would be that it's the classic BBC "balance" that sneakily balances the scales with its thumb. But ultimately, the cinematic and narrative language of the thing was definitely on the Thompson side of things, I think. Those rotating shots of soldiers playing America's Army screamed "murderbot hypnotization machine," for example; the totally unnecessary inclusion of an under-appreciated and bored girlfriend for the time-travelling youtuber discovering hot coffee; violent blag mugging gang plays GTA.

Most damning of all to any claim that this was an objective and serious look at the games industry was that a pretty interesting-in-its-own-right aspect of development - the crunch time, the managing of different studios - was included, but ultimately only as a tool to try and portray Sam Houser as someone who doesn't care about the people who work for him. I felt there were several scenes that really seemed to be trying to portray him as someone whose drive to make the game he wanted meant that he didn't spare a thought for the people he was hurting (EG, putting in a scene of him dismissing the "plight" of Devin Moore, to contrast with Jack Thompson, who just wants to see him get a fair shake!). It was a reasonably sympathetic performance by Radcliffe, but the script is against him.

And all this is all secondary, really, to the fact that it is a really crap halfway house of a story. A vague attempt appears to have been made to contrast Thompson and Houser as men being worn down by the stress of their own ambitions and will - but to make that story requires them to bend the truth of it all in some subtle but irritating ways. Meanwhile, they also want to make a "this is the true story" type thing, with a "serious" examination of the issues, to the detriment of the narrative structure. So, just not good, really.

tl;dr: The Social "Meh"-twork

God, it was awful.

So, I haven't watched it yet and I plan to this evening, but this is my favourite thing to come out of this so far:

There are some more particularly choice tweets from staff here as well.

So, I've read that it's based on this book which Rockstar have said they had no involvement in, so it being a bit washy with details would seem about right, and explains Rockstar's tweet. I meant to watch it last night, but ended up watching the Destiny Quick look live instead, so I'll hopefully catch it on iPlayer, which is here, if you're in the UK and wanna catch it http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ccjn9

Rockstar's response just seems petty and bitter after they tried to make this thing not happen by throwing lawyers at it.

Yeah, I forgot all about it myself but I Tivo'd it. After seeing that Rockstar tweet, now I really MUST watch it this weekend.

The show was terrible. Really terrible.

Poor dialogue, poor story, rubbish 'points'.

Wow. Implied right off the bat GTA made him do it. Good going.