Little Big Planet gets a Little Big Delay
By Why_So_Serious 4 Comments
Before I go on I must address this...WARNING: All views in here are expressly opinions. You may disagree and you may agree on some. If you can't stand to listen to views that are different than yours or you get offended easily than don't read any further.
Two days ago, Little Big Planet was delayed due to two lines of the Qur'an in the background as music, a islamic citizen received a copy of this game early and complained to Sony about this "offensive" language. Sony recalled over 750,000 discs(estimate) to remove on song from the game. After giving this a few days of thought I have a few opinions I would like to discuss. In this day in time I can see where Sony comes from in delaying the game. Anything is taken as offensive and people fear being sued due to the obsessive amount of it going on. The tiniest things around can become the largest of court cases. Thus, Sony has good reason to delay the game so that there won't be any consequences. I understand the whole thing on freedom of religion, but that's just it. Gamers are blaming the Islamic community for the delay and that if they "weren't so offended" we would have the game in two days. I was furious when I found this out too, but it's not their fault entirely. Sony and Media Molecule put the soundtrack in the game so they know what they are releasing. Why in the first place would you release something like that. As sensitive as America is today and the diverse cultures we have they had to have at least thought something might have happened. The song wasn't put in the game on accident.
But that leads me to another thought. Why recall all the discs instead of just making a tiny update to pull out one song. Is it really that difficult? Epic games added a whole new online game mode to Gears of War through a patch so why can't Sony remove one song. Then this whole thing wouldn't be such a huge outcry. It's not the quotations that is making this a huge deal, it's the fact that it was delayed. This leads me to some excellent points made in Sweep's blog about this same topic:
Sweep:
A large group of people believe this Islamic interference is unjustified. Someone pointed out that people should be allowed to say what they want without fear of persecution - essentially presenting the notion of "Freedom Of Speech". Fine, you can say whatever the hell you want and you don’t have to care what people think about you. But you DO have to deal with the consequences. If what you are doing is fundamentally insulting to a culture or religion, then that’s just wrong. Sony seems to have realised it's mistake and is obviously trying to remedy it - hence the 1 week delay. There should be a level of respect for people everywhere, and that involves a level of tolerance. This is about what they think is important, not what you think is important.I would like to point out to everyone that Freedom Of Speech is a western luxury, and that many cultures have strict social restrictions. We do as well, we just dont realise it because they are intergrated into our culture. Using this freedom to insult people just because they are so far away in another country is both cruel and unfair. I appreciate that no individial has been directly targeted, but supporting the "Who gives a fuck what Islam thinks!" ideology just proves how ignorant you really are. (Nobody said this, but it reflects the mentality).
The idea that we have become restricted by Political Correctness was also presented - and that people now live in fear of offending alternative cultures. Political correctness is there exactly for this reason - to avoid insulting people. I will agree that some aspects of political correctness are unnecessary but this is one of the cases where you should be paying attention because you are going to fuck off a lot of people if you screw this up, as Sony has just discovered. Criticising the concept of Political Correctness is understandable in terms of saying "Trial and improvement" over "trial and error", but if Sony had been more politically correct then this entire issue would have been avoided and their game would be released on time. Do you really think they care if a ten second cut of their soundtrack has the Qur'an in it? Of course not, they will have no issues with removing it - its just unfortunate that the problem was only spotted so close to release.
People are going to disagree with me. Well, let me know what you think. I would consequently like to recommend travelling the world, to everyone. It really does broaden the mind. If you believe that Islam is wrong on this issue then I suggest you travel a long way away, immerse yourself in a different culture and get some perspective. 3 years ago I travelled to Thailand, a country where they have infinite respect and loyalty to their royal family - to the extent that even saying insulting things about them is considered almost blasphemous. So you don’t walk into Bangkok and start shouting shit just because you are from somewhere else and you think these rules don’t apply to you. You shut the fuck up, nod, smile, and eat your fucking rice just like everyone else. You dont have to do it when you are at home but at least it would teach you respect for other peoples cultures.
Sweep makes an excellent point when he says traveling the world to immerse yourself in others cultures. While this is America we should probably respect others views more than most people actually do. We are very narrow minded sometimes when it comes to judging others. The "all muslims are terrorists" thing is very harsh. Although shamefully I have sometimes feared them and made extreme comments to other Muslims on this same point.
We live in a country right now overcome by fear IMO which is the reason people blame the Bush administration for our debt problems. But no one as taken time to look at why we are there. People just blame others when they don't understand why something has happened. Bush never had a chance. He was hit by one of the biggest tragedies in a long time in America not even 7 months into his 4 year presidency. He had to clean-up this mess and thus never had the chance to do what he planned to do. So don't blame anyone on this. We can blame the Islamic's for complaining, Sony for recalling, and media molecule for putting it in the game. So instead of putting the blame on others...such as I have in the past few days...get over it. I know it will be tough for me do to this being my one week off and I wanted to play the game all week, but it isn't as if it was cancelled or delayed for a month.
Till next Time,
Why So Serious?