Guest Column: Turning in the Badge

Great article!

Video games wasn't a cause of World War 1. However, the romanticizing of violence and warfare certainly was, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say part of the author's critique is aimed at our modern day romanticizing of force unbound by authority.

The Jack Bauer link got me thinking about how heroes and laws/regulations usually interact: media often shows situations where the heroes should break their laws/regulations for the greater good, but it rarely shows situations where following said laws/regulations is the better choice.

Since the norm isn't interesting, they show the exception 95% of the time. Then people begin thinking the exception is the norm because it's all they see. (It's similar to Jeff's pondering on whether all the government conspiracies in video games lead to a fucked-up perspective of actual governments.)

@furiousjodo: But that's not the reason you were shooting them. Those were members of the Rikers gang, escaped prisoners from Rikers Island Prison. They just so happened to be near something you needed to pick up.

@turambar: But violence in entertainment isnt anything new. The important part is being able to separate the difference between real violence and the imaginary one. Lots of sports are pretty violent (boxing, american football, mma fighting). There is clear evidence that some of those injuries are very harmful to the people who are involved in those sports but so far people still want to watch those sports. Despite the real injuries that they are causing to the people involved. So far in video games mostly digital people have been harmed in those games (though with vr who knows how many people will injure themselves seriously while playing).

What i take offence to in these kinds of articles is the implicit statement that people who enjoy any form of entertainment that differs from the authors own set of moral values is simply doing stuff the "wrong way". We cant play fps games to just watch stuff blow up (for example: just cause 3 ) because that is somehow morally wrong. Instead we should only play fps games where each death is a significant event with multiple moral and ethical issues that we have to solve.

So forget games like doom or mortal kombat or anything where the goal is just to have fun. We need instead to only play games which explain to us in detail how every death is a horrible horrible tragedy.

Also i am pretty sure all the mass killings by real life firearms will just vanish from the face of the earth if we stop developers from developing violent games.

I just don't think this style of criticism makes much sense for the "co-op MMOs" that are coming out now. The discussion is interesting, but at the end of the day it's like arguing about the quest text everyone skips in MMOs. It's just filler to get you hooked on the progression loop and a means to an end.

@nardak said:

This article reads like a pacifist playing a shooter game that resents the fact the game has you killing people. I don't understand the logic in that, but than again, I'm not a pacifist.

@mike said:

Na, I feel this game includes commentary on you being the bad guy. It's why I don't feel the crit around the game so much (also because a lot of it seems to be "oh noes, US military killing US civilians: this is bad" - like, US military really kill civilians every day; drone strikes sum up to wiping out thousands for being near a building where someone who a broken machine learning algorithm said might be a terrorist might have been sleeping and that's just part of our reality. Suddenly the civilians are fictional and USian and everyone needs to bring out their views on the US constitution to back up why this game has a bad story. What? How was that the trigger to write about the horrible stuff going on in the world?) because I looked at those fragments in this game. I saw the LMB become what they are because they were just more division agents. Agents who did what they could and tried to draw the line that your player character is fed here (save the city and do what needs doing to keep things "safe" - some foes easy to see, others just people with pistols on the street, picking over corpses to survive). And things went south, the lines of support were rolled back and the first wave troops were left to die in the NY winter. I read that as what could happen your second wave. That is your potential future that the game is expanding upon when talking about the current bad guys. The division agents trapped in an apartment trying to save survivors as they're told no support is coming and the Molotovs start impacting the windows: that's you two months from now.

The game never explicitly says you're anything but the good guys to your face... But then you kill looters who were ransacking a crafting mats area (and were not really hostile if you gave them space) and loot it yourself. Bad design or the game nodding at you? It's either in there because they didn't care about narrative and had to reward gameplay or it's in there because they're also aware of the fact you're doing a lot of harm as you focus on "the things that matter"; civilians are just casualties or "enemy combatants" the second they don't look like obedient defenceless rubes. I think the text is there to be read as showing you exactly what your character is and how blinded by the "might is right" ideology that the mainline story constantly pushes on your character. You are the hero, now kill kill kill! Walk into the DZ and get out of the all-seeing eye of the net (with the ominous message you're free from anything but proximity contact) and what happens: division agent on division agent murder for gear. The game narrative and mechanics says the only reason you're even lawful (let alone good) is the eye in the sky.

[I've written more about this in the podcast comments that go with this article]

@halexandra64: But shakespeare made those plays for general english audience (they were plays for a pretty rowdy crows at their time...bad plays got their share of rotten stuff thrown at the actors)...and the plays usually ended with all of the corpses piled on the stage for greater effect. The question also is: Did Shakespeares plays make the society more violent as a result? Or did they reflect the violence of the society? Did calling them tragedies change the society for the better?

And division isnt a tragedy. It is an action fps. Should we also ban movies from Tarantino because deaths in his movies are often presented withouth any real moral or ethical issues? Should the heroine in Kill Bill films cry each time when she kills someone? Do all of the movies have to be done in a certain way? Does this same principle also apply to games?

Anyway this is my last post on this matter:)...i just believe in the freedom of expression and not censoring stuff because it doesnt suit your particular set of moral values.

This is just you projecting, in no way are these kind of articles saying you are doing anything in the wrong way by enjoying a game like this, implicitly or otherwise. That kind of ridiculous strawman argument as a way to somehow take a piece of media criticism personally just misses the point entirely. I like a lot of games, movies, books etc. others have criticised harshly for a variety of reason, in no way is that criticism in any way aimed at me as someone who disagrees with that criticism or enjoys it despite agreeing with it.

What is the point of that last sentence by the way. In no way is this article arguing for developers to stop violent video games, so thats just another strawman argument you constructed.

If we're to use Shakespeare as an analogy, then the question is not whether the plays made people violent, but rather how did the plays effect people's thoughts on the role of violence.

I don't think I ever said anything about banning games or censoring anything. Listen, I get it. You have strong feelings about this stuff and it's easy to look at critique as something more than it is. At the end of the day, The Division is a perfectly fun game and if you just want to log in and run a mission with your pals, more power to you! :D

Who are arguing for censorship here. Criticising a piece of art like this isn't arguing for it to be censored, it is just criticism. The word censorship has pretty much lost all its meaning on the internet with how incredibly misused and overused it is. You're not some heroic defender of free speech because no one is arguing for anything to be censored here, people are just discussing and criticising in the same way you are.

@turambar: Without getting into politics, that could be an interesting stance for a game to explore, but I don't think that's what ME is trying to do. That's a point that would be made by an attempt at regulated response failing, or by the Council viewing Specter membership as a necessary evil to be avoided unless absolutely needed, or by somebody quoting the Bhagavad-Gita if you can't think of a less heavy-handed way - not by avoiding a resolution entirely by making "You get to break all the rules" a good thing to strive for that puts humanity on the political map and also happens to save the galaxy because Hooray Humans.

@ various: It makes me sad to see how few people understood what this article was about at all, or simply decided not to read it before commenting.

e: Spec Ops: The Line asks some great questions about this, come to think of it. Man that game was smart.

I never will buy this argument. Just because a game markets itself as something doesn't mean it can't be criticized for lacking something that it claimed it didn't have. I don't mean to be rude, but that's just how I see things. If you want to play a game where you kill fake people without question, fine. Art doesn't exists in a vacuum, however. A game is not free from criticism because it said 'I'm doing things you don't like and if you don't like it, don't play me!" It doesn't work that way. We in fact can like the thing (or a thing) it does (third person shooting), but ask questions as to why it thinks doing such thing is acceptable, for example.

Games where you kill virtual people aren't going away. Power fantasies where one lacks responsibility are not going away. There is however a cultural significance, IMO, as to why such a thing is needed and I believe looking into that can be fruitful.

@amyggen: I dont believe myself to be a defender of free speech:) This is just you trying to stick a label of your own creation on me:) Like i am somehow assuming some heroic mantle on behalf of liberalism and greater personal freedom of expression for all.

I am just stating why i believe so strongly in this subject matter. This is the basis of my argument concerning this particular matter.I am just simply passionate about this particular subject as obviously you are too. Or should i call you a defender of somewhat deep and meaningful deaths in video games?

And as you yourself said before trying to put a label on me "people are just discussing and criticising in the same way you are." In this particular case i am criticising the author criticising the game (which is quite a lot of criticising).

@nardak: The point is that putting yourself on the side of free speech and against censorship is nonsensical in these kind of discussions because no one is arguing for anything to be censored here, it's just criticism of aspects of a game. My response was a bit too snarky though.

The hypothetical I was posing was that what if ME was not attempting to avoid a resolution, but rather being purposeful in its acceptance of "you get to break all the rules", and posing it as a positive with no other subtext. There is no rule written that this viewpoint, when presented, has to be accompanied with an attempt by the author to subvert it in some way.

Obligatory: "Critique is not the same as telling people how to think," and "Media does not exist in a cultural vacuum."

And if your biggest criticism of an article is that it's just someone complaining about something they don't like, maybe you should show a little self-awareness, lest your criticism of the article becomes the exact same thing.

The thing is she isn't critiquing The Division just because it has death. Her point is that the way those games talk about death stays some pretty nasty things. This does not mean that the people who make or play this game are bad people or even the The Division should not have been made. Just that if we accept what it says at face value then as a consequence we accept some bad stuff.

This does not mean that every piece of media about death has to be deadly serious, far from it. In fact if The Division was less concerned about making its world look as down to earth and realistic as it does than it would not feel like it was trying to say anything about state sanctioned violence in the real world. Quentin Tarantino movies are actually pretty good example of how to talk about violence in a less serious way. The thing is that The Division actually does take itself seriously and as a consequence it is worth writing about in a serious way

My response to the bolded section would be that I would like it if we more often asked "why do we like the thing in the first place, and what it says about our ourselves and our criticisms that we continue to eagerly engage with the very thing whose acceptability we question."

After all, @halexandra64 has said she enjoys the Division despite the criticisms she has put forth.

Wonderful article. I used to play FPS games a lot, but now I don't so much anymore. Once they started moving most of their focus to multiplayer, I lost interest in most of them. I don't like feeling like an unstoppable killing machine most of the time these days.

What makes me facepalm the hardest when it comes to the story and setting in The Division is how much more easily we'd all be able to swallow it whole if it wasn't set in the real world. A perfectly competent third-person cover shooter where you shoot enemies and numbers pop off and you find loot and level up--mechanically, that's what The Division is. But instead of being set in outer space, with heroes battling alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy, you play as a regular person who left a job at the gas station and picked up an assault rifle to go kill hundreds and hundreds of human beings.

Whoever pitched this game at Ubisoft sure laid out an unenviable task for the scenario writers. If you look closely at what's actually happening in the game, for even a brief moment, it's just totally outrageous. I can't help but imagine this kind of criticism just wouldn't even be happening if Ubi had published "third-person Destiny" rather than what we're playing now.

Thanks for the article, Heather!

But... there is no call to censor or ban here in the article.

Far more crucially, a call to suppress this sort of article is an attempt to silence. This article is criticism, that's also speech just like the game is speech. And so is criticism of the article (meta-crit). You've constructed a purely straw-opponent here and only people who writte about how this article shouldn't exist are writing something in favour of suppressing speech. If you want to disagree with the article then do so by offering alternative readings of the game or tracks of thought. Engage in meta-criticism (look at what sort of critical response the Division has received: why is it often of the form it is and what makes this game different to other similar games that has caused the critical eye to be focussed in such a specific way here but not for the other games before it?) Don't just try to label anything but praise or the narrowest of criticism of mechanics ("the game feels bad to control, the graphics are weak, 2/10") as censorship or liken it to bans.

This is absolutely the sort of article GB should be running (and paying writers to provide). Something beyond the off-the-cuff of much of the video content, something considered. GB can be more than a few guys yacking over footage and occasionally going deeper in an aside. The written stuff has so far been great, as has Austin's stuff (and Patrick's stuff before that).

@halexandra64: So much good writing on Giant Bomb these days! You rock.

I've only ever found that nuanced critique has increased my enjoyment of media, made it more complex and interesting.

Like, I haven't played The Division, so I can't speak to whether I "agree" with this particular line of argument-- but it's still a cogent and well rendered argument, and that's awesome regardless of whether I ultimately find myself in agreement.

See, I really appreciate the landscape here. The city post-apocalypse but not of the zombie kind (because let's be honest here, the Last of Us had vibes of this but swapped out a lot of humans for former-people who are now fungus and gave the cities much longer to be "reclaimed") has a really haunted deserted tone.

This is, in areas, a place to dread when no one is even there. This is the fog of a Silent Hill made of night snowstorms and the potential for anything to be out there but actually the horror is the body bags peeking out of the snow as you walk past. This is a virtual space in great need of a camera mode.

Some of that is because it's a decent virtual NY. In a detail we don't normally get in the abstracted worlds of GTA or other open worlds. This is (while not making most areas actually walkable inside) a space that feels real when I'm walking it alone. There's also a combat game and an RPG progression there (plus some fear of others in the DZ) but sometimes I'm just there for the place. That setting of real world but post-apocalypse is a sparseness we don't often see done like this. At times the scenery is draining and all you've got for company is a recording of someone in their last moments to share it with. That is why I think there is great storytelling inside this game, even if the game as a whole has many clear failings (including the story, and the comparisons to Assassin's Creed 1 are worth making for where it could go).

And sometimes that horror does map well to the combat and what it says about a person with a badge and the right to kill anyone they see. A bit of that is thanks to the setting (which is also somewhat refreshing for an RPG as it's not fantasy/faux history humans or scifi - those seem to be the two genres you can set your RPG in to get a crowded setting off the bat) but it also wouldn't go away with a palette swap.

Just mapping this to SciFi? There is no genre that is typically more loaded with metaphor than SciFi. We may not immediately feel the same discomfort if this was given a SciFi sheen but it's not as if the commentary it makes would have gone anywhere if they'd done that. Halo is still about marines taking on a diverse religious group, even if those marines are "United Nations Space Command" not USMC. The phrase "alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy" isn't restricted to SciFi, it's in half of Trump's speeches.

I think it more stems from that the game takes itself so seriously, but then when it comes down to it all prisoners who escaped from Riker's deserve to be shot on sight when in a real world situation there would be plenty of people tied up in these groups who weren't inherently evil. All of the looters who may just be scavenging for supplies and trying to survive are shot on sight as well. The Cleaners and the LMB make sense, they are out purposefully murdering people and everything so I guess anyone who was a part of those organizations

I understand why in a video game context I am just shooting them on site, and the mechanics of the game are very good in that respect, I just don't think it fits what someone who is trying to piece together what is left of Manhatten would be doing if they were really trying to rebuild.

If the game even did a Watch Dogs thing where it had a brief pop up over each "red guy" that said murderer or something like that it would go a long way towards making it feel more justified. I just have a tendency to really get pulled out of the story when the "good guys" are just shooting people without any provocation or anything. For the "Kill the Lieutenant" and htose sorts of quests it feels more directed but when it comes to random encounters it's a little bizarre to pick off a guy that has no real threat to you at that point.

This doesn't mean I hate the Division or anything I still like it quite a lot, it just really pulls me out of the narrative and drives me to just play it purely as a game without caring at all about any of story or characters.

It probably should be noted that the author is merely asking for "more" from video games, not "less" - and that the critique is not trying to take anything away from The Division, but to maybe provide some insight as to an angle where it could possibly enhance it beyond what is also a fairly enjoyable game.

We aren't looking for LESS shooting and killing in The Division, we just want more (or better) reasons to do those things with greater justifications for violence.

We truly do need more articles like this on Giant Bomb. Absolutely loving it.

I have over 190 hours played in the division and the only cutscenes I've watched are the ones you can't skip, like the opening movie that's secretly a loading screen. I don't know why I'm shooting anyone and I don't care. It might be because I always play with friends and never like it when control is taken from me, or maybe I'm just conditioned to assume all video game stories are bad and not worth watching. But now that I think about it, it sure does seem like we're gunning down people in the street just for looting.

Meh. I could use the exp.

No one said you can't critique a game. It just seems silly to critique something for the the exact thing it purports to be from the very beginning. I could critique a horror film for the amount of blood and gore but it's kind of inherent to the genre so basically all I'd be doing is wasting my time bloviating for the sake of trying to change an already established entity; in this case, a game. The Division is targeted at the same markets that go in for stuff like Diablo, Destiny, WoW and probably also like Call of Duty and the like. Mindlessly killing mobs is what those people are actively seeking and in huge numbers. They tweak the formula but none of those publishers are going to slow things down to the level of minutia you're talking about in their premiere action titles because there are plenty of other games to fill that niche that aren't action games.

Just wondering if sometimes a loot shooter is just a loot shooter. Does diablo have a life message, DOTA, etc ? I think the story framework is there because they at least knew they needed some kind of campaign and set up a world of sorts. It last a few quick hours. The majority of the game is just collecting the next weapon, gear or jacket. Its simply BSing with friends as you compete with other people. Kind of an arcade thing. Doubting most players or UBISOFT care that much about the story or politics of this world. Its just a wild world. UBI just wants to keep people in their quest for loot and not go back to Destiny, another game with the same goal. May want to address this in a different game, not sure it applies to this one.

I agree with you that there's no call to censor or ban anything in this article, but not everyone who has written about The Division has been this respectful to other viewpoints, and I think that's important to remember as well. There may be "a purely straw-opponent here" when it comes to this article, but there isn't with gaming journalism and social issue articles as a whole.

To quote a different social issue article written about The Division:

It doesn't matter that the game's associate creative director Julian Gerighty claimed "there's no particularly political message" ...What matters is that by its very nature The Division is political, and, more importantly, that those politics paint a paranoid and misanthropic image of society.

...

Let's be clear here. I couldn't care less about legislating the morality of digital characters, or attacking the prevalence of killing as a mechanic in games. What I do care about is any cultural object which sells itself on paranoia and ignorance, which propagates the worst self-destructive fantasies of Western society and that wields political ideologies under the pretense of entertainment.

...

Yet it staunchly refuses to take responsibility for its representations, for its politics. If we want that to change, we have to make it, and its creators, responsible.

When you're suggesting that your subjective political viewpoint is correct, and you're talking about needing to hold artists responsible for your perception of the moral value of their art, then you're absolutely pushing for censorship. The Giant Bomb article doesn't do that, but the article that I quoted does.

20 years ago, it may have been someone complaining that Gone Home is pushing an agenda. Imagine saying that game "wields political ideologies under the pretense of entertainment" and "if we want that to change, we have to make it, and its creators, responsible." That would sound like a call for censorship to me.

Again, that doesn't happen in the Giant Bomb article, but it does happen, and when "think like me or you're a bad person who needs to be stopped" is the implication, I would hope people on any side of an issue would put aside their differences in opinions and reject that approach.

Why have lore and story and atmosphere at all then if all you want is a loot-em-up? Why have a Wild world at all? Make the graphics like SUPERHOT and the map looking like DOOM maps. Then also give every weapons some obviously tiered name and then you'd have exactly what you're talking about.

You think most people don't care? You might be right, but I'll be damned if there sure isn't a way to guide them to caring.

That's probably a better worded response to what I wrote, yes. Thanks.

Edit: Although, I will add that we can like aspects of a thing and question other aspects of a thing, but our overall opinion is that we like it. Games have mechanics, after all. We can admire their mechanics and question the ethics behind using the mechanics. So perhaps I don't 100% agree, but you have a point there.

@shivoa said:

See, I really appreciate the landscape here. The city post-apocalypse but not of the zombie kind (because let's be honest here, the Last of Us had vibes of this but swapped out a lot of humans for former-people who are now fungus and gave the cities much longer to be "reclaimed") has a really haunted deserted tone.

This is, in areas, a place to dread when no one is even there. This is the fog of a Silent Hill made of night snowstorms and the potential for anything to be out there but actually the horror is the body bags peeking out of the snow as you walk past. This is a virtual space in great need of a camera mode.

I've actually thought a lot about this too. It's kind of a shame that so much of the nuanced storytelling in The Division is so ancillary to what you're actually doing in the game. Here's a cellphone recording where someone who thinks she's about to die takes what might be her last chance to call her mom and open up about being gay. Here's a recording where a dad calls his daughter who's trapped in New York and tries to make sure she feeds their honeybee colony, because he's not just worried about today, he's also looking toward the future. Here's a series of ECHO recordings where we see that someone at a pharmaceutical company was ready to blow the whistle on her employer, who may have been much closer to a cure to the Dollar Flu than anyone realized, but withholding it for a profit motive.

And as you point out, a lot of the experience of running around a deserted, infected NYC is delivered by the environment design--maybe even the majority of it. Body bags, viral contamination tents, abandoned vehicles and disaster relief infrastructure give you a glimpse of what it was like before you showed up with the Division's second wave.

And yet the story that YOU play, as a Division agent, is just something you experience behind a gun barrel, with all the problems that come along with that, which Heather outlines in the article and we've all been discussing here.

And sometimes that horror does map well to the combat and what it says about a person with a badge and the right to kill anyone they see. A bit of that is thanks to the setting (which is also somewhat refreshing for an RPG as it's not fantasy/faux history humans or scifi - those seem to be the two genres you can set your RPG in to get a crowded setting off the bat) but it also wouldn't go away with a palette swap.

Just mapping this to SciFi? There is no genre that is typically more loaded with metaphor than SciFi. We may not immediately feel the same discomfort if this was given a SciFi sheen but it's not as if the commentary it makes would have gone anywhere if they'd done that. Halo is still about marines taking on a diverse religious group, even if those marines are "United Nations Space Command" not USMC. The phrase "alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy" isn't restricted to SciFi, it's in half of Trump's speeches.

You're absolutely not wrong, and I didn't mean to imply that science fiction stories are devoid of parallels to the real human condition. I'm a big consumer of sci-fi tales myself! The point I intended to make is that, correctly or incorrectly, we'd be much less likely to have a discussion on a game website about the ethics of what a Division agent does if the Division were a group killing Locust grunts in the aftermath of Emergence Day, rather than a group of humans killing people in New York City in a near future scenario the game posits as at least somewhat plausible.

Also, a chilling point you make there at the end.

For me it was the moment when I realized they were creating an America where the punishment for rioting is death by assault rifle without a trial.

Interesting article, though I wonder where some of these concerns could be addressed in a game like The Division. Not to say that such a thing is impossible of course, but the way the game handles itself, it is unlikely that there would be much room for subtly and subterfuge. Couple that with the Clancy name being attached, and I find it hard to believe it would be possible to put such small but meaningful adjustments into the game. Bombast is a part of how that man wrote. Mixed, to be fair, with tense moments and military terminology. Obviously that could be handled separately as part of DLC or even a very large patch, but the idea of morality being injected into this particular game's world was a curious thought.

For the record, I do enjoy the game, but I fear it's underlying design (Grab, Just, All The Loot You Guys!) was lost in a sea of people who were reading much too far into the world it was based in. Not saying you are wrong for doing a "deep dive" on what the game presents, but had the fiction been set in basically any other setting, people possibly wouldn't be so quick to inject their own politics into the game itself. Maybe it accomplishes more with less in that way? Provoking discussion without having to show it's full hand?

I'm giving The Division a lot of credit of course, it being a loot-driven shooter and not some professor's study, but I do like the notion of it going a route more in line with Spec Ops: The Line. True, that game was notoriously heavy-handed at times, but it still attempted to show what the cost of unchecked power could be. I mean, even the loading screens in that game mocked you for your "accomplishments." Doubly so if you had died and were re-loading!

Somehow we would have to find a middle ground though; that golden blend of immersion without preaching. I don't think we're there yet. At least not in such a way to encounter a design like that in a major release.

Also, since it appears relevant to the conversation: There is a quest in The Witcher 3 that deals with what you mentioned about some type of resolution. It was a small quest, just another one to check off your list as Geralt did his Witcher thing, but I'll put it in a spoiler text below just to be safe...

You can disagree with the article (mainly the point that the game sells itself on "paranoia and ignorance"), but I think the main point was that saying "this game aint political, y'all!" and the game in question is about shooting people in a real life city during a time of crisis and taking their loot doesn't make sense. It comes across as wanting to have your cake and eat it. There's certainly questionable elements of The Division and it'll be kinda hard to deny that the game /isn't/ about shooting people in a real city to take their loot while you're built up to be this hero of sorts. That's political. We're this hero under government authority to kill for the "greater good" these people whom we don't know and that we haven't given a trial to. That's the message the game sends. Whether or not you constitute that as the game selling itself on "paranoia and ignorance," I'll leave that up to you. I'll also leave it to interpretation as to whether or not you can ignore that fact and enjoy the game's combat.

What that article basically says is not to deny responsibility by saying "it aint political, y'all!" It'd be much more honest to come out and say "yeah it's questionable, but we don't want you to think too hard and just have fun shooting and looting." Of course, that doesn't free it from criticism either. In fact, that's a whole different discussion. But I think it's impossible to cut politics from the game considering its premise. It has a message, even if it wants to deny it.

Saren's suicide is him being reasoned out of mind control, which itself was brought on by his own actions. That someone who is also legally unrestricted talks him down, and he then decides to kill himself, doesn't at all diminish the fact that he was reasoned into recognizing he dun goof'd. And Shepard being legally unrestricted doesn't influence his ability to shoot Saren in the head, which is the other way to stop him laying seige to the Citadel.

The answer to how to deal with someone who's using their freedom, resources, and abilities to cause great harm, is ultimately to reason with them, or to fight them. Both are represented here plainly, in true BioWare fashion. Saren either totally sees the light or you smoke him.

I don't know about your Shepard, but mine was diplomatic as fuck. Certainly never stooped to the levels of any of his enemies. United the Geth and the Quarians, helped out the Krogans, all that good fun stuff. "Bear the shield but break the sword" makes it sound like you would've wanted a scenario where the galaxy literally never had to fight, and instead hunkered down and withstood the Reaper onslaught (or anyone else's) until the buggers got bored. It's a pretty thought, but woefully naive. Like, dangerously.

You might be conflating legal freedom, unlimited power, and a moral code. Spectre's are legally unbound, but they don't possess actual unlimited power, which would've made your question about what to do against someone with it both more interesting and easier to answer. I doubt you actually meant unlimited power, but the way you used it made me question it for a moment, so here I am making sure. Heather's quote specifically speaks to moral codes, not legal freedom or unlimited power. The quote itself doesn't seem to make much sense in the context of these games being controlled by actual people (nevermind the implied connection between legal responsibility and any moral code), and I'm talking more about the article now than this Mass Effect thing.

If your Shepard/Warden/Revan/Agent didn't follow a particular moral code, it's either because you also don't, or because you chose to portray a character who doesn't. Most of the games touched on in this piece are games that allow for a range of moral roleplaying, while also certainly mainting a fairly rigid amount of combat. They're action games. You'll shoot stuff, you'll slice stuff, you'll bonk stuff. I'd personally also like to see more options to engage with NPCs (or players) in less aggressive helpful ways, like Heather brought up earlier in the piece, but by the middle it read more like someone who'd been hoodwinked into playing a game where you're a government agent sent to shoot stuff and play dress-up.

But yeah, games where a particular morality is pushed hard on you can definitely suck.

Sorry to hear "game culture" people have an empathy problem though. Good luck to them. I'm sure they'll get it down in no time, if they even want to. It's not difficult. You just imagine you're them.

If it does, it's message isn't necessarily some one particular interpretation. If the developer claims it has no message, then it very well may not inherently be trying to convey some political message. That's fine. That doesn't mean it can't, in practise, convey a message for someone else, which is also fine. Trying to inextricably foist that interpretation onto the work itself, as though it were an intrinsic quality of it, however, isn't very fine.

NOTE: for anyone reading this out of context, we're not talking about the Giant Bomb Division article here. We're talking about a different Division article.

Anyhow, I think that the situation here likely stems from one person who genuinely doesn't feel that they're making a political statement with their art, and one person who feels that it's impossible to consider their work anything other than highly political. I would guess that this happens likely because one person is so opposed to a particular topic and / or the way it's being handled, while someone else has no issue with it, so it's not even something they see as political.

To use a somewhat extreme example, consider how some people get upset that a developer is "pushing an agenda" whenever homosexual characters appear in a game. They might feel that a developer is pushing their politics on them, while the developer just wanted a diverse cast of characters, and might strongly disagree with the accusation that they're trying to make some sort of political statement.

I think that's sort of what's going on here, and I don't think essentially saying "Of course you're making a political statement. Admit that, and admit your game is questionable," is the best way to handle a situation where people don't see anything wrong or political with what they're doing, and where a "right" and "wrong" is a subjective issue in the first place.

And this is also a very good point.

This is exactly why I bounced so hard off of Fallout 4.

Thanks for the article, Heather!

I have a family, and a job. In real life everyday I make decisions that involve ethics and have actions that are directly impacted by my ability/desire to have empathy.

Yet sometimes on a Friday night, after the kids finally go to bed, I enjoy popping in a video game like the Division and mindlessly shooting stuff with friends. I have no desire to deal with complex issues of morality while doing so.

The author writes a well written piece, but a pointless one. If in a world such as ours, with all of its real world issues/tragedies that happen daily, you shouldn't need a Tom Clancy game to help illustrate these complex issues. You are looking in the wrong place. It's not what it's for.

It's the equivalent of complaining that there aren't enough healthy choices at the fast food restaurant, when there is a Whole Foods and a Trader Joes next door. What you are complaining about may be factually true, but it is pointless in context. Go next door. Volunteer at your local soup kitchen.

@jmic75: Edit: not sure why my iPhone keeps auto pasting my comment. Sorry.

Just wanted to say great comment and I agree

They can be and you can definitely treat them that way and get plenty of enjoyment out of them. That's totally valid! Sometimes, that's what people need after a long day of work. To just play something.

Still, very few games are without politics. Arguably none, given that they are works of labor but outside of that even a game like checkers has politics. It's fine to ignore what The Division might be saying (or any other game for that matter) but it doesn't stop the game from saying something, intentionally or as a consequence of its design.

I'm rarely afforded an opportunity to directly converse with someone who professionally writes about social issues in video games, so I have a hypothetical that I've been wondering about, regarding an issue of inclusion and artistic freedom. The new Doom game will be here soon, and like the other games in the series before it, the new game is going to include pentagrams and other demonic imagery. Because of this, some religious people could be offended by playing Doom, and may refuse to play it because of those images.

Were a Christian to bring that to the attention of the developers, do you believe that the developers of Doom should remove the pentagrams from the game in an effort to be more inclusive, or do you believe that people who are offended by such things simply should avoid that game? The argument could be made that removing that content wouldn't really affect the gameplay, but I still personally wouldn't be comfortable with the idea of some people's ethical or moral opinions leading to the alteration of a product that will ultimately be enjoyed by many others who don't share those opinions at all.

But perhaps you feel differently, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts either way.

I will never understand gamers attacking games.

Almost everything Heather talks about in a negative, I see as a positive. Watch the link below and I think you'll agree.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world?language=en