John Davison

Since we saw the results of our poll on sex and violence in games last month, I've become increasingly fascinated with how our audience responds to contentious content. Whether it's parents asking us specifically about the strong language in Assassin's Creed, or telling us that they're more offended by sex than violence, the results are always intriguing.

The latest observation in this little social experiment (I guess you'd call it) concerns the videos we posted yesterday to illustrate the ESRB descriptors on Grand Theft Auto IV. We produced four thematically focused videos based on the six descriptors that the game carries.

All of them are brief, and designed to give our audience a snapshot of what the content can be like. It's hard to show context with videos like this, so for each story we tried to set it up and explain that you don't have to have sex with hookers, and you don't have to kill everyone you meet. The point, of course, is that you can if you choose to.

Anyway, I digress. The point of this post was to tell you the order of popularity of the four videos we posted. A little snapshot of the order in which the vicarious thrills of viewing naughty content come. And here it is:

The runaway winner was, of course;

1. Partial Nudity and Strong Sexual Content

Seriously, could we really expect anything different? I don't think so. This was followed by my personal favorite (and the one I expected to "win" overall, because it's kinda funny)

2. Strong Language

then,

3. Use of Drugs and Alcohol

and a distant last place, by a significant margin...

4. Blood and Intense Violence

Our good pal Brooks has been helping us put together some original video content for the site this past week, and hopefully it represents what we'll be able to do a lot more of in the coming months. There are four in total for GTA IV, and in keeping with the way we've been tackling games with the written word, each of our videos tackles the contentious content described by the ESRB content descriptors so parents can get a taste of what they might see (or hear) if their kids are playing. Along with each video, we are posting a reminder that the context of the content is important to consider...though admittedly, some of them are much funnier if taken completely out of context, like my favorite, the Strong Language example.

We also have a video that combines the Partial Nudity and Strong Sexual Content, one for the Blood and Intense Violence, and one for the Use of Drugs and Alcohol.

Enjoy.

I was chatting with Mary Jane at Forbes last night about GTA IV, and over the course of discussing the way the game unfolds we actually stumbled upon what I think has long been the true genius of the GTA franchise. For all the talk in the press of the nasty stuff that the game enables you to do, very little of the discussion ever goes beyond that. As I mentioned yesterday, the vast majority of GTA coverage tends to be of the mechanics, and it's clear that what GTA really excels at is giving you the freedom to do whatever you want. Just because you can do something though, doesn't mean that you have to.

The true genius of the franchise is that it makes YOU the monster, rather than presenting you with a monster to control.

There's nothing making you run down pedestrians. You don't have to shoot the cops when you're trying to escape from that warehouse. There's nothing that says you have to get your jollies from hookers. Sure, you do have to take out the bad guys, and there are some terrible things served up as part of the narrative, but the truly monstrous things are, for the most part, purely voluntary. The franchise has been doing this since the early days, but the depth that Rockstar has brought to Niko's character makes it far more apparent. He is a reluctant monster. A recovering monster who only really becomes evil when you direct him to be so.

Norwegian site Dagbladet very kindly linked to our GTA IV story today, and also provided some commentary on the sex and violence poll that we ran. What's most interesting are the results to a replicated poll that they're running that shows the very different attitudes to violent and sexual content in Europe.

Here's how their responses to the question "As a parent, which would you find most offensive in a video game?" break down as of lunchtime today. In case you don't read Norwegian; "Et grafisk, avkappet menneskehode" is the "graphically severed human head" response at 65.8%, "To menn som kysser" is what it sounds like, "two men kissing" at 24.9%, "En mann og en kvinne som har sex" is "a man and a women having sex" at 5.2% and "Gjenaatt banning" is the cursing response, at 4.1%.

From the latest poll on What They Play this week...



Not to keep banging on about this, but W.T.F?

Every now and then, I notice something about American pop culture and attitudes towards it that makes me feel more alien than usual. Despite being in the States for 10 years now, I'm still astounded by attitudes to certain types of content; none more so than sex and violence.

With Grand Theft Auto IV just three weeks away now, the game is an important part of what we're doing on What They Play. We're polling parents and kids about attitudes towards the game, and doing what we can to educate our audience about the game. As part of this we've been doing a lot of outreach into other communities; the obvious "gamer" and "geek" stuff like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc., but (probably more importantly) the "mommy" communities and blogs too. As part of this, our valiant "street team" (ludicrous marketing term) posted a poll on CafeMom that replicates the one we have running on the site right now: "Would you let your under-17 year old play Grand Theft Auto IV?" with answer options: "Yes," "No Way," or "Maybe, after I have learned more about the game."

So far, the responses are 62% "yes" and 37% "no way" and a (very surprising) big fat zero on the "Maybe, after I have learned more." American moms, I'm sad to learn, are either prematurely judgmental, or unwilling to do some research. Ouch. That screws our whole business plan, huh?

More shocking (to me, anyway, to get back to my original point) was the first comment that was posted on the page. "We are really laid back when it comes to video games because my husband is a huge gamer," says the commenter. "We let our 5 year old son play games like Gears of War and Halo, but I absolutely draw the line when it comes to Grand Theft Auto. Did you know you can pick of prostitutes and drive them to back allies and have sex with them in your car? You cant see the actual act itself, but you can see the car rocking with them in the backseat and the windows fogging up. Enough said."

I absolutely draw the line at Grand Theft Auto.



Because a five year old chainsawing someone in half and seeing blood splatter all over the screen in Gears of War is far more acceptable than an implied sex scene where you see the car bounce around a bit.

From November 2006, but still valid...