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Brazil bans CS, EQ

January 21st, 2008 (Visited 3506 times) Tags:

I am not sure there’s a comment I can actually make here! It’s too easy a target… Ironically, Brazil has a thriving indie dev scene going on.

Counter-Strike, EverQuest banned in Brazil // GamesIndustry.biz

It’s alleged EverQuest is harmful because players are asked to accept both “good” and “bad” quests, the psychological burden of which is said to cause problems. The game was never officially released in Brazil.

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Raph’s Website » Video games and stereotypes wrote on January 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm:

[...] discussion has evolved in this thread about the degree to which entertainment of various sorts affects us, and I thought the quote [...]

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Michael said on January 21st, 2008 at 11:43 am:
Actually it looks like the judge made a mistake confusing the game CS with the CS mod “Rio”. In the mod, players kidnap ambassadors, hide them in a shantytown, then try to kill the policemen that came to rescue the ambassadors. The more policemen they kill, the more points they earn.
As you see, it is not very educational.
And I would like to take this opportunity to ask you how do you see the fact that the most popular games (for hardcore gamers) are games in which you must kill other people. What is so special about killing people that it sells so much?
tallimar said on January 21st, 2008 at 6:33 pm:
“What is so special about killing people that it sells so much?”
i dont know, why are the classical works that are filled with death so popular (IE Shakespeare, stevenson)?
personally, i think it’s pretty much a part of human nature. we have always been comparatively violent all throughout history. even one of the first manuals on how to wage war was written in the 6th century bc. i think that the old testament even has many tales of death and war and if you’re feeling really abstract, even many of our nursery rhymes and fairy tales can be considered violent.
Ingrod said on January 21st, 2008 at 8:56 pm:
Violence is fun when nobody is hurts
Jokes apart, that is the wrong approach to the “problem”, the most popular games dont are about “kill other people”, they only have the same mechanic that “Space Invaders” or “Robot Wars”, overdimensionated and hiperrealistic, but the same mechanic, you manned dummies shooting against dummies manned for other people, nobody is hurts, nobody is kill, that is the reality.
That games promote violence?, that they activate the same brain swichtes that real violence? I doubt, in real violence you suffer real pain and real fear for you life and health, real fear is an main element in real world violence, never present in a game. Teach war tactics in an peaceful and stable social context promote violence? I doubt too, many Irak veterans have played games all his life an this dont make then inmune to the pernicious mental effects of combat fatigue and fear.
The real problem is the real life context that promote use real people how game dunmies, not kill dunmies in a game imo
Is true that some scientific works demostrate a conection of videogame violence with certain agressivity switches in brain, but for this same rule they must ban first too soccer and many competitive sports with real battles with police after the encounters and many real deads.
And inclusive chess nust be banned (is a simbolic battle representation, censored!) xD
And Everquest banned for promote moral dilemas, is only sad
Jeff Freeman said on January 21st, 2008 at 9:18 pm:
Brazil has a thriving indie dev scene going on.
I guess big publishers ignoring your entire country is a boost to indie development.
When I was into the UO “emulated server” thing (as they were called, though “reverse engineered” would be more accurate), Brazil was where all the biggest were running.
I mean, years after that I think you posted about a US unofficial server getting 1500 players (or something like that), but multiple Brazilian servers were doing that and better, years before that. They were to the point of the most successful ones running multiple shards, even.
Like EQ, UO had not been released in Brazil. Also, the monthly subscription fee was outrageous for many Brazilians… I don’t know if that situation has changed.
Interesting then, a person buying EQ in Brazil is likely buying it to play on a private/unofficial server.
Interesting because they’re banning sales of the client due to the game’s content, but the content is not client-side. And – in Brazil – unlikely to be the same content an EQ player in North America would encounter on official servers.
It’s a bit like banning sales of Internet Explorer due to the content of a web site.
On another note, this is may not be as irrelevant as it might seem to North American gamers.
Reverse-engineered WoW-servers are sure to be the next big thing, but I’d think EQ-servers are still quite popular there.
Alvaro Cavalcanti said on January 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am:
It’s a shame. I’m a Brazilian developer and aspiring game designer and when I read this news yesterday I felt really ashamed.
I think that there isn’t much to talk about it since the subject has been worn enough since Columbine. The point is, don’t this judges see that banning isn’t going to solve the problem? It’s like DRM on audio files, time has proven that it’s not effective, it just doesn’t work.
And the “funny” thing is, the text I read yesterday said that the Lan Houses that have the games installed won’t need to have them uninstalled, because the use of the games isn’t prohibited, only their commercialization. According to authorities, the game usage shall be guided based on each person’s morale, since the games are rated 18+.
Shameful.
Morgan Ramsay said on January 22nd, 2008 at 8:17 am:
Ingrod wrote:
Violence is fun when nobody is hurts …
We, when unaffected by societal mores, are naturally inclined to derive pleasure from the physical or emotional pain of others. Off the top of my head are the examples of ancient Roman gladiatorial combat, the world history of dog fighting, and, of course, reality television and game shows of the present day.
Zell said on January 22nd, 2008 at 8:33 am:
You know, EQ2′s approach to Good And Bad was my biggest turnoff to that game. And yes I realize this is almost completely unrelated to the topic of this posting.
Tim said on January 22nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm:
tallimar said on January 21st, 2008 at 6:33 pm:
“What is so special about killing people that it sells so much?”
i dont know, why are the classical works that are filled with death so popular (IE Shakespeare, stevenson)?
A lot of long diatribes and opinions at http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/01/18/what-will-the-gamers-do/ would say there’s another side to the story :^)
Richard Bartle said on January 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 pm:
Ingrod>Violence is fun when nobody is hurt
I believe that the great sage, Wednesday Addams, made the point best: “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then, it’s just fun.”
If you ever want a definition of the Magic Circle, that’s it.
Richard
Ingrod said on January 23rd, 2008 at 12:18 am:
Ingrod wrote:
Violence is fun when nobody is hurts …
We, when unaffected by societal mores, are naturally inclined to derive pleasure from the physical or emotional pain of others. Off the top of my head are the examples of ancient Roman gladiatorial combat, the world history of dog fighting, and, of course, reality television and game shows of the present day.
When, I mean people that play violence in games specificaly, shooters in example, nobody wants play to war if can be hurt or killed (other than sadomasoquistic type), other thing is see violence in a passive forn or be a psicopat.
I indicated that the real problen is see other people how “things” (NPCs, dummies, toys) and have fun seeing their real pain, roman circus, reality shows, dog figthing, ara example of people seeing a show where the characters are dehumaniced, gladiators are slaves, in ancient society “things with voice”.
The problem is not only be unaffected by social mores, too is when the a group or a social context and his mores allow people to get a real human being and reduce then to a toy for fun -ancient rome, skinhead street violence, war- you dont have empaty for a thing. In CS you dont shoot to other people, shoot against dummies, thing, but when you “kill” other player you know that behind the real person is alive and healthy and talking with you.
Len Bullard said on January 23rd, 2008 at 6:29 am:
Try another model: for a given population of human players, some percentage are close to the edge of real violence. Game play as simulated violence enables them to more readily cross the line. As games acquire larger scales of play more inclined minds are more inclined. Their acts feed back into the population at large reducing inhibitions to similar or near similar acts. Without a third order correction, these acts accelerate and spread.
The analysis of core gamers and devs regards this topic is typically defensive and shallow with regards to knowledge of human behavior. How is it that Flight Simulator can train pilots and the US Army game results in an untrained player to do the work of a medic, but a game of sociopathic acts accompanied by psychopathic violence does not make for better trained sociopaths and psychopaths?
Experienced musicians know not to beat the Mean Drum. Gamers don’t.
Slyfeind said on January 24th, 2008 at 1:48 pm:
Violent entertainment, I think, is cathartic; the same with blue comedy acts. We hold back so much violence and rudeness and gross acts all day long, so when we get home, we laugh at Chris Rock’s comedy routine, thrill at gunning down virtual prostitutes in GTA, wince while watching Braveheart for the zillionth time, and all the while we burp and we fart, and laugh while Peter Griffin burps and farts. It’s a release that we all need once in a while.
Ingrod said on January 24th, 2008 at 7:01 pm:
The analysis of core gamers and devs regards this topic is typically defensive and shallow with regards to knowledge of human behavior. How is it that Flight Simulator can train pilots and the US Army game results in an untrained player to do the work of a medic, but a game of sociopathic acts accompanied by psychopathic violence does not make for better trained sociopaths and psychopaths?
Yeah, that is true, I dislike games with extreme and realistic violence, for me that is a wrong path, the games need more imagination, and a new direction, less kill, kill, kill.
Try another model: for a given population of human players, some percentage are close to the edge of real violence. Game play as simulated violence enables them to more readily cross the line. As games acquire larger scales of play more inclined minds are more inclined. Their acts feed back into the population at large reducing inhibitions to similar or near similar acts. Without a third order correction, these acts accelerate and spread.
But that model is a bit shallow too, tolerance to virtual violence is not equal to tolerance to real violence, and obviate the social context, is true that after thirty years of violent films, TV and videogames exists a more tolerance to violence in media, but that is no correlative to a significant increment of real violence in the occidental countrys.
Len Bullard said on January 25th, 2008 at 6:19 am:
We don’t know if there is a proven correlation, but the causal chain is there. Tolerance to violence in high schools was once much lower than it is now. Violent acts may not show an increase but the intensity of those committed is increasing. That’s training on a population where the edge cases have reduced inhibition and increased capability. Games aren’t the only cause of reduced inhibition, I agree. Media in general is violent. What one might ask is what has contributed to the thirst for it? What I am pointing out is the training link.
If you ever worked a booty bar (topless, nude, etc.), there are generally laws against serving alcohol (not always but generally). The reason is it is it reduces inhibitions. The combinations of loud music, in-your-face-sex and inhibition reducers results in the same general behavior: violence. It is the combinations that as a dev or author you want to be cognizant of. Keep in mind, I am not talking specific instances but big number population trends. However, the kind of violence one sees hasn’t changed much. Reduced inhibition is not enough.
Games are not video or TV. Those are passive media. Passive media stimulation is weaker than interactive stimulation (see S/R paradigm in behavioral science). The interactive response has a much higher correlative value to predicted acquisition of behavior. Again, if the training link exists, and it does, ask yourself what you are training them for? Even the US Army gets this.
Owners of these bars and the legislative branches of your local governments tend to agree that some combinations of stimulus are not societally healthy. Brazil may be overreacting or they may be more aware than the States and much more willing to legislate. It will be an interesting experiment to watch if some party can track the data.
Eolirin said on January 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm:
What exactly is being trained with a shooter game though? Hint: It’s not what you’re suggesting. It’s not how to fire a gun (FPS controls are extremely flawed in regards to actually matching what it’s like to fire a gun), and it’s not that you should go out and kill people. If you’re sufficiently detached from reality that you cannot distinguish the bunch of pixels on the screen from a person, you’ve got really big problems. What a typical FPS really trains is object tracking, pattern recognition, and eye hand-coordination. And those are useful tools in many areas that have nothing to do with violence. If you break down what you’re actually doing in a FPS, it’s the following: attempt to find the right shaped, sized, and colored group of pixels (pattern matching), track that object around the screen (object tracking), line up your crosshair with that object and press a button (eye-hand coordination). That the group of pixels happens to be shaped like a human is mostly irrelevant. When someone plays the game they’re not identifying the pixels in the shape of a person with a real person. Because the identification isn’t there, there’s also no feeling involved for the pixels on the screen. That’s why it’s easy to shoot them. They’re not real, the player *knows* they’re not real, and the game can’t teach you that they’re real. Even if you kill a million groups of pixels shaped as people, as long as there’s no association with real human beings, the ‘lessons’ from the game only apply to the game world.
And that’s why you can’t “train” sociopathy or psychosis the way you’re describing. You can create a certain level of desensitization towards the depictions of violence, but that doesn’t necessarily destroy empathy, it simply makes the *images* more acceptable. But that isn’t the same thing as actually enabling people to be violent towards other *real* humans. The levels of abstraction is too great in games for people to view the figure they’re killing as real. If this weren’t the case, and your game centered around killing people that were hard to distinguish from real humans, very few people would be likely to play it. And there’s a reason for this. Most people are naturally empathetic, and a lack of empathy is almost required for violent crimes. If you have a really good VR rig and have AI that passes the Turing test for the purposes of being an innocent victim, very few players would be capable of killing it, just as very few people are capable of killing a real person in cold blood. Even if the player is intellectually able to understand that killing that seemingly real charcater in a seemingly real way isn’t really happening, they’d still have a hard time pulling the trigger. Knowledge that a person is *real*, knowledge that they’re not just a group of pixels, makes it even harder.
Of course, people get around this all the time by objectifying the victim, by turning the actions they’re taking in real life into the same logic as you see in a violent game, but doesn’t mean that the process necessarily works in reverse. Games are good at training many things, but objectificiation of real world people isn’t so much one of them. Games are great at teaching patterns, they’re not so great at teaching people how to *feel*. Emotion still isn’t something we’ve gotten down well enough that we can design mechanics around it. At best we can attempt clumsy methods of propagandizing like making all of the enemies a specific type of person. Doesn’t work too well unless the player already buys it though, since it’s very obvious what you’re trying to do.
Slanted news reporting is much more likely to cause objectification than any game, or movie, or song, or book. Ignorance is a bigger issue than being trained to hunt for the visual “reward” of being able to track the group of pixels that just happen to be shaped like a person and press a button when your crosshairs line up. Lack of empathy is the enabler for violent crime, not the object tracking disguised as violence.
And the only way you can get to the point where the “training link” even becomes a viable way to examine the situation is if you make the argument is if you state that playing a game has a *long term* effect on how people view the world. Because it’s damn hard to play a game *and* beat up people at the same time. You typically need to put your controller down to do that. So it’s not how they respond to certain stimuli or are able to complete tasks that were mirrored in the actions they were doing in the game, but how they *view* people and the world around them. That the only long term effects that we’ve even been able to get any statistical evidence of relate to the fact that games do teach us patterns very well, and those lessons stick, still doesn’t get you anywhere when you start talking about behavior or changes in personality. Like I said in the first paragraph, a FPS doesn’t teach you the pattern “kill people” it teaches you skills involved in pattern recognition, object tracking, and eye-hand coordination. And that’s all we’ve been able to show sticks.
Right now games are more about the How than the Why. They’re about teaching patterns, not about exploring behavior. Action, not emotion. Even if this changes over time, you can’t *train* the Why. You can make the person stop and think and begin to explore thoughts that they wouldn’t necessarily have before… but you can’t *train* the answer to the questions. You can only train the critical thinking to get to them.
And before people beat me up over this, I’m separating narrative from gameplay when I say this. You can have perfectly emotional or artistic narrative in a game, but I have yet to see a game that relies on an artistic mechanic. Arguably, such a thing may be impossible, mechanics aren’t inherently artistic, even if their use can be. The whole point though is that this is an indirect process. You can create a scenario which inspires, but it’s done by arranging a bunch of pieces which do not. This isn’t significantly different than any other method of art, except that in this case you directly interact with the building blocks rather than simply looking at or passively experiencing them. But the building blocks are not the part that could be considered art. Art changes people, but paint in tubes, or uncarved wood, or ink as yet unapplied to page does not. People see the mechanics and assume that that is the whole point, but it’s not. While the mechanics can train, they provide no really useful message. It’s process devoid of content. That’s why most games today have very little chance of meaningfully changing the player on that deeper level that art aspires to. Doing so would require the participation of the player on a much deeper level, and it thus has to be fairly voluntary or it falls flat. You can’t train “kill people” mechanically, because mechanics cannot express the concept “person”, and really, they have a hard time expressing the concept “kill” too. You could theoretically make a game with that message, but doing so would require going well beyond the typical FPS or GTA style game. It would have to actually posit that this was a good thing to do by making the player come to that conclusion about the real world. The player needs to find a deeper ‘truth’ about how they should be killing people, a motivation, a reason, and a belief. Pointing and shooting at groups of pixels shaped like people isn’t enough. It needs to change the player’s world view. And thus far I’ve not seen a single game that does that (jokes about games so bad that they make you want to kill their creators aside anyway). Basically, the day that we can take the argument that games can make normally non-violent people violent seriously is the day that games have proven themselves as a viable form of art (True art doesn’t always have to inspire people to be “better” after all… even if we could agree on what “better” means in that context).
Ingrod said on January 25th, 2008 at 12:56 pm:
Games are not video or TV. Those are passive media. Passive media stimulation is weaker than interactive stimulation (see S/R paradigm in behavioral science). The interactive response has a much higher correlative value to predicted acquisition of behavior. Again, if the training link exists, and it does, ask yourself what you are training them for? Even the US Army gets this.
Some years ago the “theory” said that “TV and violent music is a cause for school violence”, now these are “more secure” passive media, the real danger is videogames that are “interactive training”
Then playing shooter is a training for kill, looting in a RPG a training for stealing, hit prostitutes in GTA a training for do the same in real life? And kill aliens is a training for prevent a space invasion, too? Even US army must know the difference against a simulated enviroment and a real, I doubt that they go to substitute training with real weapons and boot camps for virtual enviroments.
Is true that rules are necesary, but what is the limit for these rules? Ban Everquest for roleplay characters doing “bad actions” is get things a bit far, and ban Counter Strike for a mod not is be “more aware”, only demostrates a blatant ignorance about games and players. The problem with censorship is that many times the censors decisitions are very cuestionable, ban Manhunter 2 have logic, ban Everquest is ridiculous.
Eolirin said on January 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am:
Ingrod, he was quite correct in that quote you made. Active media is involving, unlike passive media, and thus it’ll typically have a greater impact. It’s also better at teaching you something, because involvement typically results in a much higher rate of retention. He just totally failed to grasp what a game actually teaches. As I said in my really over long – now that I look at it – post above you, right now games are very very bad at creating the sort of intellectual and emotional lessons that would be required to actually make a non-violent person violent. Only someone who has a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality is going to have the sort of response he’s talking about. And it’s because games teach process and not context, at least at the moment. Narrative in games can teach context, but narrative isn’t something that works on that “training” level. It’s the passive part of the active medium. Again, right now. I’m sure that in time we’ll figure out how to better integrate the two, but we really haven’t done it yet.
Kerri Knight said on January 26th, 2008 at 8:11 pm:
Media is more powerful in the recipient’s hands than the crafter’s. Patients with Parkinsonism who have regressed into spending much of their time either catatonic or unable to get around suddenly act 100% normal in the presence of music. Late in the onset of Alzheimer’s, patients may be able to perform Bach’s greatest works while simultaneously querying, “who is this Bach fellow you keep mentioning?”
I don’t study the brain for a living and haven’t looked into the comparisons to other senses, but I’ve studied many years now on what parts of the brain music interacts with. There are a great deal of ‘universal truths’ about what parts of the brain respond, but there are just as many wildcards that change from person to person.
The great challenge in a very young media like interactive gaming (especially utilizing so many senses) is finding and learning those unwritten rules. In music I know whether it is a classical concert or a rock band that certain things need to happen for everyone to leave having had the very best experience their senses could give them. Yes, a lot of very different things need to happen that wouldn’t cross over well between the two, but they both fail when these certain things are ignored.
Morgan Ramsay said on January 26th, 2008 at 10:12 pm:
Ingrod wrote:
Even US army must know the difference against a simulated enviroment and a real, I doubt that they go to substitute training with real weapons and boot camps for virtual enviroments.
The military doesn’t substitute physical training with virtual environments; however, the military does complement, and integrate, physical training with virtual environments. I don’t mean that casually. They’re quite serious about virtual training systems.
Len Bullard said on January 28th, 2008 at 6:36 am:
“…He just totally failed to grasp what a game actually teaches.”
You are confusing what is intended by the developer with what occurs. Do some reading on the S/R paradigm and observations of ‘superstitious learning’. My point is that one can’t claim games as a serious means of training for one kind of content then claim it doesn’t train (alter behavior) with another. If all a game trained was hand to eye coordination, spelling games would have little to no value.
Keep in mind:
1. B.F. Skinner et al proved the S/R relationship over three decades ago. Disputing that disputes science.
2. My comment about acting out violence described statistical populations where sociopaths and psychopaths exist at some percentage. The speculation is that violent game content lowers inhibitions. Item one denotes that is also trains responses. What is harder to prove is that it also trains for tactics and strategies.
Interactive games have such effects because any S/R relationship has them. The strength of training response is debatable, not that it doesn’t exist. Brazil may be overreacting or it may be seeing your defense in the same light as physicians view a defense of patent medicines: “It makes them feel better so it must be medicine.”
Culturally it is just one influence among many, but the aspect of interactivity is notably different and powerful.
Kerri Knight said on January 28th, 2008 at 5:17 pm:
“TV and violent music is a cause for school violence”
There’s actually nothing factually wrong with that statement. It is ‘A’ cause. If you think music and other media don’t incite certain responses, and given enough exposure, certain formed behaviors, you’re ignoring basic human physiology. I can sit someone in front of just pictures (non-interactive) and watch the effects on an FMRI as they view bunny rabbits and flowers vs. mutilated bodies. The problem, like so many identified evils, is that it gets blown out of proportion and used to push an agenda so much that people just stop listening to the arguments.
So….even the medium of ‘blame’ can induce a response in people!
The problem isn’t ‘games’, ‘music’, or the medium. The problem is the careless way they are handled. Len made the point about ‘the mean drum’ (I went and read it, great blog! :9) a few weeks ago that fits right in. Just staying at the abstract level, its not about pixels vs. people, the issue there is actually dealing with stressful situations. Video games love to teach that violence is an acceptable (and rewarding) response to stressors. You get all kinds of hormonal and other physiological responses from the imagery (and the intense musical fight scores!). A stressor of sufficient familiarity arrives in real life, your brain just runs on what it has trained itself to do at that point.
No, the conclusion is not forgone at this point that you’re going to pull a knife out and gut someone, but your body and brain have just been primed to do something violent, so its that much more likely to happen. There were plenty of times playing counter-strike where there are very few people left on the map and my heart was thumping about 120bpm, adrenaline pouring in, and god knows what else happing.
Just like the rock group that seems totally unaware of how much damage they’re causing by pushing the audience too hard at the end of the show, the designers and developers need to respect the medium a little more and not make poor choices as to what to communicate with it.

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