So it turns out that Variety, that venerable journal for people who like to use the term “The Industry” in a non-ironic fashion, has a video game blog called “The Cut Scene” written by one Ben Fritz. Now, you might expect that this is like a meat-packing journal having a column for reviewing tofu burgers. Fie! Come not with such preconceptions. I’m sure it’s a serious enterprise.
Well . . . sort of.
The matter came to my attention because The Cut Scene, just a few months into its run, has taken a brave moral stand against inappropriate content from a video game industry titan. Now I see you are on the edge of your seats . . . . is it wanton violence in Grand Theft Auto IV? Racist stereotypes in a hot new shooter? The fact that every online fantasy game in existence dresses female characters like Charlie Sheen’s downstairs maid?
No — Ben Fritz is seriously upset that Sid Meier’s update/remake of the venerable game “Colonization” will be named . . . well . . . “Colonization.”
No, really.
I literally exclaimed “holy sh*t” out loud when I was reading an e-mail this morning listing the “Games for Windows” coming out this year and I came across this
This leads me to wonder how the asterisk is pronounced when you literally do that. But I digress.
But goddamit, am I the only one who think it’s morally disturbing to make a game that celebrates COLONIZATION? It’s ironic, actually, because just a few months ago a friend sent me a link to some information about the original “Colonization” game from 1994 (pictured left) that this one updates. At first, I thought it had to be a joke, but sure enough, it was real. However, I dismissed it as a relic from a time when neither developers nor players took videogames seriously as media with moral implications.
Yes, 1994, before the Magna Carta and the Enlightenment and stuff. What the fuck? Is this guy twelve?
But the idea that 2K and Firaxis and Sid Meier himself would make and release a game in the year 2008 that is not only about colonization, but celebrates it by having the player control the people doing the colonizing is truly mind boggling.
What’s mind boggling [sic] is that a blogger at Variety would launch into a cant-rant that would be disdained as silly even by the Yale English Department.
There are many reasons why this is extremely foolish. It reads almost as if this is the first computer game Fritz has encountered. Empire-building games always involve conflict — often violent — with other people, and the more sophisticated ones almost always depict stronger groups overcoming weaker groups. Many involve religious or cultural conversion of some sort. Many permit digital genocide, with your little nation of abstractions defeating another little nation of abstractions mercilessly. One of the earliest and best strategy games ever made portrayed global thermonuclear war as a viable strategic option. While the graphics, gameplay detail, and level of abstraction vary widely, they all come down to build, manage, conquer, and destroy.
Fritz’s objection seems to be that in this instance those familiar gameplay elements are insufficiently abstract because they are depicted in a specific historical context that included real-world events we deplore as opposed to made-up contexts involving pretend events we would deplore if they had actually happened. But what, precisely, makes it more offensive or more celebratory of historical evils when I have my French colonists conquer parts of America in a game of Colonization than it is when I have my American colonists conquer part of a randomly generated map inhabited by Greeks or Babylonians in a game of Civilization IV? Or for that matter when I order my Zerg minions to commit genocide against defenseless human colonies in Starcraft?
Fritz has bought hook, line, and sinker into the entire nanny-state notion that depicting something — even interactively — is celebrating or endorsing it. Certainly it can be, like the sick concentration camp simulators that the neo-Nazis put out now and then. But is Das Boot an endorsement or celebration of Nazi Germany, or is it a tragic and heroic film depicting the terrible reality of war? Is Das Boot a lesser movie than the saccharine Dances With Wolves because it unflinchingly depicts the war from the side of the bad guys?
How about the computer games in which you can play German forces in combat, either in shooters or in real-time strategy? Is Fritz ranting against those? Well — apparently, not yet. Is he ranting against Grand Theft Auto IV’s depiction of various sorts of violence and bad behavior? No - he seems somewhat fascinated by it, and also skeptical of the notion that it should be viewed as harmful.
No, Fritz is not asking for a transformation into “Grand Wash Auto IV: The Soaping, Featuring Non-Expoitatively Clothed Union Washers.” He’s not freaking out about the game because it includes carnage — as historical colonization certainly did. He’s freaking out because it’s insufficiently respectful of certain academic dogmas and proprieties. He’s freaking out because certain subjects must, to his ilk, be treated only with moans of outrage. That’s silly to anyone but Fritz. Gambling, drugs, and prostitution are indisputably social evils, but would a movie critic, the sort of actual, thinking writer Variety is known for hiring, decry The Godfather or Goodfellas as dangerous influences on society, or would he appreciate them as the works of art they are?
Moreover, Fritz clearly hasn’t played the upcoming game or the original. If he did he’d know that the game imposes severe consequences for going around picking fights with Native tribes, who will kick the asses of an overly aggressive player. Amusingly, in one of the GTA IV columns I linked, Fritz gets in somebody’s face for saying that GTA IV encourages violence without playing it first.
Plus, how can you possibly be the designated computer game blogger for a major media outlet like Variety and not have even heard about the original Colonization until a couple of months ago? That’s like getting hired by the New York Times Review of Books blog and making your first entry “I have just heard about a very shocking book celebrating pedophilia. Apparently it’s called ‘Lola’ or something.”
Last 5 posts by Ken
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June 27th, 2008 at 6:30 am
1. Not seeing the irony. I guess “that’s not ironic” jokes/snipes are played and all that, but I’m not trying to make one of those jokes. I mean, the position that (1) there was some game called colonization and it was EVIL and HOW COULD PEOPLE DO THESE THINGS but hey it’s ok we’re enlightened now but what’s this. . . (2) NOOOOO history repeats itself when will we ever learn?1?!?!
*gasps for air*
Is somehow an invocation of irony just isn’t doing it for me. I think I;m trying to say the cant-rant comment was spot on.
2. Do NOT show him the EU series. Or Hearts of Iron (and sequels/expansions). Or any war games. Or Masters of Orion, because WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE PSILONS, THEIR FRAGILE FORMS CAN’T TAKE THIS KIND OF ABUSE.
3. Do you think he’d find the notion of dark elves racist? Has anyone ever gone off on a dark evlen racisms rant before? A guy can hope.
4. I can’t *quite* agree with the “how can he never have heard of colonization?!?” point, much as I want to (and it’s one of the better 4x games ever. I eagerly await the remake). It’s an old game by gaming industry standards. there’s an entire generation of gamers - guys who have been gaming for a decade+ - who can easily have missed Colonization because they were probably getting started on the PS1 and didn’t play computer games much (and maybe started gaming after it came out anyway). Also, Colonization is not one of Sid’s more famous games, nore one of the more famous genre examples. I’d argue it was overshadowed, though it was a success commercially (and critically loved) if memory serves.
Generally speaking I do want someone who is doing this kind of game blogging to be knowledgeable of the industry, and to have some appreciation for it’s history. I just don’t know that I can easily quantify or qualify how that should work.
I think in general his stance as seen through the Colonization example is far more appalling. I can’t begin to list all of the examples of games that present things that should seemingly set his Outrage-dar off (see pojnt 2).
I do think that if one wants to engage in meaningful critique of gaming, one should probably be versed in it’s history (David might have something interesting to say here that may or may not contradict this point, I dunno). And one should also understand how sometimes awful, terrible, nasty things are presented and the player can do them. But that these things aren’t awful, terrible, nasty. Sometimes there cleverly presented, such as when Richard Garriot came out of his crisis of conscience and filled an entire room in one of his dungeons with children (who weren’t children, precisely. The game engine was structured such that one could not speak to them, and this was immediately obvious becaus otherwise you could engage children in conversation), forcing many players to stop and really think for a second.
Or when he made an entire game that was 80% anti-crpg as they’d existed at the time, frequently presenting the player with choices that didn’t have an immediate tangible payoff, except for warm fuzzies and dreams of huggles (but the fuzzies were warm and soft, and the huggles were very snuggy).
Or any number of other examples. Like Chris Crawford forcing you to game over if you initiated a global scale nuclear conflict in Balance of Power.
Lots of designers have presented real world situations, given you the chance to do things that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t have, and then made the repercussions more than “oh, my, look at how my score improved”. This is a very important part of gaming history, even while modern history’s main stream titles often don’t do this well (or at all). And I think it’s a problem that this guy either isn’t versed in this history, or worse was just going for some shock value.
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June 27th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Variety also on occasion employs Tom Chick of Escapist / Quarter to Three / Tom v. Bruce fame as a game writer. In fact, Chick has a surprisingly muted comment on Fritz’s blog.
Why they passed Chick over for Fritz is beyond me. Maybe he wanted money.
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June 27th, 2008 at 8:19 am
“The obvious comparison that spring to my mind would be if somebody released a game called “Civilization IV: Confederacy,” in which players have to “lead a proud people to defend their values and traditions against their oppressive neighbors to the North.” Sure the game might not require you to own and abuse your slaves. But defending the Confederacy is inherently about defending the racist practice of slavery.”
Can someone direct this idiot to the Matrix Games website, where he can find not one, not two, but THREE grand strategy Civil War games that allow you to fight the War of Northern Aggression as the CSA?
Maybe that will cause his head to explode.
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June 27th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I sure hope no one ever does a remake of Seven Cities of Gold.
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June 27th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Amusingly of course, Colonization was a rather sanitised version of the colonisation of America in any case….
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June 27th, 2008 at 8:45 am
“Al Says:
I sure hope no one ever does a remake of Seven Cities of Gold. ”
That was the first thing I thought of as well.
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June 27th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Chick got hired to blog for the SciFi channel at fidgit.com. I’m guessing there’s an exclusivity clause in there somewhere.
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June 27th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
“He’s not freaking out about the game because it includes carnage — as historical colonization certainly did. He’s freaking out because it’s insufficiently respectful of certain academic dogmas and proprieties. He’s freaking out because certain subjects must, to his ilk, be treated only with moans of outrage.”
Well put. Though I think he’s acting cynically rather than sincerely, as you suggest.
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June 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
[…] the bemused… How can you possibly be the designated computer game blogger for a major media outlet like […]
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June 28th, 2008 at 8:55 am
i agree.
the only way you could possibly be so “shocked” by the content in the game is if you were there at that specific time in history. its almost as if he is shocked by it just because its deemed as ‘offensive’ in whatever circle he socializes in.
i hate that the internet has given a voice to nutters like that.
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July 26th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
[…] The comments to this guys post are far from friendly, people are saying he should be fired, telling him his Blog sucks and so on. One guy even wrote a counter blog that is making short work of the original Blog. […]
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