A couple weeks back, Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price wrote a lengthy post on his blog responding to a story that broke earlier this week about some inflammatory statements he’d supposedly made. The reality behind the story was that some site or another picked a few choice quotes out of a much longer interview and used them out of context in what seems a fairly obvious grab for hits.
In response to this ridiculousness, Price took the opportunity to ask why the enthusiast press isn’t using their time to report on the pending Supreme Court case regarding the California law regulating sales of games with “inappropriate” content. Price describes the gravity of the situation, explaining that if the law is upheld, it could ripple into other media, and calling it “tantamount to government censorship.”
None of what Price has to say is really up for debate there. The effects of such a law passing could be very far reaching for the industry and the consumer. It’s already difficult for game makers to create anything mature both from a sales perspective and ESRB ratings (not that anyone’s yet created a worthwhile AO-rated game), but a vague law about inappropriate content could end up putting games like Grand Theft Auto or even Mass Effect behind the black curtain.
Back to Price’s main point, though: “I challenge the news sites to carry the flag on this issue, to make it a key and ongoing story.”
Again, no question here; it is a challenge, and for a few reasons. Get ready for sweeping generalizations.
Giving the sites in question the benefit of the doubt, I think that the big issue is one of simple quotas and business. There are few truly big news stories in gaming. Even a breaking story can get lost in the slew of press releases, screenshot updates, and what-have-you unless it’s on the level of the Infinity Ward implosion earlier this year or the current Supreme Court case we’re discussing. Sites like Joystiq and Kotaku have traffic quotas to meet, and focusing too much on one story could be a detriment to that when there’s some new tidbit about the next Modern Warfare map pack people are going to crap their pants over.
And that’s where I’m going to lay a lot of blame at the feet of the gamers themselves. I’m absolutely a gamer, without any doubt in my mind, but I’m excluding myself from this particular group because I DO read the stories about the Supreme Court case, both awesome fluff pieces like Joystiq’s quote coverage and in-depth articles from the New York Times. I know a lot of gamers do, too. However, it seems like the press releases about games like Modern Warfare pull a lot more traffic than something all “thinky” like a Supreme Court piece.
There also seems to be a general disinterest in the issue. In one article, the first user comment was “makes me glad I’m 23 and not bothered by this law.” A lot of gamers don’t seem to understand the far-reaching implications of what would amount to a huge expansion of what constitutes obscenity (with reference to obscenity laws) without any real clear boundaries.
I took an informal poll of about 20 coworkers and found that only one of them was familiar with the case and a few were only passingly aware of it. With so few people both in and out of gaming aware or even interested in the case, why would gaming news sites bother making the story a big one?
Popularity: unranked [?]
No comments