The father of Deus Ex, Thief, and System Shock attacked those who were involved in Donald Trump‘s violent video game reel as a developer.
Spector is a veteran in the scene (we could name a few more games from him!), and he attacked his younger colleagues on Twitter. „I don’t believe games cause violent behavior. Not for one second. However, the videogame reel shown at the White House on Thursday is simply disgusting. Every shot is in colossally bad taste, and everyone associated with those games should be ashamed of themselves. They hurt us.”
He got a reply, saying that his games are also far from an E (for everyone) rating. His response: „True enough but the games I work on typically offer alternatives to violence; I try to show the consequences; there aren’t any decapitations, bloody gibbing headshots or ax killings. I don’t mind violent games. I mind games that glorify it & present it in graphic, disgusting ways.”
Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox and one of the directors of Fig (a crowdfunding website), chimed in, saying that violence is sometimes necessary as part of the depiction. „Your own games can be cut with such a mindset -pressed into the same service of highlighting depictions of violence to undermine art and expression. Such depictions are sometimes necessary if art is going to be useful to our species. Have you not read Shakespeare? The Bible?”
So there’s already some conflicts between game developers after the Trump-meeting on Thursday. The situation is likely going to evolve into something else shortly. Until then, here’s Trump’s reel in case you haven’t seen it yet.
Source: GamesIndustry
That reel on YouTube was truly in poor taste, only focusing on the most gruesome of deaths to characters in a video game. They intentionally done this on purpose to get a rise out of the people. While Spector does his games in a way that shows that actions have consequences he shows it in a way that doesn’t glorify it. So he deserves some respect. Although other video game developers raises the bar on the level of violence they show because they want to. They know what audience their games are targeting to. Adults and only adults, because they know they can take what goes on in their content of games, they know they’ll get a reaction from their audiences. The only reason that video game violence is up for discussion again despite being concluded, is because it still concerns children somehow getting a copy of M-rated games. It doesn’t help that when you plus that lack of common sense and smarts from the parents who was supposed to check the game they are buying them, and keep them from children, but fail, you get a constant hot mess that occurs every time something happens that the news media will quickly blame video games when they check perpetrator’s motives and stuff.
The White House is trying so hard to make this a big deal after the Florida shooting, and try to detract themselves from the real problem, which is the handling of gun laws and other actions that everyone needs to do their part in to ensure another shooting doesn’t happen again, because it happened, lots of times. But we can never forget, that the perpetrator of each shooting had other things happening to him other than just video games to go through the trouble of planning and executing a shooting at school. No matter what, blame the guy with the gun who used it to shoot other kids, rather than something that has always been for entertainment no better than radio, TV shows, and so forth. Everyone has their ways of creating video games. Specter has his, and everyone else has theirs. They really shouldn’t have to be dealing with this crud because of ignorant adults with kids, who doesn’t look into the contents of each game to determine what they will get from their children, and the constant scapegoating of news media to find something to blame for shooting, other than the person responsible. Nikolas Cruz was a troubled individual who gone through things that he decided to respond in anger and back it up with violence. The one to blame for all this in at least the school shooting in Florida is Nikolas, not video games.