It’s extremely hard to take the current commotion about Resistance Fall of Man seriously.
The Church of England is outraged that Resistance Fall of Man features a location with likeness to the Manchester Cathedral, Tony Blair is asked to comment, and the church would be willing to calm down for a price.
Something is seriously wrong – everybody seems to basically understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but when it comes to video games, otherwise intelligent people will happily short-circuit and claim that a sci-fi game “encourages people to have guns battles in the building“.
The part about encouragement comes from the bishop of Manchester, and it raises the question whether he personally felt very encouraged to engage in gun battles after playing the game? I think he needs to step forward on this issue: Did he feel a strong urge towards real gun violence that he could only barely control?
Or is it rather a sort of interpretation-by-proxy along the following lines: All these weird people who play video games must surely feel encouraged to engage in gun battles in the cathedral. (Though I have no basis for this assumption whatsoever. Please send money.)
Fall of Man is not the only case. There is also motion to EU parliament to ban Rule of Rose, because it “features children and perverse, violent and sadistic images that are harmful to human dignity.” I commented the motion with links to motion in my blog (http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~plankosk/blog/?p=89).
Look at all that free publicity that the church is giving Sony!! The whole situation is kinda pathetic, and it ends up only making the church look bad, and gets people talking about the game.
When stuff like this happens, there’s always this subtext in the conversations that’s along the lines of ‘violence never existed before videogames’. Don’t mind the millions that God kills in the bible. No no, that’s compassion apparently.
How did Sony do it? Did they video inside the cathedral and then convert the video to graphics? Whatever, I’d be pissed if someone pictured the inside of my house then made millions out of it on a shoot em up. Regardless of the unfortunate wider issues of the church and Christianity versus massive profiteering corporations, it’s bad taste from Sony. Why not set the game in VT?
Full marks and frag points to the Bishop for sheer chutzpah! He’ll be claiming copyright on ‘second life’ next. At the very least he’s generated some ‘awesome’ publicity for his own fantasy adventure title which has been losing members for years. And it could work…cultural imperialism and a fairly dark and violent missionary past could make his franchise a big-seller. Particularly at Christmas.
I have not played the game, but it’s my understanding that it involves an alien invasion.
I know that you’re not supposed to bring weapons into a church, but I’ll bet that if it was infested with violent aliens soldiers from beyond the moon then Bishop McCulloch would approve of using force to remove them. Even if you’re silly enough to take the game literaly, wouldn’t that be all the game ”
encourages”?