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May 11, 2006
Censorship: Artists Supporting Art
When talking about censorship, I often note how nudity and sexual themes are treated in video games. For developers of video games, including nudity or sexual content is a risk, both at the rating level and at retail. Your product might get hit with an AO-rating or shut out from some or all of the major retailers (as God of War originally was from Walmart).
Am I advocating we add sex and nudity to all games? Of course, I'm not. However, I firmly believe that developers should have the full range of human experience on their palette when they create a game and not some kind of Disney-esque range of things to choose from.
If other mediums were subjected to what is increasingly becoming our palette through self censorship and retail reluctance, movies like Shakespeare in Love, Sideways, The Graduate and American Beauty would never have been made, and if they were, their commercial success would have suffered greatly. Feel free to pick up these movies at your local Walmart.
Is the bar for mature themes in video games much lower than it is for other forms of art? It seems so. What is so offensive about Fahrenheit that it couldn't be released *as is* in the states without neutering parts of its story?
I fully believe that movies like Sideways and Brokeback Mountain never would have survived creatively if subjected to an ESRB ratings run. Developers are inclined to pre-censor now in the post-Hot Coffee, post-Oblivion rerating, and such content, even nudity, is unlikely to show up even in cases where it would make perfect sense.
It was this story, Nude art stripped from show, that got me thinking about this issue this morning. I often say that if other forms of art were treated like video games (ie. censoring things outright like E3's banning of adult content or the defacto retail censorship that comes with an AO rating), that people would protest the affront to their creative freedoms.
So they did: "...some art professors are angry at what they see as censorship and are planning to show their own nude works at the off-campus display in solidarity with the offending students." Good for them.
Posted by BrendaBrathwaite at May 11, 2006 08:25 AM | Discuss this post on our forums