So a while back Extra Credits posted something that caused a certain amount of consternation across the internet. This is, in my opinion, because they handled their topic without respect; they knew that they wanted to talk about something, but they didn't actually talk about it well and see it to a logical conclusion (to be critical, there would have been some difficulty in this because they didn't actually have a good flow of logic set up, but people have made the same case better).

I've included the video below, in case anyone's interested.

Now, I'm not going to directly respond to the video, as other people have already done so, but I want to have it as a sort of starting point that I'll make a reference to.

Games are Art

I think we've gotten past the point where we have to argue this, and if we still have to argue this it's because people are being pedantic.

Games are an artistic expression. Now, one can argue that there's less artistry in them because they're more frequently the product of a shared vision than any single person, but there are some very strong counter-arguments to this (and nobody in the mainstream levels the same complaints against film). There are also counter-examples to this.

However, this isn't the critical point here.

Art is Expression

One of the things that game designers and writers need to be able to do is to tell stories. They are going to tell stories that may be painful, may be controversial, and may be the source of legal issues.

Now, this doesn't mean that all the expression contained in games is good. One can discuss without end the merits of Doom, or Call of Duty's "No Russian" mission, or all sorts of bawdry or misanthropic content in games, but there's an important question to be asked here:

Who is saying what?

The foundation of the Western cultural ethos is the notion that the individual and the word are two of the most sacred concepts. Now, both of these have a great potential to go astray, but they're also the only way that we make things better.

Now, this is where I think Extra Credits goes off the rails.

There's an argument that if you're going to feature bad guys, they should be presented in a historically accurate way or not at all.

There are a couple counter-arguments to this.

First, historical accuracy in games is basically a myth. Unless you're going to constrain the player heavily, or explain the history of events around what they've done, you're not going to get accuracy. We can't reconstruct scenes that well, and the changes that people make may be intentional. Nobody gets angry at historians for leaving out the time between battles when they study a war (unless, of course, they fail to provide an accurate timeline due to this omission), because they're not the point of interest.

Second, a lot of the time we don't have historical accuracy in games it's because players would be involved in things that are unsavory. This is perhaps a little bit of a point in their favor, but only on the surface. If the argument is that players are becoming acclimated to symbols of hate and beginning to associate with them, do you really want them to get all the way into the darkest recesses of the human psyche?

A lot of game developers intentionally shy away from being overly accurate because they want to be respectful and not show things that they don't feel like they can respect in the game format. If you want to protect players from the trauma of being forced into something abhorent, you can't force them to look at it. If you put two teams of players against each other and one is doing war crimes, you're going to wind up with some real issues.

I think of the game Chivalry, which featured a good faction and evil faction. At times the evil faction would have a goal like "kill all the villagers" or "burn the town", and I don't think that's what Extra Credits is advocating for. The way it was handled was not respectful of history, but I also didn't see it having a really strong adverse impact either. Nobody went out and slew peasants (to my knowledge) as a result of playing the game.

Who Decides?

One of the fundamental issues of free speech is always going to be the boundary between free speech and speech which is illegal.

Now, Extra Credits isn't calling for banning speech, but they make a point where they object to the treatment of German soldiers being on the same level as the treatment of British soldiers.

I think that one could point out that there are a lot of people in India, Africa, Canada, and Australia who would argue that the English weren't exactly the good guys 100% of the time.

Now, I don't think that this merits condemning them forever (in the same sense that we don't condemn the Germans forever), but it raises an important moral and ethical quandry about representation in games.

I think that the logical thing is not to make anyone heroic on the basis of who they are. Now, you can make the point that certain people have certain values and should be respected for that or condemned for that if they have an evil viewpoint, but people tend toward moral expedience and the "good guys" may very well not be. See all the controversies surrounding the depiction of the American wars in Vietnam and the Middle East for an easy example of this.

A competitive game without any story elements associated with it imposing any moral decision based on arbitrary conditions will not achieve the goal that they desire, and it runs the risk of causing more harm. People don't play these games thinking about the nature and ethics of war (at least, not unless they were already doing it), and they're not necessarily rooting for the side that matches their character's uniform so much as rooting for the team they're on in the moment.

I worry that making people more conscious of stuff like this would actually be more potentially harmful. If you lecture people about them being on "the wrong side" with their choice of team, you could force them to confront evil or you could cause them to go for entertainment and companionship with people who have less scruples about moral history.

The Adult in Society

Now, with that said, I do see one point of agreement with Extra Credits here: you don't want to force players into things.

However, there's another key point to be made here:

Who buys a WWII shooter without realizing that if you go in multiplayer you're going to potentially play as bad guys?

I like that they brought up Rainbow Six Siege as an example of a game where the plot is that it's all just training exercises and nobody is really getting hurt, though I'm not sure if this is actually canon or not.

I think that the majority of people who play video games have an appreciation for the fact that Nazis are bad.

We don't see strong associations with desensitization and the commission of violent acts. One could argue that studies have shown that people have a slight correlation (but not necessarily a statistically significant one) between tastes for violent entertainment and their own violent acts, and that their emotional response differs after seeing depictions of violence, but there is no conclusive causal link.

The history of storytelling is full of people doing bad things, and it's also full of people glossing over the bad parts of a person's life and focusing on achievements or merits.

Choose almost any noteworthy character of antiquity and you'll find that they're often more memorable in their flaws: Odysseus gets everyone killed through his pride, Hercules kills his own family, Shahryār keeps executing innocent women due to fears about adultery, and so forth.

People who go to play a game, especially an M-rated game, should be trusted to have a functioning sense of right and wrong. You can make the case that people parent with games, and children wind up exposed to content in games that they may not be developed enough to handle, but there's already a system in place that aims to prevent that. It has failed time and time again, but it exists and if one wanted to be less hypocritical they could assess how and why that system has failed and work to remedy that, instead of arguing that people who make games intended for adult audiences should be placed under restrictions meant to protect children.

Adults can choose what they do and don't want to see. For instance, I don't typically play games where there is graphic violence against women; it bothers me a lot. So when a game like Insurgency: Sandstorm features female characters often suffering grievous bodily harm, that puts me off of it. I can make the choice not to play it, or I can decide that the merit of the work outweighs the content. I don't have to accept that killing women is good to play, and most of the time I am able to make the deliberate choice to play on the Security team so that I don't wind up in that situation (admittedly, this is a luxury afforded to me by playing the players-against-bots mode, but since that's a mode I prefer I don't have to worry about that).

That's something that I, as a rational adult, can do when confronted with a game that has merit but also things I disapprove of. If it bothered me more, I just wouldn't buy or play the game, but as it stands I don't see any issues with it. I don't need a special version of the game or any coddling, and as a game designer I don't think such things should be put in games.

A Closing Note on Choice

One of the things that I find most important here is to think about what exactly games provide.

I'm not so concerned about freedom of speech for players as I am for developers and writers of games. That may seem hypocritical, but one of the reasons for this is that it's a matter of experience.

I used the example of Chivalry above, and its spiritual successor Mordhau also has a similar problem, though not perhaps to the same extent. In Chivalry and Mordhau, the community could be considered toxic, and quite openly so. As a predominantly multiplayer game on Steam, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

I'm totally fine with developers moderating in-game and game-related communities beyond what is require by the law (assuming that it is done in a way that actually improves the experience for everyone), because generally they don't pretend to be public forums. However, it should be even-handed (for instance, if people decide that politics should be banned, all politics should be banned equally), and it should be done with the thought in mind that people want an experience when gaming that is positive.

For instance, I don't play Mordhau online very much anymore, despite liking how it plays. I generally play offline against bots, because when I play online the community is full of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior. Occasionally I'll hop on to a cooperative Horde server (which tend to be friendlier) or get a good random game, but I don't play online to be surrounded by twelve-year-olds who think that stabbing allies and having a profile picture of Hitler is the funniest thing on earth.

Getting rid of that, however, is not the same thing as having people who are creating artistic expression be silenced, because they're imposing their actions and messages upon others (who have paid to have a different experience than the one they're getting). It's the same thing as protesters blocking off events that they don't like. If people are playing to have a certain experience and trolls come along and ruin it, it's a big problem.

At the same time, it's worth noting that I have a hard time pointing to anyone that does this well. A lot of people view this sort of moderation as being a "shove it under the rug" thing rather than a "come up with a community that's positive" thing, and even the places that claim to be working on the latter really don't do a good job with that. I was a moderator on video game servers and discord servers for a long time, and I have yet to see people (myself included) who have found the perfect line between permitting expression and ensuring a positive experience for everyone.

It's also worth noting that as someone who writes on Steem, I believe in everyone's rights to express themselves publicly, even if it's just so I know who I don't like.

Wrapping Up

We are living in an era where people have challenged the rights to speech more than ever before, and thanks to the internet it's possible to see more and more extreme content.

The solution to this is not to tell artists, writers, and consumers what is wrong. I'm a believer in the intellect and humanity of the common person, and to make arbitrary decisions about what stories you can and can't tell and which situations (without an overarching narrative) you can depict is just plain wrong. It's navel-gazing attempted to further a political agenda or infantile power grab.