01.31.08
Posted in games, politics, writing at 1:44 am by Rob Fahey
A couple of weeks back, Britain’s embattled (and increasingly forlorn-looking, as fellow closeted BBC Parliament fans will have noted) Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, took up the standard of the battle against the single threat to our country’s youth. Not the erosion of their civil liberties, or the crumbling of the economy that’s meant to sustain them; not even drugs, or alcohol, or terrorism. This vile and pernicious threat is, of course, videogames.
Brown parroted elements of the spiel of his repellently false opponent, David Cameron, in calling for videogame makers to ban knives from their games - essentially saying that they should accept responsibility for the recent spate of highly-reported knife crime among youths in Britain’s cities, especially around London.
I wrote a fairly lengthy feature on the matter for GamesIndustry.biz, which pretty much sums up my own view on it. In the wake of that, I was contacted by the Evening Standard, who wanted me to write a short piece outlining my perspective on the debate.
Although I spent quite a while working the piece into the word counts they requested, they didn’t publish it in the end - and rather rudely, didn’t even bother dashing off a quick mail to apologise for wasting my time. Being that the Standard is an odious, biased and unpleasant rag at the best of times, I’m not entirely surprised - I got the impression that they had contacted me purely because I was one of the few game writers who made a point of seeing both sides to the whole Manhunt 2 banning story, and were disappointed to find that this doesn’t translate to being enough of a fool to think playing videogames is what’s making members of violent gangs stab one another in South London.
Anyway, in case anyone is interested, here’s what was going to be published. Shame, really - I was quite looking forward to slagging off old Gordy in the national press. Some other time, maybe.
It’s very disappointing that Gordon Brown would try to make videogames into a scapegoat for London’s youth crime. It’s a cheap political trick to point the finger at a soft target like videogames, instead of accepting responsibility for the difficult, complex roots of this problem.
I don’t think for a moment that a politician as experienced as Mr Brown really believes that we’re going to solve violent crime by taking some videogames off the shelves. He knows that what’s really needed is to tackle the thorny questions of deprivation, social integration, drug policy and policing - but videogames make for a nice, distracting soundbite and take the heat off for a few days.
There is definitely a debate to be had about violent videogames, but Mr Brown’s comments aren’t helpful. We need to look at the enforcement of age ratings, and make sure that retailers are sticking to them. We need to make sure that parents know what their children are playing, and can control their access to unsuitable material.
The research into the effect of violent games on people’s behaviour is very inconclusive - but even in the absence of a clear answer, I think most people, including those inside the games industry, agree that children’s access to violent media should be controlled. We already have a great age rating system, but there’s a lot of work to be done on that, and the Government needs to be working with the industry to ensure that children are protected, rather than just pointing fingers.
The tragedy of knife and gun crime among young people in London shouldn’t even be part of this debate. There’s no evidence of any kind of link with videogames - but plenty of evidence that links these crimes to social problems like drugs, underage drinking, poverty and poor social integration. London needs to hear Mr Brown’s plans to tackle those problems - not just empty allegations of blame and cheap soundbites.
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01.09.08
Posted in games, work at 3:15 pm by Rob Fahey
Quick work-related heads-up - my feature on Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is up on Eurogamer. (Avoid the comments thread, which has dissolved into idiocy as people who can barely count attempt to argue about sales figures.)
I’ve finally had a chance to delve into COD4, and rather like it. Perhaps because I played Counter-Strike until I was blue in the face (well, until I got fired from my job for absenteeism and sleeping in the office, anyway - true story), it doesn’t feel quite as fresh and interesting to me as it seems to everyone else, and I’m continually pissed off by the absolutely, shockingly awful multiplayer lobby system. But it’s a damned good game nonetheless, and most of my Live friends are playing it, which makes it all worthwhile.
Hating the levelling grind mechanic, though. I’ve played enough MMORPGs to be sick to the back teeth of this mechanism in games - it doesn’t feel like a reward system to me any more, it feels like stealing all my toys and then rationing them back to me. MMOGs like Tabula Rasa are finally managing to break out of this model, only for action games to dive right into it? God, I hope not.
Technorati Tags: Eurogamer, journalism, COD4, Call of Duty, videogames, Xbox 360, Xbox Live
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01.07.08
Posted in politics at 11:02 am by Rob Fahey
First post of the new year - hope you all had a good holiday, and are feeling sufficiently refreshed after your break to put up with some utterly ridiculous nonsense from the nation’s media and would-be leaders.
This report on the BBC this morning effectively illustrates the extent to which immigration has become a meaningless, pointless political football. I’ll spare you from having to read it - in summary, it’s about a memo which was circulated in the Immigration Service saying that students who have marginally outstayed their visas should be given some leeway, unless they have broken some other laws.
The example given is of a university student from China who had to resubmit her application due to an error in the first form she sent, which brought her a couple of days over the expiry of her original visa. Under new rules, the immigration service was preparing to deport her, but the agency’s chief executive stepped in to prevent this, and has now issued a guideline saying that in similar circumstances, leniency should be applied.
Hands up, anyone who has a problem with this? Come on, nice and high where we can see them! No, didn’t think so. We’ve probably all had friends who are overseas students in the UK - the concept that they would be deported from the country for making small clerical errors on their forms, or sending them in a little late, is abhorrent, just as it should be. We all despise unhelpful, jobsworth style behaviour, and it should be nice to see the chief exec of a civil service agency doing her bit to make her agency more friendly, more helpful and more willing to treat people as human beings.
Well, not if you’re the Daily Mail. It’s hardly a surprise that the Mail is willing to jump on this story, and the nation’s most hateful rag is quick off the mark with some lovely unsourced statements to set the tone of its article.
“Last night insiders in the service said hundreds of thousands of students - including many who never had any intention of studying - could be staying on illegally and were effectively being granted an amnesty,” it breathlessly reports. Now, this is typical Mail journalism. It’s a contentious, unpleasant statement, which isn’t backed up by any kind of figures or research - but is passed off as legitimate (and put right at the top of a prominent news article) by attributing it to “insiders in the service”.
This is the kind of sneaky trick which I despise in journalism. Note that there isn’t an “insider” being directly quoted here; it’s a statement being made by the paper, but attributed without quote marks to someone else who conveniently can’t be named or identified. They’re claiming, in essence, that this is the gist of what they were told by some people they won’t name - and intriguingly, they haven’t bothered looking up any figures to confirm it. This line changes students who’ve messed up their forms or forgotten to send them in on time into evil, scheming immigrants who are here to steal all our jobs, benefits, women, etc. - and it does so without actually giving a single shred of evidence to support that picture of things.
You expect that from the Mail, though. You also expect the utterly disgusting rent-a-quote Andrew Green to say something foul and bigoted in an article like this, and he helpfully supplies a quote. But what, might I ask, is David Davis doing keeping company like this? Why, he’s electioneering, that’s what. David Davis is intelligent enough to know that an immigration service, like any other civil service, must have priorities and must be willing to be flexible under reasonable circumstances. Sadly, he is also unprincipled enough to say exactly what the braying, selfish masses who consume hate rags like the Daily Mail want to hear, even when he knows it to be untrue, unfair and downright cruel.
Not, of course, that our incumbent government are any better on this issue. Lin Homer, the immigration service chief exec, wouldn’t have had to intervene in this case were it not for ill-conceived new Home Office guidelines demanding stricter, harsher application of the laws in all cases - an utterly unreasonable demand on the Immigration Service, and an utterly unreasonable way to treat people who have come to the UK to study. The accusation that the Home Office is effectively legislating off the pages of the Sun and the Mail seems to hold more water with each passing day, as the gaping flaws in the logic in new legislation and guidelines become increasingly clear.
Stories like this one make it clear that there really is no immigration debate in the UK - all there is is an ill-informed, bigoted and unpleasant shouting match, in which any reasoned voice is sadly being drowned out. The demonisation of illegal immigrants (one of the most exploited, un-protected and ill-treated segments of our society, who are deserving of our pity, not our hatred) is complete; now the deep undercurrent of distrust and racism which sadly underlies much of the British population has moved its sights on to legal migrants, and even students.
This despite the fact that the economic case for migration is overwhelmingly positive, despite the fact that the figures regularly trotted out by the anti-immigration lobby have been proven time and again to be dishonest, despite the fact that every month brings a new disgrace for anti-immigration activists who are shown up as racists or members of racist groups.
In a debate, these things would matter - in a shouting match, they don’t. In the meanwhile, those who have come to the UK to study, to work, and to legitimately build their lives in this country, are the ones who suffer.
(As an interesting thought experiment, imagine the reaction of the Daily Mail and its ilk if there was this kind of unpleasant furore, thinly veiled racism and all, about British people emigrating to the United States, or the Far East, or Australia?)
Technorati Tags: BBC, immigration, politics, Daily Mail
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