The ASA: as fearsome as a spaghetti broadsword
Posted: October 21, 2011 Filed under: Games, Media | Tags: advertising, ASA, banned duke nukem advert, duke nukem Leave a comment »
It could have been alright, you know. It could have been a lighthearted riposte to the current trend for "gritty" shooters taking themselves far too seriously. Instead, it was a bunch of disappointing set pieces stitched together by weak knob jokes. Ah well.
Remember the start of June? Steps were still blissfully unreformed, Nancy Dell’Olio was exactly where she belongs (that is, nowhere near the nation’s TV screens) and everybody was naively hoping that Duke Nukem Forever might not turn out to be a colossal disappointment of a videogame, blithely ignoring the gathering mountain of evidence that it was actually going to be about as enjoyable as scraping a PVC quoit across a crusty abcess.
Just how awful was it in the end? Well, scroll down to the bottom of this page and see for yourself. This presented a bit of a problem for the advertising bods in charge of trussing the thing up in its shiniest rags and dragging it to market – a job that must have been akin to slapping some lippy on a decaying blobfish and desperately trying to pass it off as a supermodel. Their strategy was about as sophisticated as everything else orbiting the tattered mess of DNF, combining embarrassing attempts at blackmail (which predictably backfired harder than a howitzer stuffed with frozen turkey) with a TV spot full of – what else? – schoolgirls, explosions, and pictures of topless strippers with their sauciest areas pixellated so awkwardly that it looked like they were wearing Lego nipple tassels. One in the eye for all those “Games are art” ponces, there.
This week, the Advertising Standards Authority passed judgement on that same terrible TV ad, ruling that because its “gyrations were overly sexually explicit,” it may henceforth only be shown after 11 p.m. Pow! A slap in the face for those pesky ad-men, right? Except! It’s now a full four months after the game’s initial release, which makes it exactly three months and twenty-seven days since the world collectively sighed “Oh, it’s rubbish,” forgot all about Duke and moved on to the next glimmering consumer bauble. The marketing campaign has long since been wound up – there’s no point in running it, now that the cat’s out of the bag and every reviewer from here to Transnistria has given the game a proper drubbing (my favourite line comes from Ben Kuchera of ArsTechnica, who said it’s “like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive—and you’re the uncle.”)
Leaving aside for now the whole issue of whether the ASA is right to make these moral judgements, or if it’s a bit odd that they freaked out over a flash of bum when the same ad showed monsters erupting into crimson showers of blood after taking a blast of shotgun pellets to the groin, there’s the bizarre fact that they’re really, really late to the party. How has it taken this long for them to get around to administering this mildest of slaps on the wrist?
And yet the ASA can do NOTHING to keep our children safe from this guy.
They’re an odd lot, the ASA. Their mission is to protect the nation from misleading material by regulating EVERY SINGLE ADVERT in the country, across TV, print and the internet (!) – but it’s a bit of a hopeless cause, given that the advertising industry has hordes of slick-suited PR agents and Brylcreemed account execs, while the ASA is just three part-timers sharing a broom cupboard (probably). Forget David and Goliath, this is like pitting a fruit fly against the Death Star.
The Authority’s regulatory powers vary wildly for no discernible reason: print seems well-covered, with sanctions ranging from trading penalties to pre-vetting, but for TV the absolute worst they can do is ask the broadcaster to stop showing the infringing advert, and maybe threaten to call in the bigger boys. Busybodies like me have been whinging about this situation for over five years now, and you can see why: verdicts such as this Duke Nukem one fail so completely to serve their supposed purpose, that it’s actually a bit embarrassing. The horse hasn’t just bolted, it’s met a nice lady horse, moved to Chigwell, started a modest import-export business and retiled the bathroom – and now the ASA decides to send out an announcement congratulating itself for shutting the stable door? If they’re going to be that rubbish, they might as well just not bother.
So, to help the poor ASA get its mojo back, here are some suggestions for new sanctions it could impose:
*Send a round-robin email to all of the advertiser’s clients, friends and family, containing a photoshopped picture of the miscreant in question stuffing Weetabix up their bum and really, really enjoying it
*Have Justin Bieber tweet about how the advert makes him “sadface”
*THUNDERDOME
*Freeze the company’s assets and don’t release them until its entire executive board can successfully make it to the third round of Ninja Warrior
*Offer “double or quits.” The ad’s creative team have to choose to be locked inside one of two shipping crates – one containing a nice Victoria sponge and a full pardon, the other a rabid Chris de Burgh wearing a tattered loincloth and riding an enraged bull elephant (the twist is that both boxes actually contain a de Burgh)
*Death by Vanessa Feltz
Nobody’s turning off the smut hose just yet
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: Media, Technology | Tags: internet, Internet Watch Foundation, ISP porn block, IWF, Mothers Union, opt-in porn block, opt-out porn block, Reg Bailey, UK ISP 1 Comment »
Don't panic, everyone!
As someone who likes to think of himself as fairly up-to-date on technological matters, as I settled down in front of the TV on Tuesday morning for my daily intake of Weetabix and BBC News it came as something of a shock to hear their tech correspondent, the resplendent Rory Cellan-Jones, casually describing how ISPs across the land were suddenly going to start blocking off “adult content.” Immediately, there arose a stirring, unanimous cry of “WHAAAAT?!” from all present (that is, three blokes all under the age of 25), suddenly panicked by the potential implications of such a move – such was my surprise, I nearly choked trying to stop myself from spraying little gobbets of brown cereal gunk all over the rug. Fortunately, the shock subsided almost as quickly as it arrived, as we heard that it was only for new customers, and all that would happen was that they’d be asked to opt-in to the blocking system when they opened an account. Phew! Rory had the situation well in hand – he went on to describe how the system would, as well as choking off the smut pipeline, also block harmless things like the Wikipedia page on Al Qaida, and as he did so you could swear there was a little cheeky glint in his eye, as if to say “Don’t worry, Dads and husbands, I’ve got this one covered. Here’s your golden excuse.”
My reaction seems to have been about the same as everyone else’s – although most other folk managed to avoid having a near-death experience as a result of inhaled wheat products. The pattern was identical: surprise, a brief soupçon of outrage, then a quick deflation as you realise that it’s not that big a deal. In fact, there’s been a fair bit of confusion around the whole thing, with our man Rory insisting that it will be something that you have to choose to switch on, while The Mail and The Guardian claimed the exact opposite: you’ll have to tell someone to turn it off. So what actually is it? James Firth, of the SRoC blog, suggests that the ISPs have agreed to no such thing, and are privately furious at the suggestion that they’re about to surround the web’s naughty bits with an iron curtain of tank traps and sniper towers, that you can only get through if you snap your heels together and ask nicely. They have committed to help raise awareness of ways that parents can block such sites, and make these tools available, but they’re each doing it in different ways: as the Guardian went on to report, TalkTalk will continue to use the network-level filtering that they already offer, while BT will be providing a software package for users to manage themselves. Neither of these will be in any way compulsory.
So how, then, did this particular storm find its way into the news agenda’s teacup and start sloshing all over the saucer? It seems to have all stemmed from Mother’s Union, the charity (motto: “Christian Care for Families”) whose chief exec, Reg Bailey, wrote the original Bailey Report earlier this year (title: “Letting Children be Children”) which was chock-full of headline-friendly proposals for action on things like padded bras, stripper poles, jazz mags and the like. Early Tuesday morning, in advance of a meeting with the Prime Minister, they sent out a slightly weird, typo-laden press release trumpeting “the news that major internet providers will now require customers to actively opt in to receive adult content, rather than the less effective opt out control that currently exists.” This was the line that everybody ran with before things cleared up, and seems to be a result of the Mother’s Union press office having a bit of an itchy trigger finger (I’m assuming that their press releases are shot out of a cannon) but not quite understanding what was actually discussed between ISPs and government.
This is how PR works, right?
This is a bit odd, but surely a relief to everyone who was worrying that the internet was about to be censored – it isn’t. At least, no more than it already is, thanks to the oddly-secret-if-not-actually-malicious machinations of the Internet Watch Foundation’s blocklist, which is adhered to by over 95 percent of UK connections and is supposed to keep out kiddie porn, but can occasionally misfire and shut down Wikipedia. What is it that these filters have against those guys?
This whole brouhaha has, however, revealed just how tricky it is for people to agree on what the internet actually is: ISPs seem adamant that they’re just delivery men, ferrying boxes of data to and from your computer with no regard for what’s actually inside. From a technical point of view, this is completely accurate. However, most people don’t see the web in technical terms, as a service, but in semantic terms: it’s a place, a sort of humongous public square with a respectable university and family-friendly funfair at one end, and a load of dodgy folks in trenchcoats at the other. The ISP is like a personal driver who’s supposed to take you on a tour of this wonderful new place, steering you away from the mucky and disreputable bits. This is a flawed viewpoint – unlike real life, there’s no public space online, everything is owned by someone and it’s that person alone who decides what’s going to feature on their particular patch – but it’s a popular and not entirely unreasonable one.
The struggle for ISPs, then, is that there’s plenty of demand for both models: lots of us want to simply manage our own access, but lots us don’t, and this new system – which is just a code of practice, at the end of the day – seems a like a fair crack at juggling these difficultly opposed demands. Yes, it is a bit scary, and yes, it would be better if parents just MTFU, learn a bit more about the internet and actually engage with their howling offspring themselves rather than foisting responsibility onto some corporate third party, but hey – it could be worse. After all, at least we’re not Australian.
Why the Legend of Zelda is great, and Link is an example to us all (well, except in his choice of headgear)
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: Games | Tags: ethics, ethics in games, japanese folklore, legend of zelda, Link, videogames effect on children 4 Comments »
HEY, LISTEN!
Previously, I’ve banged on about the many complicated ways that videogames can influence children and how we gaming types shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand over the issue or, worse, wheeze up a massive fuss and make ourselves look like we deserve to be the main window display in “Ye Olde Snivelling Dickhead Shoppe.” Today, though, to add a more personal perspective to this whole messy business, I’d like to share some thoughts on my own childhood gaming experiences.
Specifically, this means Zelda. My first Zelda experience came at the tender age of twelve, when my brand-new Nintendo 64 was placed proudly atop my fourteen-inch TV like a chunky plastic monarch, regally surveying the few square metres of tattered bedroom that would be its new kingdom. Not having had much gaming experience beyond the odd prod at a Gameboy, my N64 – alongside its most famous game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – was a revelation. The colours! The sounds! The wide open vistas! It was the first time I’d seen how art, music, characters and story can all come together to give a game a real atmosphere, a soul all of its own, and I was hooked.
I’ve played through six different Zelda titles – my very favourites, Ocarina and the even better Majora’s Mask, have had eight or nine plays each, so my total Zelda time must easily run to a few hundred hours: this may sound weird, but it’s really not so bad in context. All the games follow the same basic formula: something most heinous, often the evil Ganon, is threatening the mystical land of Hyrule and it’s up to Link, a sprightly kid in a green nightcap who’s usually between ten and nineteen years old, to make his way across the land defeating Ganon’s assorted flunkeys until getting to the big bad boss himself and taking him down mano-a-mano. Along the way, you explore Hyrule’s towns and villages, which contain their fair share of oddballs and troubled souls who can help you along your way.
Is it violent? Absolutely. Link’s always waving his sword about, slicing some monstrous spider into gooey leg soup or lobbing flaming arrows at evil bats. A lot of the fun lies in using a mix of skills and tactics to overcome your obstacles and escape mortal peril – without combat, there wouldn’t be any real game mechanic. Nevertheless, it’s still a far cry from stabbing Arabs in the face amidst some grimy HONESTLY-IT’S-NOT-AFGHANISTAN-IT-JUST-LOOKS-VERY-SIMILAR near-future warzone – no, this is just simple, old-fashioned fantasy. In the dark ages before the invention of television finally made it blissfully simple to figure out where all your furniture should be pointing, kids would be reading about or acting out their own Zelda-like adventures, with courageous champions slapping down naughty monsters. You know: the Hero’s Journey, and all that. In fact, Zelda draws on a rich heritage of folklore from its native Japan – a heritage that goes back centuries, and is translated into the game as one simple message:
Whenever it’s possible to help someone, you should.
For much of Ocarina, for example, it’s impossible to progress without lending a hand to folk. You have to help the lovable Gorons find a new source of their favourite food (rocks), and chase angry parasites from the belly of the giant fish Jabu-Jabu. Yet there are plenty of things you aren’t obliged to do, but can if you feel like it: rescue lost dogs, round up chickens, help a family escape a creepy spider-curse. These always result in some tangible reward for the player, usually a nice bit of equipment, and you can always clearly see the positive difference you’ve just made to someone’s life. They don’t just slink off moodily, but actively parade their newfound happiness about the place and always, always – in accordance with Japanese customs – offer a hearty “Thankyou!”
Hang on Anju, we're gonna fix this!
Throughout Japanese fairytales, especially stories like “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow” and “Momotaro,” there’s a recurring theme - the protagonist offers some small help to his fellows, and later on finds this good deed repaid many times over, often when he or she needs it most. It’s easy to see why Japanese society, for all its faults, is one of the most cohesive in the world. The game’s designers cite one story in particular – the “straw millionaire” – as the direct inspiration for Zelda’s famous trading quests, which have Link running around the whole of Hyrule, swapping items with various strangers to solve their problems, before finally receiving some sort of reward. In Ocarina, you have to make nine such swaps before you can finally get the eyedrops you need to help out your mate Biggoron, who’s promised to make you a wicked tasty sword if you can help him reclaim his sight.
It might sound like all this helpfulness stems from selfish greed for shiny new toys, but that’s not necessarily true: in Majora’s Mask, the darkest but most brilliant of the series, Link has only three days to save a town from being crushed by the falling moon. He does this by constantly travelling back in time, reliving those same three days over and over until he can finally sort it all out. This means that, after you’ve put all your effort into, say, saving the marriage of two tragically cursed lovers, you only end up having to warp back to the past and see all that good work undone. Even though you get to keep whatever baubles you received for your efforts, they don’t make up for how absolutely heartbreaking it is to see these characters, those lovely, endearing people for whom you feel genuine empathy and worked so hard to help, sent straight back into misery.
Even though a lot of stories on the subject are obviously nonsense, it’s still true that games can have a negative impact on children’s learning and behaviour. Yet, as someone who’s been a committed Zelda fan since he was a wee sprout of a lad, I think it’s still worth remembering that these titles, in tribute to those classic folktales, carry a strongly prosocial message and prove that it’s possible to have a hugely successful, multi-million selling series of games that aren’t just artistically brilliant and great fun to play, but can also teach you to be a better person.
