By Alec Meer on May 11th, 2009 at 7:40 pm.
A couple of readers have recently asked us what we make of Velvet Assassin. Which is understandable: no-one should trust their own opinion, only ours. Only two of RPS have played it, and suffice to say neither of them are in any hurry to ever play it again. Which, essentially, means it’s silently suffered the Dread RPS Pointy-Finger Of Judgement, and thus will pretty much never be posted about here. Except for this post, obviously.
The game, fundamentally, is Splinter Cell in the 1940s, but its successes and failures in that regard are not what proved to be a talking point for us behind the scenes. What we did discuss (as you may have picked up on from the podcast before last) was the character the game’s protagonist was based around. Hesitant moral deliberation follows.
Velvet Assasin’s heroine Violette Summer is based upon real-life spy Violette Szabo. One can appreciate why – a female assassin seems a rare enough thing today, let alone in the 1940s. Conceptually, the mix of oddity, violence and titillation inherent in a fictional recreation/embellishment of such a character is a videogame marketing manager’s dream come true. As well as that, the game attempts a few nods towards both historical accuracy and sober commentary on how messed up World War II was, on both sides of the fight. Entertainment and education: a perfect blend, right?
Or perhaps not. Violette Szabo, you see, was captured by the Germans after just over a year of active duty as a Special Operations Executive. During her incarceration, she was repeatedly beaten, starved and sexually abused. Ultimately, she was executed, aged just 23.
While Velvet Assassin’s Violette Summer is only ‘inspired by’ Szabo, the game’s marketing consistently makes a point of mentioning this, and even employs a narrative theme of Violette reliving her past adventures whilst apparently dying of severe wounds suffered during capture by the enemy. Loading screens show a seemingly near-comatose Summer lying in bed in a revealing nightgown, with a fearsome German soldier looming above her. The tiny nightgown reappears in the confused, confusing ‘morphine mode’ – when past-Violette takes found drugs to make present-Violette collapse into chemical addlement, in turn realised back in the past as her wandering through Nazi bases as a temporarily indestructible waif in gossamer bedwear.
Are we okay with this? Should we be okay with is? In a medium that so often makes light of past tragedy – any number of other World War II games, the recent trend of Middle Eastern conflict-based titles, even something like Colonization glossing over slavery – is it fair and right to single Velvet Assassin out as being too irreverent? Certainly, Szabo’s daughter Tania, aged only 3 at the time of her mother’s death, refused to allow her mother’s real surname and biography to be used in the game. From this recent interview with developers Replay Studios: “We had phone contact with her as we need to ask for permission using her mother’s name but she did not have interest of being in public. We of course respected this and so we did our best to separate the two. However, we have to admit that we would have liked to get some of the material from Violette Szabo into the game or in our background story, like for example some of the poems from her. But the utmost respect for her family’s feelings and requests is definitely of higher importance to us.“
Perhaps the mere concept of turning her mother’s sad story into entertainment was bad enough (or equally possibly, perhaps it was a matter of money: her refusal to be involved has only been mentioned in passing to date), but how must she feel about seeing a recreation of her raped and murdered mother intermittently depicted as a titillating figure – back turned to the camera on the box art, perfect buttocks proudly displayed in skin-tight trousers? (Additionally, catsuited models have been hired to roleplay Violette at press events). Or about the choice to have this homage to her mother regularly use morphine as a magic power-up? And would any of this be any less worrying if the game had been totally, 100% reverent, and not a murder-centric action title starring a sexily-dressed lady?
It’s worth observing that Tania Szabo is the author of Young, Brave and Beautiful, a biography of the mother she never really knew. Unlike Velvet Assassin, the book does not seem in any way lurid – but it is nonetheless also turning Violette Szabo into an industry. Should videogames have the same entitlement? Or does the bulk of this young industry being still so centred around gunplay and titillation mean it should steer clear of more serious matters? The question that looms largest to me is, oddly, why did the developers/publishers not simply make a game about an entirely fictitious 1940s secret agent instead, and thus avoid any possible upset altogether?
I only ask so many questions because I don’t have the answers. I do, however, know that I’m fairly amazed Velvet Assassin has been and gone without its choice and interpretation of subject matter being a big talking point.
Damn you RPS, tell me what to think!
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elope with me rps and we’ll sail around the world x
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We don’t want questions!
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Should videogames have the same entitlement? No. A daughter’s biography of her mother is trying to approach truth. The videogame is cynically trying to exploit this person’s tragic story into a summer blockbuster to boost the publisher’s stock price. There’s really no comparison.
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“I do, however, know that I’m fairly amazed Velvet Assassin has been and gone without its choice and interpretation of subject matter being a big talking point.”
I’d suggest that the primary reason for this being the case Alec is that the game doesn’t seem to have been very heavily prompted up to and upon its release.
I was mightily surprised when Steam informed me it was available to buy a week or two ago. I’d heard of VA in the past, but had not expected it to appear until the end of this year. Asking around, it seems most of my friends had either not heard of VA at all, or were also surprised at its recent release.
No one seems to be talking about the game in any capacity, bar the reviews (and there doesn’t seem to be many of them), so that’s probably why there’s been no controversy/discussion/debate/angry internet argument. The publisher, SouthPeak, would appear to have dropped the ball as far as promoting/selling the game is concerned.
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I imagine the game would have provoked more discussion if it had been, well, any good. If any of us had enjoyed playing it, I could see some Angry Internet Man using an argument similar to Alec’s in order to make us feel bad about it. As it is, this just makes me feel bad about being a gamer.
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…perfect buttocks…
Come now. “Toned,” certainly, “taught,” perhaps, but “perfect”? That’s like calling something the “perfect cheeseburger.”
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I had heard of the vague background as anybody else, but did not know about the cruel facts. If this was a movie, there would certainly be an outcry, especially as Velvet Assassine is by a German based development team (in fact, they are sitting about 500 metres away from where I am writing).
This raises other questions: Are games an (art) form for telling stories as complicated as the one of Szabo’s fate? And is the (gaming) public far enough for treating such games serious enough?
Thank you for raising these questions!
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Can I just take the time here and say that the often-heard argument “well, this game has some disturbing content/themes, but since it’s not very good, it’s not worth discussing” is, frankly, complete and utter bullshit? Thanks.
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Does this game have loads of Dragon Age style maturity in it?
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Yep the big issue is that this rape victim/mother has been sexualised to boost sales. If the team had shown the nerves not to rely on titilation for marketing I’d be defending the design of this game much more. As it is it is just a good stealth game in very questionable taste.
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“Or does the bulk of this young industry being still so centred around gunplay and titillation mean it should steer clear of more serious matters?”
Not if it is actually handled seriously, but how many copies is that going to sell? Being an industry, their job is, ostensibly, to produce product and sell enough to make a profit. I think it is becoming clearer and clearer that a large number of publishers feel you can’t sell something unless it has sex and violence. How well would that game where you bag groceries sell? Ask Tetris.
We push harder and harder for our medium to “grow up” and be “mature” yet we continually pander to immature and puerile baser instincts. Not that I don’t enjoy looking at a lady’s behind (and it’s why I prefer to roll females with MMOs or any 3rd person game, honestly) but having it be your primary selling feature can’t bode well for the contents therein, unless the industry in question is porn.
To add further distaste to the bitterness in my mouth is that it didn’t seem like the daughter of the deceased lady the game was based on wanted the game to happen at all. That’s respect for your source material right there.
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@smee: Where did you hear that argument? What was said in this thread was more “since it’s not very good, no one discusses it”, which is very different from “it’s not worth discussing”.
And mujadaddy, the perfect cheeseburger sounds good.
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@jalf: The point is, what is my perfect cheeseburger isn’t going to be yours. And that Meer has just outed himself as a poor judge of backsides ;) :p
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jackflash – I disagree.
We wouldn’t really blink if Hollywood came along and romanticised and sexualised a female spy’s life with an ‘inspired by’ written in the credits. We wouldn’t feel morally outraged by a historical novel doing much the same. So a videogame is fair, if you ask me.
I’m not going to complain that a sexy actress is cast for a serious historical role. Similarly, it makes no commercial or artistic sense to make the protagonist in this game anything less than the most beautiful that the artists and designers can make her.
If the game is a pile of balls, then it’s a pile of balls. But should historical subject-matter put us off as we gleefully murder people in cartoonish environments in GTA, Postal and the rest? Really?
Did we have qualms when we gunned down the hilariously-accented nazis in the countless other WW2 games? They too were modelled upon real individuals, thousands of them – and often turned deliberately into figures of fun or caricatures.
We have to start accepting our hobby as a legitimate medium for any story at all. Then we can get back to the serious business of assessing each piece on its own merits.
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Call me over optimistic in the human race but how many copies does having a nice arse shift? I mean really I am a straight male who rates women’s arses about fifth in physical desirability (below hair, eyes, voice and dress sense but above breasts and teeth) but I’ve never bought a game just because there was a picture of something I wanted to have sex with on the cover.
It would be nice for one pr company to treat us like sentient beings rather than a cock weighed down by bags of gold.
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It is also unfortunate timing, coming just a few months when at GDC when developers were castigated for being “fucking adolescents” prompting quite a few a people rallied to the developers defence. It certainly seems a more accurate description now.
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I like how there’s nothing about the actual gameplay
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@Bhazor: You may not have bought it, but does it attract your attention on the shelf? That’s all it needs to do– once you’ve looked at it, it’s in your head enough that you’ll maybe wonder about it and maybe pick up the box and look at the back of it to see what’s going on there, and so on and so forth, and maybe you haven’t bought it because of the buttocks on the cover, but it started that chain of events… I’m not defending this, but you should be able to see how it works.
As far as exploiting a tragic story goes, hm. The idea is kind of sickening, really. I was intrigued by the idea of the game (and was hoping it might be a sort of more-stealthy WW2-era NOLF kind of thing), but seeing that it’s more exploitative, now I’m less interested.
So, here’s a thought– consider The Path, which is, basically, about horrible things happening to girls and compare it to Velvet Assassin, which is about horrible things happening to a woman. The Path still makes me (and other RPSers) uncomfortable, but it’s more respectful and isn’t exploitative– it’s so symbolic it becomes a pure metaphor rather than a straight-up depiction of events.
I’m having a little trouble expressing the point I’m trying to make, but there seem to be similar themes explored from VERY different points of view.
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I’d like to imagine that the original pitch was a respectable interpretation of a war heroine’s career in espionage, but, through the process of development and the natural pressure of a high-risk industry, the vision was skewed, and it’s only in hindsight that we can see it is quite poor taste, too late for it to influence the final product substantially.
But then there’s the barmy “morphine-time” antics which makes me think they never really gave a shit.
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Does “Carve Her Name With Pride” the movie, based on the book of the same name, count toward this “mere concept of turning her mother’s sad story into entertainment ” or “… turning Violette Szabo into an industry”?
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Alec, in my opinion you, and those who agree with you, are looking at it from a wrong perspective.
Is it OK to make a game about a real person who died, especially via violent means? Yes. There have been plenty of games like that, and nobody here seemed to mind this particular aspect of them.
It is OK to depict this woman as sexy and possessive of “perfect buttocks?” Yes. It is normal to idealize heroes in both written and oral traditions. Being made good-looking is a form of idealization, and idealization is a way in which we show our respect and/or admiration for a person.
Plus, would you really consider it less problematic, if she was depicted exactly as she looked in real life? To that end, according to what photographs I could find of her, she was fairly good looking. At 23 this is somewhat normal.
Basically, my point is, I don’t really understand what is making you uneasy or outraged. Could you please explain?
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I think it is disturbing that a woman who was raped, tortured, and killed would be used this way. Her own daughter refused to let her mother’s name be used. That should’ve sent a signal to the developers that it might not be a good idea.
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Yes.
Yes we should make this game, why people think these games are upsetting au contrait to lets say a movie(SAW) or a book? That is because a game does not offer a physchological look into the mind of others, but into there own, and might show them things they do not wish to see. It is fear for what one might be that leads to a skewed view on these games.
Then again, movies and books have been used over the years to illustrate horrible events sometimes used for entertainment.
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Dorimant:
Haven’t most games been puerile for a long stretch of the medium’s history? Most games cater to what a twelve-year-old boy would think about as “AWESOME!” and gamers’ tastes, even past that age, are notoriously bad. Go to any Gamestop and you’ll see shelf after shelf of power fantasies and titillation. Sure, there are exceptions, and yes, the exceptions sell, but hey–literature’s classics include Lolita, Hamlet, and Crime and Punishment. Gaming’s classics include Doom and GTA 3, and we’ll call any half-assed plot brilliant just for showing up (See Half-Life, which has a plot akin to a Michael Bay movie).
None of which is to say I don’t play these games. I do. But I’m kind of uncomfortable about it. I’m just jonsesing to play Devil’s Advocate/troll today.
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Just to tell you how does it play:
Imagine your stealth-em-up of choice, now change all the colors to shades of brown or gray, then proceed to reduce the size of the levels so they can fit in a shoe box, give every room a single solution, give the player 1-2 “oh shit I can do this only once per level” buttons and throw in shitty controls for the PC. Oh yeah, and for some reason, you can’t sneak faster than a patrolling soldier who you are trying to murder.
Oh yeah, and no saves, only checkpoints.
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I think of exploitation in terms of Lars von Trier. I can handle his films (just barely, sometimes) because they are imaginary constructs who he submits to his will and subjugation. Or, in the case of the five obstructions, the subjugated is a willing participant in the experiment. If he were to take a previously “real” woman and torture, rape and exploit her in effigy or via some avatar, especially when the surviving family requested he not do so, then it would be deplorable. As it stands though, and I’m thinking of his Breaking the Waves / Idioterne / Dancer in the Dark trilogy specifically, they become character studies and depressing journeys of sacrifice for love and I don’t consider them exploitative, simply contemplative.
Of course, I say Tomato, you may say Tohmatoh. Eternally grateful I am the button says Opinion.
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I would like to see how game developers interpret my diaries into a tits and explosion testosterone fest.
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I think it is pretty sick and pathetic myself.
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I want the game to be made for the sake of freedom of speech, but I still find it absolutely tasteless and offensive.
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I am sorry, but that comparison is conceptually flawed to the point of being ridiculous.
You are comparing a story of a child in hiding, to that of a professional soldier/spy trained in weapons, deception, unarmed combat and explosives among other things.
Unlike Anne Frank, Violette Szabo was in fact a war hero, who blew up bridges, marked targets for bombing and killed people. She served her country, knew the risks and sacrificed her life as did many others.
I really don’t understand why you think that depicting her in a slightly idealized fashion (as far as looks) is an insult to her memory. We do it to our heroes all the time, that is the point of having heroes.
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If this is exploitative, then so is the Path. Just because one was made by “indie developers” doesn’t automatically make art – just like one being made by a developer with an actual budget excludes it from being art.
Would it have been deeper and more contemplative back when it had the slower, less actiony concept and was called something else (someone please remind what it’s original title was)? Yeah it would have been. But that’s the, perceived?, mainstream market. They literally had to redesign the heroine to make her more appealing. They wanted her less supermodel, the publisher and by extension the market did not.
We have only us to blame (by which I mean the people who buy T and A based games).
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Um, how is running around stabbing nazis in a nighty in a drug induced fever during her dying moments depicting her in an idealized fashion exactly?
As for The Path.. it wasn’t based on real people so is hardly relative.
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Can I just take the time here and say that the often-heard argument “well, this game has some disturbing content/themes, but since it’s not very good, it’s not worth discussing” is, frankly, complete and utter bullshit?
Heh, I’m of the belief that if a game sucks at being a game (fun, entertaining, strategic, etc.), then it’s pretty worthless as far as videogames go. But then I’ve never been one to care about the videogames as art and whatever debates.
Velvet Assassin sounds like it was conceived and directed by marketing execs through and through.
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“Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony.
We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours–the works.
People need heroes. They don’t need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers.”
“Mythology for Profit”
Morgan Stellartots Keynote Speech
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“As for The Path.. it wasn’t based on real people so is hardly relative.”
Neither is Velvet Assassin. “Inspired by the story of” means about as much as “Spiritual Successor of”. In other words: nothing.
“Velvet Assassin sounds like it was conceived and directed by marketing execs through and through.”
The moment it got the new title, Velvet Assassin, yes – it was effectively remade by market studies. Can’t really blame the developer or the game for that though – your ire on that is with the publisher.
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It is fairly sad the developers/publishers decided to take that direction with their portrayal of Violette. To be frank, as a stealthy-actiony game of the type we’re all so familiar with, it’s not especially suited to a sympathetic portrayal of a genuine historical figure. These type of game are geared towards tension, thrill and excitement, so any attempt at framing it in a sober historical context is bound to run into difficulty.* They should, as you suggested, have gone with pure fiction, more in keeping with the fun-in-a-historical-setting type of game I’m sure they were always gunning for.
I’m trying to imagine the style of game that would be suited to a more ‘serious’ take on such a theme (which is of course emintently possible; I’ve not read the book by the daughter but I imagine she wasn’t sexing up her mother to cash in, and similarly, from what I remember of it, Carve Her Name with Pride was a fairly considered and moving dramatisation of her fate.
*Not that it’s impossible for games to do this, obviously. Thoughtful/deep subjects are often explored in, e.g., RPGs and the stories of many games successfully (in my opinion) deal with serious messages. Dealing with historical events is, I think, a little harder however. WWII FPS games somewhat bewilderingly get a free ride for their turning of a gruesome and destructive conflict into epic shooters. Though that could arguably be applied to WWII set films and books as well, so perhaps it’s a broader cultural trend rather than something specific to games.
I’m losing my point here. This was a tactless handling of a sensitive subject.
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@Alaric
Hey if American McGee can do what he did to a children’s tale, why can’t my stories be turned into a stealth/horror game with a tarted up protagonist?
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Alaric, in my opinion you, and those who agree with you, are looking at it from a wrong perspective.
When you counsel that granting perfect buttocks and a titillating nightgown to female heroes is simply “idealizing” them, a form of wholesome praise and nothing more, you seem to miss the point that the real Violette Szabo was raped and murdered and now a videogame about her is sexualizing her image (and in a totally unnecessary, superfluous manner). Those things cannot be disjoined. You also seem to neglect the market valorization of sex, as demonstrated in Alec’s link to Kotaku. The unfortunate conclusion seems to be that Southpeak is selling the image of Szabo in basically the same manner as Lara Croft, while appearing ignorant of the fact that Lara Croft (who could be another discussion entirely) is fictional and didn’t die as a rape victim and prisoner of war.
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The difference is specifics. They were not based on real individuals, they were based on a mob entity. You were killing Nazi #23, not Hans, former steel worker with 3 children and a wife, who died from starvation on the Russian front.
The difference here is that this is based on a specific, named woman. They completely distort and disrespect her by assuming that the amazing things she did and the horrible shit that happened to her wasn’t interesting enough unless she had a nice ass and perky lil titties. Total Frank-Miller-revisionist-history for a woman who probably deserves a little bit better than that.
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@The-person-who-uses-Anne-Frank’s-name
I don’t think that attacking either your age or education level would be a good strategy, but I must bring it to your attention that “Alice in Wonderland” is not, and was never meant to be a children’s tale.
As far as Anne Frank goes, I think that if someone made a horror game out of it, depending on how it was made, it could serve the same purpose as publishing the diary.
And before I get crucified for saying that, I’d like to mention that I don’t envision such a game as involving a lingerie model and jumping puzzles. In fact I don’t think such a game is feasible at all, because aside from conversations, there isn’t any possible action that could be involved.
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OMG Anne Frank point-and-click horror adventure!
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Why would (or should) there be outrage over this? As has been accurately said by many, it’s a vidyagame, I hardly think anyone is looking to Velvet Assasin for accurate historical information.
I would argue the game as it’s set up now is well done-if you care enough to be bothered to look into the real story behind the game, great! You’ll be rewarded with a wealth of legit info from real sources, history books and the like. If you can’t be arsed to care, then in all likelihood you didn’t even know the story was based on a real one, and you won’t care anyway.
Let’s assume the game does make the point that it’s story is based on a true one. If a game is the first and last stop for your historical accuracy, well then Jesus Fuck All Christ. you’re looney.
No harm, no foul in my opinion.
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@suibhne
You are suggesting that the fact that Szabo was raped does somehow negate the fact that humans like to see their heroes as better, smarter, stronger and prettier than they themselves are. I assure you than nobody here (and no normal person in general) approves of rape or murder. It is, however, perfectly normal and not at all morbid to want to see someone whom we consider a hero as an idealized version of the person they historically were. Yes, even if they met a ghastly end.
Moreover, when bad things happen, it is not OK to forbid all mention of them. That way, only a handful of historians will ever know that something took place. Things must enter the popular culture, even if that means they may end up getting distorted.
As a historian myself, I hate when things are distorted, but still I would rather people remember Leonidas and Szabo as a muscle-bound brute and a foxy model respectively than not remember them at all.
Plus, the mere fact that we are having this discussion will make at least some people look up her name. People who otherwise would have never known about her will learn the truth thanks to this game and the conversations that it prompted. As far as I am concerned you could not ask for more.
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@Alaric: Agreed about a potential Anne Frank game.
No, they were not. No one ever made a WW2 game by researching the life stories of individual soldiers. The keyword here is real individuals. Generic Nazi Soldier is certainly an individual, but he is not a *real* individual. He never existed. He does not have a name, and he is not modelled on the life of any specific person who ever lived.
Nevertheless, you have a point. The countless WW2 games letting you merrily slaughter batallions of people are not problem-free either. Am I the only one who is a bit disturbed that we pretty much have a generation growing up who thinks nazis simply “deserve to die”? 30 or 40 years ago they were considered criminals, certainly, they fought for a cause that committed terrible atrocities, no doubt, but they were still considered human. I’ve talked to enough people who seem to feel otherwise, who think Hitler was pretty much evil incarnate, and that everyone who fought for him were “evil” (and so regular human rights don’t apply to them, and whatever cruelties you commit on them doesn’t count, cos you’re doing it against nazis) that I can’t help wondering if WW2 shooters are to blame for desensitizing us to this particular chapter of human history. In a way, they trivializes their subject matter by reducing it to “these weren’t human beings. They didn’t have names, lives, families or personal beliefs. They were just there to defend Hitler, and therefore, killing them had no downside”
I’m all for all kinds of media exploring our history, but I’m not a huge fan of the way games typically approach the task. Every other form of media has been able to produce nuanced works that treated their subject matter with respect, as something that actually happened. Somehow, this still eludes game designers. When they dig through history, it is seemingly only to find a new uniform to stick on the thousands of generic cannon fodder soldiers that are placed in front of the player.
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“In a way, they trivializes their subject matter by reducing it to “these weren’t human beings. They didn’t have names, lives, families or personal beliefs. They were just there to defend Hitler, and therefore, killing them had no downside””
Absolutely this – and in that regard, Velvet Assassin, however misguided the sexify-redesign was, is already a step above. It’s not about generic, abstract entities like “American Hero Soldier” vs “Nazi Gestapo SS trooper X”. It’s about a single, vulnerable woman, fighting her own personal battles – and losing.
Edit: Losing the personal battle for the sake of the overall good. A far more moving conclusion than what they could have (and Hollywood/Videogamewood have in other cases) done.
Keep in mind that they did not change the outcome of the story. (as I understood it from the RPS article and other sources) The main character still dies, at the hands of her captors. Isn’t that still far more genuine to the source than having her wake up, strangle the guard, blow up the prison and fly home in a stolen Messerschmidt?
Horrible things happened in Vietnam, yet we accept anti-war movies set there as okay.
Is it only okay to shoot nazis if you’re playing a male who heroically wins the day and gets to come home again?
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The game has nothing do with Szabo(other than taken an inspiration). If you ppl would actually play it,you’d know Violette is not captured by the nazis or is she tortured/raped. The loading screen only shows those images to keep you wondering what will happen or something in that direction.
Same happened with the latest Hitman and those death scenes in the loading screen.
The game itself is good or at least I liked it despite it’s apparent flaws.
I know it’s pointless to say this,but a little backround before assuming things would be great.
@ DK
SPOILERS!!!!
She doesn’t die,but you almost got the ending right with the waking up,killing the guards and flying away,lol. :D
SPOILERS!!!!
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It just seems like a case of marketing not talking to the game devs on this one.
You can see the whole promo-gameplay mismatch, right from the start, when you look at the gameplay trailers.
So far, the game takes a serious tone, and aside not portraying the truth of what happened to Szabo (which is pretty understandable IMO), the game has portrayed everything pretty realistically.
The game does a good job at showing that not all of the German soldiers are monsters. Some were disgusted with what is happening, while some were clearly conducting evil. It give the opportunity for the player to understand that in order to carry forward what Summers has to do, she will have to kill those Germans who don’t particularly approve of what’s happening, alongside with those who commit those attrocities. Perhaps I’m seeing too much into things, but the fact that in a lot of situations, you are pretty much forced to kill the soldiers in sight allows the game to hammer the point that all sides are responsible for the vulgarities of war.
I don’t think the game itself is particularly demeaning to Szabo. One could argue that the morphine nightie thing is pretty demeaning, and I’d cop to using the nightie for Summers is really pandering to the 16 yo who giggles at it. But it was pretty early on that you can overhear a comment about how German soldiers were abusing morphine too.
Aside from gameplay changes, I only wish that the marketers actually took a more serious, sombre tone that is in the game, instead of appealing to T&A. It isn’t like there’s a hell a lot of it. If you’re playing the game, you’re hardly paying attention to Summer’s outfit. If someone paid for it because of the outfits, they’ve got problems that games won’t solve anyways.
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Hmmm there are some films that use war as a action blockbuster movie and have no shame and we still don’t go after them. But I do believe that the video game industry is shooting themselves in the foot by bringing these kind of games out like Velvet Assassin and 6 days.
Oh and people defending the sexuality of the women just have to look at the picture shown on the IGN page to be disgusted about it. Pure T&A with no qualms about it.
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While I find it totally interesting (well, boring, actually) and okay to argue whether using this womans’ personal story as a selling point or not I’m a bit suprised that no one has commented on the actual game.
It’s bad. The levels are totally linear (ie you follow the one, ‘right’ route or you’re likely getting killed 99% of the time), slowdowns are common and guards will attack and likely kill you in three shots as soon as a mere pixel of your character sticks out of cover. Not even watching those ‘perfect’ buttocks got me to play that dreadful thing longer than the first few levels. You see, they needed that sob story as a hook to generate interest and discussion in an otherwise totally unremarkable and, really, bad game.
And it totally worked.
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No one ever made a WW2 game by researching the life stories of individual soldiers.
Brothers in Arms?
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The largest sticking point is that they are plainly using the real person and her missions as inspiration, or saying they are, as a gimmick along the lines of Call of Duty “real war experience. No one fights alone” bollox.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. As stylised as CoD is, you can take various elements of combat, tweak them so that they’re closer to the real thing. It’s still a game while still being combat-ish at the same time.
Spying doesn’t work that way at all and we know this. The “spying” in the game I’m sure does not even vaguely resemble the real thing. Combat games can claim at least that. Spying is extrememly dangerous and deathly dull.
War based fantasy is one thing, but these guys have strayed into reality too much for their own good and ought to be assessed on that. I’d be all for a serious spying/sabotage RPG or something like that (not that’s it’d be an RPG, but it’d have dialogue and ‘social stealth’) but it doesn’t look like this is it. Even the dying/character inside her own head part could be a very potent storytelling device about being captured, in solitary and under rolling interrogations, but again that doesn’t seem to be what they’re going for. They should have just kept their traps shut about the vague inspirations.
Alternately there’s something less distasteful about picking someone who survived like Nancy Wake. You could have some fun with a story like hers, I think. You still can’t put her in skin tight leather though. That part is always going to undermine any claim of seriousness.
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“It just seems like a case of marketing not talking to the game devs on this one.”
Talking too much to the devs. Taking control of the art direction in fact. Seriously, that’s not an analogy or a metaphor. They literally had them change the models.
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I guess I have trouble seeing how it’s worse to sexualize a real, dead woman than it is to sexualize a fake, dead woman; or how it’s worse to sexualize a dead woman that was eventually raped than it is to sexualize a dead woman that never was raped.
(Did I accidentally go to SVGL instead? I thought this site was about DRM.)
So I’m left with a question of whether it’s wrong to sexualize people (women, specifically), which, jeez, folks, is far from settled, in any medium, and a lot of brain power has been poured into it.
And there’s that queasy feeling we get when we see implicit or explicit depictions of rape, where we’re horrified, and we’re maybe a little turned on too, and that horrifies us all the more. (And if you want to excuse yourself from that “we,” that’s totally cool with me, but please don’t get all self-righteous on me and deny that there’s no
“we” to it at all.) That contrast between the desirable and the repulsive is one of the reasons that depictions of rape are such a simple way to stimulate us emotionally; and that ease of use is why they’re so popular in the stories we tell. Sexualization of rape is horrifying, but its point is to horrify! I don’t get worked up about it so much as I see it as a cheap and trite device.
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It would be impossible to judge this without playing it – so much depends on how well some of the things Mr. Meer is talking about are implemented. (My guess is “not that well”, otherwise he wouldn’t be complaining about them, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt for a second.)
Say the morphine power-up, for instance. It sounds horribly offensive the way it’s described. But I can imagine how it _could_ be done well – say a brief cutscene depicting the bleeding heroine, grimacing in pain, her features then relaxing as she injects the morphine and binds her wound. Even their overtly sexualising her need not be offensive if it ties in with the game mechanics (maybe she flirts with guards before knocking them out, for instance?), though the tight leather trousers on the box art seem a bit crass.
The nightgown bullet time bits, well, you got me there, I have no idea why they would do that. It sounds so weird and nonsensical that I don’t even KNOW if I should find it offensive or not! When I heard about it in the podcast it made no sense at all – here I read that it ties in with the intro, where she’s lying on the floor in a nightgown, presumably being abused by a Nazi guard, so there is _some_ reason to it, although it still doesn’t make sense to me. I’d have to play it to be able to tell if it actually feels offensive or not, but I suspect that the developers didn’t intend it as mere tittilation at all: in fact, there’s probably some subtle subtext there about her utter dedication to her mission, implying that her extraordinary efforts and complete disregard for her own safety led her to being captured (so that, in her flashbacks, she imagines herself wearing the clothes of her captivity to make the link between her past missions and her capture). Now, a nightie is a weird choice and so few people will “get” the connection that it will look for all the world like mere gratuitous tittilation, so in that sense the developers have been idiots, but my suspicion is that this was not their intent at all: that they meant to treat their subject-matter with respect, but failed to do so through bad artistic choices.
What’s interesitng here is that most commenters (regardless of whether they played the game or not) immediately assumed that this was an instance of exploitation rather than just artistic fuckups. This makes me suspect that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the game, but in ourselves: that we’re all self-consciously aware of the fact that we’re adults indulging in a hobby that’s perceived as immature and its products as puerile, so we’re all too ready to disown any games that give a little more than a hint of offending (the Resi5 controversy also springs to mind). Now, there’s plenty of childish games about, but, let’s face it, there’s FAR MORE examples of exploitation to be found in cinema, literature and theatre! Admittedly, those have been around for longer, but people haven’t stopped respecting and appreciating D.H. Lawrence in spite of his somewhat exploitative depictions of women (one female I know described his sex scenes as “what male virgins fantasize that women act like in bed”) or Shakespeare’s Othello in spite of its somewhat racist subtext.
It doesn’t look like we’re ready to give games the benefit of the doubt, even though it’s a new genre and it’s still struggling with finding ways to depict more serious subjects. This is a shame, as there were plenty of crass, juvenile cinematic depictions of, for instance, WWII before there were any good ones, but nobody complained about them. If we keep scrutinizing games that try to tackle with such subjects so severely and nforgivingly, we’ll end up forcing all developers to retreat to either generic sci-fi where you fight evil fascist aliens or to the mushroom kingdom where you’re a cartoon plumber jumping about. Surely there’s room for the real world in there too?
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@ DK and jalf:
I heartily disagree. Would you say that childrens’ games, like Cop’s and Robbers, Cowboy’s and Indians, or what have you trivialize the real world events those personages were drawn from?
WWII games are just an extension of Cowboys and Indians, and instead of playing with your friend in the backyard, you are playing against AI on the computer.
A lot of people seem to forget that games were originally made AS GAMES. The first games were all about gameplay, or recreating childhood fantasies in a more complete and organized form. I used to create my own games with my friends, i’d create planets, solar systems, cities, whole worlds. The reason I got into gaming is that games allow you to immerse yourself in this other world, and have fantastical experiences you couldn’t have otherwise.
Games are childish because the idea behind them is childish. Games are an evolution of what children do. They give visuals to a child’s imagination, and make a way of keeping score about who is winning the game.
Because of this, most games will never truly be art. A lot of attempts to make games into art fail, because the idea behind gaming does not generally work as a medium for generating deep, artistic meaning.
Even in RPG’s, which are more about story and adventure, story telling has not advanced much. In most RPG’s, the story or the bits of story which are supposed to have a “deeper meaning” often feel detached or just tacked on (See the abortion/no abortion quest in Mass Effect). They have almost no bearing on the game itself, or how it is played.
Which is the problem. I don’t think proper Games can ever be “art” or meaningful in the same way books and Movies are.
Although I do think computers are the future of storytelling, I think approaching storytelling on computer from a Gaming perspective isn’t the right way to do it.
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Hang on –
They wanted to use her real name for this? What a pack of bent units.
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Binho: What about games as extensions of chess and other strategic board games, arguably adult pursuits? And in any case, why can’t children’s games be art? Art is a very broad field, given what is produced for the Turner Prize (although it depends on how you define art, and nothing is more dull than debating definitions of words. If you take Wikipedia’s entry on art’s first sentence, “Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.”, then games are very much art).
In any case, I’d argue that (even ignoring the artistic merit in good game design, art and sound direction, writing, and so on which I think is worth considering, given that this is true for other media like film or literature) games such as Alpha Centauri, The Majesty of Colors, I wish I were the Moon, The Path, etc, do make insightful comments on the human condition, far beyond your analogy of games being expanded versions of cowboys and indians.
I think Kieron mentioned a problem a while back, which is that “game” is an inadequate word to describe what gaming should become, much like “comic” is used to describe things that are not really funny or comic, such as Maus.
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Sorry, I can’t let a factual inaccuracy like this go by without correction:
Alaric wrote: but I must bring it to your attention that “Alice in Wonderland” is not, and was never meant to be a children’s tale.
It was told to children, then written down by the request of those children, and later expanded and partially rewritten still for the same children. I quite fail to see how you can consider it not written for children.
Wikipedia has a good summary of the history of its writing.
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@Nate:
Well, consider that the devs attempted to use the real dead raped woman’s name for the character, but her daughter refused to allow it. And that makes the whole thing pretty damn sleazy, no matter how you try to spin it. Consider that she’s a war hero, and wouldn’t you think war heroes deserve at least a modicum of respect? So long as you’re not actively satirizing war as a whole, anyway.
If she were a male war hero, I’d doubt that they’d depict him shirtless and glistening for your viewing pleasure. Instead, the hero would probably be all business. And if she were a fallen male US Marine in Fallujah?
Gender really shouldn’t have been an issue here, but damn if the game’s developers (or, rather, the Executive Meddling that urged them to “tart it up a bit”) didn’t make it one. This isn’t the sort of thing you get horrified by. But it’s sleazy as hell.
(And it’s not like Leigh has a monopoly on topics like this. Sometimes we also talk about art direction and the shift away from realism, too. And also naughty bits.)
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@ Gap Gen:
While I agree debating word definitions is dull, but the problem here lies again in the definition ascribed to art in the context of video games.
I actually agree completely with you. If Games can be considered art, why can’t something like LARP, chess, Paint Ball, or any childrens’ games?
While chess /is/ more of an adult pursuit (So are professional sports), the point I was making is that playing is generally considered a childish pursuit, which is why games are also considered childish.
What seems to be the definition for “art” when arguing about games, is how meaningful they are are, or how good they are at generating an emotion, or generating insightful remarks or commentaries.
While those games you mentioned might make insightful comments on the human condition, how much can you say something like the Path is truly a game? As far as I can tell, its gameplay elements are no more sophisticated or engaging than the gamplay elements of Big Rig: Over the Road Racing (You press forwards, and that is about it. Big Rigs has an 8/100 on Metascore, btw.). It’s not the “game” part which gives the Path meaning, nor is it the “game” part of I wish I were the Moon which gives it meaning.
Most WWII shooters are essentially just a grown up game of Cowboys and Indians, kind of like how Paintball or lasertag are as well. All the game needs is two sides which were interesting and/or historically in oppositon. WWII is a prime recent candidate. That’s pretty much why WWII shooters are made, really.
Kieron is right that Game is an inadequate word for what games could become, so we should create a better one. And I disagree gaming needs to become anything more than it currently is. I personally value movies and books that are for pure entertainment just as highly, and in some cases more so (Gladiator? Depth of a puddle, but BEST MOVIE EVER), than arthouse movies or deep, meaningful books. I don’t think it’s about content, but how well you achieve what you are trying to achieve.
To go back on topic, the issue with Velvet Assassin, part of the reason I think it might be found offensive is it trivializes, and makes the character seem less human, and more superhuman. Somebody cited Brothers in Arms, but the difference there is that the soldiers were being depicted as soldiers – While here, a real life person is being depicted as a female version of Master Chief/Marcus Phoenix. I think that is the issue. She is being made into something she wasn’t, a sexy BAD ASS MOTHER, more Solid Snake than Violette Szabo.
To tie it into the points I was making above, another issue seems to be that they are turning Violette’s struggle into a sport, into a “game”, into something a 12 year old could enjoy without having to understand what Violette was trying to achieve exactly, and what happened to her and why it happened.
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If the developers had any point to using a real person as a model for their game, dressing that model up as a sex symbol and crafting a game about her being beaten, raped, and killed, then there wouldn’t be a problem. Artistic expression can be about anything. We don’t burn books anymore. But the game doesn’t have a reason for it. Its fetishistic, sophomoric and immoral. It deserves no defense from us. It is simply an embarrassment. One day video games will move beyond this garbage, but that day will only come when ignorant players looking for cheap thrills, and pretentious, emotionally stunted pseudo-intellectual players looking for validation both wake up and realize we can’t hide behind the pap and filth with the claim “lighten up, it’s only a video game” (as if the word “game” excuses base morality and crass consumerism any more than anything else does) and still complain when the Roger Eberts and Jack Thompsons of the world marginalize the whole industry.
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Binho: so if I set out to climb Mount Monadnock and get to the summit, do I accomplish more than if, setting out to summit Mount Everest, I almost get to the top?
I love pulp, too, but come on–you can’t rank Die Hard (one of my favorite movies, for what it is) alongside 8 1/2 (one of my favorite movies, for what it is).
Further, Cowboys and Indians definitely trivializes the conflict it’s based on, but because children play it, and we can’t expect them to know about the horror of its roots, we excuse it. Grown men who can program games don’t get that kind of slack.
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hmmm, as a random afterthought, i don’t think Kierons’ example of Maus as a ‘comic’ exactly works.
Maus is a comic, even though it might not fit with what is stereotypically a comic. It is a bunch of drawings and words which tell a story.
Video Game is more of a misnomer for something like The Path, since I wouldn’t say it is actually a game. It’s more of an interactive virtual environment. You don’t exactly ‘play’ The Path the same way you would ‘play’ counter-strike. You just interact with it.
In the same way, people who research massive online environments call them Virtual Worlds, and make sure not to call them games. MMORPG’s are just a subset of Virtual Worlds, the most important point being that MMO’s have predominantly gamey aspects, unlike other Virtual World’s (Second Life comes to mind)
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Should videogames have the same entitlement?
In my opinion, absolutely. Dramatizing figures and events in the past is an important and powerful way of keeping these very things alive in the minds of the people.
I do agree that the developers/produces/whoever seem to have lost(never had?) any real sense of trying to respectfully portray exactly what Violet’s actions during the war were.
Just like film or literature, games often overstep the mark from tasteful to profane when it comes to subjects like this, and unfortunately the subject matter and any real profundity is lost more often then not,
This could have been a great game. Espionage during world war two was amazing, and I’m shocked at how few developers have tried making something out of this, especially amidst the glut of ww2 manshoots.
But I ramble. TLDR; Velvet Assassin COULD have been something special.
If they had approached the game with strong intent to at least respectfully dramatize Violet Szabo’s already dramatic career as a spy, this would have been a different article.
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@Pants the Fanciest:
If that were the case there might not have even been an article.
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@ Spanish
No, you wouldn’t accomplish as much – but the example is hardly fair. Mainly, because Mount Everest is clearly more difficult. I’d have to say making a good pulp/action movie is just as difficult as making a good ‘thinking’ movie. There is an equal amount of poor attempts on both sides.
On the other hand, it also depends on the effort you have to put in, and what your goals were at the start. It might just be a personal view point, but if a paraplegic gets to the top of Mount Monadnock on their first go at mountain climbing, is that not more of an accomplishment than if a professional mountain climber reaches the top of Mount Everest?
Why do you rate 8 1/2 higher than Die Hard? Because it makes you think? Don’t you enjoy both of them equally when you see them? Is how much a movie makes you think more important than how much you enjoy watching the movie?
I don’t know if I’m explaining myself properly :) not very good at expressing and clarifying my opinions sometimes.
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DCJ:
I’m not so sure that sexualization IS disrespectful.
And I don’t see why we think people’s children (especially those separated at very young ages) are particularly able to make decisions regarding their deceased parents’ names.
Nor, even were it disrespectful, do I see any real harm in disrespect shown to the dead. Does anybody here believe in an afterlife of preoccupation with one’s temporal representation?
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So does this game include mildly trippy gameplay or what, because I actually am having a hard time following the whole night gown god mode thing.
I’m not seeing how this is more offensive than other sexploitation games. Of course I haven’t actually played the game. How does this compare to say Bloodrayne? I assume the actual game consists of running around in sexy outfits killing Nazis. The little known fact that the character was inspired to any degree by a real person doesn’t shock me. Worst case some people will be interested enough to learn more about her. I am; more so than playing the game.
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It disrespects the subject by implying that their accomplishments are insufficiently noteworthy without the accentuation and showcasing of their sexual attributes (which, unlike their accomplishments, they were merely born with), and degrades the audience with the assumption that they cannot be moved or stimulated without having their most basic impulses indulged.
‘Respect for the dead’ is something of a misnomer; we respect the dead, or show proportionate disrespect to the dead, by being honest about them. We don’t do it for their good, but for ours, to maintain a less abstract sense of history; we want credit to go to the correct people (consider the justifiable displeasure at a film like ‘U571′, which depicts an American group infiltrating the U571 to steal an Enigma machine; the real U571 was destroyed by an Australian squadron, and the first naval Enigma machine was taken by Britons. Even that abstracts things to the level of nations, but at least the individuals’ names are available).
ERROR: WARRANT MISSING. Would a less lascivious depiction have made you more or less interested in Szabo?
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i dont know what the hubbub is all about. we cant hide the fact that rape and murder of women did happened in WW2. this game didnt glorify rape thats the main point. im going to play the game, not because the main character is a woman but because its a spy/ stealth game. dont get me wrong, Stolen was utter crap, Sam is getting old and i want something new.
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Gap Gen:
Yes! Excellent quote from an excellent game. And people say that games don’t teach you anything…
Well, I’d like an actual review of the game. Posing questions is nice, but…
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It disrespects the subject by implying that their accomplishments are insufficiently noteworthy without the accentuation and showcasing of their sexual attributes (which, unlike their accomplishments, they were merely born with), and degrades the audience with the assumption that they cannot be moved or stimulated without having their most basic impulses indulged.
If you’ll forgive a bit of rhetoric, I suspect that the reason many people find sexualization disrespectful is that they themselves disrespect sexuality.
When Russell Crowe plays John Nash, does anyone argue that Crowe’s biceps mean that we shouldn’t respect mathematicians unless they can do 100 push-ups? Does Weaver’s Goodall’s passion invalidate her intelligence? Maybe vice versa? If I base a character on a creative historical figure, but portray them with a little more eloquence than is strictly accurate, does that mean that creativity isn’t worthy of respect in the absence of eloquence?
It’s a dodge to argue that one talent is our responsibility while the other isn’t. It would be egotistical to claim credit for whatever talents we have. Each is a blessing, granted us by the particular circumstances surrounding our conception, birth, and life. Even if that weren’t the case, physical beauty is hardly genetic. Our genetics may limit our potential– I don’t see any supermodels with Down’s syndrome– but our beauty is a function of much more than the color of our eyes and the symmetry of our faces.
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@Binho
Aesthetic arguments are probably futile, but here goes:
I don’t enjoy myself as much watching Die Hard as I do watching 8 1/2. You’re right that considerable creativity went into the making of both movies; however, 8 1/2 rewards the viewer’s creativity in viewing it more than does Die Hard. You can turn off your brain while watching Die Hard, or you can engage fully with the movie, but it’s just as good either way. 8 1/2 is definitely less enjoyable if you don’t engage with it, but it’s still good, which is why it’s better than Die Hard.
I don’t see it as a divide between enjoyment of and thought about a movie: thought about a movie enhances the enjoyment of it.
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It’s ridiculous to boil opposition to sexualisation down to ‘disrespecting sexuality’; opposition to crass sexualisation may just as easily derive from a very healthy “respect for sexuality” — the real thing, not exaggerated cartoon notions of it, which have a dehumanising effect just as much as the violence jalf describes in his post above.
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showcasing of their sexual attributes
Sexual attributes are not worth showcasing. Unlike athleleticism.
(which, unlike their accomplishments, they were merely born with)
People can take no credit for their sexuality, while they can for, say, their intelligence.
their most basic impulses indulged
Sexuality is among the lowest of the things we can care about.
That’s what I’m referring to.
It’s okay to disrespect things. I don’t have any particular respect for the practice of making my bed every morning; if I learn that somebody engages in that practice, I don’t really care. If I saw media that connected that practice with things I did care about (how about generosity?) I’d probably be a little irritated by its valuation of bed-making.
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Usually journalists cover a game controversy, or until Darkfall recently – get caught up in it, not create it themselves? Tsk tsk RPS!
Do you know at what point in development permission to use the Szabo name was requested? This is a pretty important question. If the family had acquiesced and it was only in the planning stages, the game might very well have been dramatically different in any number of ways to toward the actual hero Violette Szabo. The game as it is now is clearly only thematically close (female brunette spy, ww2; duh) but NOT her story OR her name by any means more.
As for the drama double standard argued toward romanticizing the killing of Nazi’s, some of the most poignant moments in Velvet Assassin come from finding letters left by Nazi’s to their families and girlfriends, deliberately bringing central the fact that the enemy was all too human.
My impression of that, combined with last resort nature of guns and knife use felt like it was incentive to try and accomplish your missions without killing everything that moved, to try and let infiltration and escape be the focus of the game. To that end, the title delivers pretty well. Not perfectly, but with much more style and grace then this witch hunt for drama & controversy.
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I watched a developer diary a few months ago for this game and the developer (english not first language) said “Violette is not an ass monster”. I thought that was an interesting defence of the games heroin/e. I’m more troubled by this game than I’m letting on.
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The Question is .. What about Gameplay? Is this game good or not? You can´t change the history @ WW2. Love it or hate it.
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Nate: The term ‘disrespect’ strongly implies ‘contempt’, you might want to find another word.
In any case, it’s a matter of proportionality. Why depict Szabo as a sexually idealised leather-clad action girl when she was not so? (If this lot wanted to make a game about some gun-toting hottie mixing it up in the European Theatre, why not just make one up and abandon the pathetic premise that this is all somehow ‘based on’ Szabo?) As I’ve said above, we can show respect with an apt portrayal; an inapt one is disrespectful, whether it’s making her Stripperific, or… a crazed hyperobese serial killer, or a malfunctioning cyborg, or a chicken or whatever.
That said, sexualising a woman whose achievements were not sexual carries its own disrespect in the context of a society where women are still judged disproportionately on their appearance and sexual appeal. “Even if you did some great work for the Allies, lades — you gotta be hot!”
“Digital Signal X” : No-one here accused Velvet Assassin of being a Wolfenstein/Indy Jones-style “faceless Nazi cannon-fodder” game, if that’s what you’re saying; interestingly, it sounds like the game avoids this to an extent. But I don’t think the timing of their request is important at all; a more important question is “How fucking stupid was the request?”, the answer being, “Very”. As you say, the connections appear to be “female spy, brunette, WW2″. And you can pretty much chuck the “spy”, since in games like these a better analogy would be the Commandos. So, “female, brunette, WW2″? Yeah, Violette Szabo would’ve been a totally unavoidable elephant in the room if they hadn’t brought her up… [rolls eyes]
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@Gap Gen
I’d just like to point out that there is indeed an Alpha Centauri quote for any and every situation.
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, For I Have Tasted the Fruit
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A good friend of mine is related to Hitler (third cousin twice removed or somesuch) and nobody has contacted him asking permission to use his ancestors identity in the Wolfenstien games.
(I don’t think he’s too bothered about it though)
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I don’t think Hitler obtained tragic war hero status, though.
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I think that if the character wasn’t so sexual and the game would’ve been 1-1 historically accurate (even if it means boring at times) it could have been good, and a beginning of something good. I mean portraying the entire story, from infiltrating enemy lines to doing whatever she did (I don’t know her story) to the point she’s captured and killed- we’ve all seen games taking these dramatic settings and making them happen (end of COD 4 was pretty emotional even if all the rest of the story was mediocre). games unlike movies can make you bond with character and if they do it right when the character is taken away it can be a really emotional moment it is the essence of storytelling in video games.
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Binho: No, I think what Kieron was trying to say (and this is only based on my recollection of what he said) is that “comic” means “funny”, and there are several “comics” that are not funny. The original meaning of the word has become inadequate to describe the medium, but the word has now stuck. Hence The Path or The Majesty of Colors as a videogame, despite not being very “gamey”.
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He certainly did amoungst neo-nazi morons.
Just had a thought, if the nazi’s had won the war what would computer games be like now? Would we all be bored to death, shooting endless lines of Tommies and Yanks and suffering badly rendered bombing raids on industrial centres?
Return to Leeds Castle?
Oh god, paralell world thread alert!!
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Every single WW2 game would be about Operation FUCKING Sealion.
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“Why depict Szabo as a sexually idealised leather-clad action girl when she was not so?”
Seriously, you need to take another look at it.
I really don’t see the sexyfication of her. The nightgown dream sequences are hardly titilation – it screams vulnerable, eerie and dangerous to me.
Her outfit is one of the most normal outfits you’ll find for a female character in a videogame. Do I need to remind you of the latex dipped Nova of Starcraft Ghost? The countless chainmail bikinis of fantasy worlds?
She’s wearing leather pants. And that’s supposed to be stripperific?
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That’s it. Next Normandy beach storming that shows up in a game they should try and broaden its appeal and have all the allied forces in capes and leather budgie smugglers and nothing else like 300.
Just to see the reaction, mainly.
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Kinda tangentially apt/interesting maybe:
http://www.brightweavings.com/ggkswords/patriot.htm
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Do you have any idea how many Roman soldiers, men, fathers, husbands, died at the hands of Hannibal Barca at Cannae? And you’d dare make light of it by playing Rome Total War? Do you really have a right to cheapen their deaths which were by all accounts horrific, by playing war like a game, casually sending thousands of them to their deaths at a capricious whim? have you no respect?
etc.
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Man, I wish people actually read posts before commenting.
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Serenegoose: Empire was actually advising me the other day that cheap troops make good diversions to keep enemies away from more valuable units. The bastards.
As the for the game, I find ‘morphine mode’ quite tasteless. I had to put the game down after two levels because it was just awful. Aside from the fantasically tasteless morphine mode, poor graphics, iffy voice acting, wildly confusing storyline (they tell it through a series of very short cutscenes which make little sense), the AI made it, as one reviewer put it, an exercise in balancing fun with frustration.
One thing noone has brought up, really – aside from the linear levels, you have no choice but to murder a large number of people to get past. Think of most stealth games – Splinter Cell, Thief, mind suddenly gone blank thinking for a third – all of them give you an option to knock out your opponent rather than kill every single last one. The game throws letters at you from the men you’re supposedly killing, trying for sympathy witht he enemy, but then a) gives them dialogue so inane that you’d think they all had mental disorders and b) gives you no other option but to murder them in quite nasty ways, showing full detail – even in one animation, stabbing a guy right in the cock followed by in his shoulder.
Aside from the misuse of someone’s memory (I don’t get why some people become untouchables yet it’s perfectly fine to murder tons of people senselessly), the game has lots of other problems with its presentation that make it seem like a failed attempt at doing something that could have been interesting.
I doubt the game was made to deliberately trivialise the events – lots of little things about the game strike me as if they tried to make something intelligent but failed a few hurdles after the start. It’s like reading a bad bit of fan-fiction; they’ve tried to make it serious but it’s beyond their talent.
A couple of readers have recently asked us what we make of Velvet Assassin. Which is understandable: no-one should trust their own opinion, only ours.
You make it sound as if you’re tired of people wanting to know what you think. How horrible it must be for people to value your opinion.
ed: proofreading for clarity.
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How horrible it must be to wildly misinterpret gags based on your own erroneous presumptions.
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MY apologies then, text isn’t known for clarity. (That isn’t sarcasm!)
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Gap Gen/Binho: Yeah, as Gap Gen says.
KG
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I remember quite a few years back I was playing Wolfenstein 3D on my PC and a friend came over who was not a gamer. I was excited about the game and asked him to take a look. He said “That doesn’t bother you?” I look at him completely puzzled and said “What doesn’t bother me.” He said “Killing all those people”. I didn’t see that game that way and just enjoyed the competition of getting the highest score in a multi-player match. He saw it from a completely different perspective and a small part of me agrees. The argument can go both ways. Do you see that game as killing people (in VA’s case exploitation) or do you see it as a game. I tend to see games as games but a small part of me wonders if I have lost a part of myself by morally accepting what goes on in a game as just a game. The same can be said about movies, books and anything else. I guess its just like I was told a long time ago, “What you put in your head is what comes out”. Anyway just my thoughts on the matter.
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Good article. Game not so good (or respectful) sounding.
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In my humble opinion the actual tale of Szabo is tragic, and whether the publisher says “inspired by” or not, by just mentioning her name in relation to this is insensitive.
The argument might persist that “why is this any worse than any other game based on real events when someone died” – well this isn’t based on real events is it? It’s a complete perversion of the real events, and while CoD and the likes are no where near realistic, at least you get some idea of what the people actually went through; not plain lies. By bringing in the tiniest element of fact velvet assassin has destroyed itself.
All I have left to say is to echo this really:
“The question that looms largest to me is, oddly, why did the developers/publishers not simply make a game about an entirely fictitious 1940s secret agent instead, and thus avoid any possible upset altogether?”
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Because, as someone else pointed out, could you construct a 1940s female Allied spy without her name being raised?
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Within 1 minute’s walk of Stockwell tube you can see a mural commemorating Violette Szabo (middle of roundabout, to the left) plus a public ‘shrine’ to Jean Charles de Menezes (just to the right of entrance).
I’m not sure any other reasons someone would want to get out at Stockwell tube however, unless they really had to (you could stop for a few minutes on your way towards Brixton maybe).
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Um… yes, with spectacular ease? (Wait, you’re being sarcastic, right MK? It’s so hard to tell on gaming blogs…)
Hang on, what were we saying… “female, brunette, WW2…” My god, why didn’t they ‘base’ the game on Vera Lynn?! She’s even alive to be interviewed!
edit: I’m warming to the idea of a “Vera Lynn: Allied Superspy” game… It could directly parody this one! Also, SingStar… *rubs chin*
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If someone did pull that name out it’s completely irrelevant. If I say the Hitman franchise is based on Alexander Litvinenko it doesn’t make it so.
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That’s true, unless you’re a writer for IO, in which case it’s not.
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Whether or not this game is disrespectful of Violette Szabo’s memory is one thing. I certainly agree that ‘sexing’ up the character in the game is unnecessary.
Though I also think this is disrespectful to the gamers. It is as if they think their target group consists solely of basement dwelling teens whose attention will stray if they can’t focus on a pretty ass when there are no explosions happening on screen.
That, my friends, is why gaming is still viewed as something immature by many.
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Um… yes, with spectacular ease? (Wait, you’re being sarcastic, right MK? It’s so hard to tell on gaming blogs…)
I get it!
What confuses me is the invisible line that makes a person untouchable. What has to happen to you before people aren’t allowed to make crap games about you any more?
There’s a lot of characterising of the developers and publishers as money-grubbing fat-cats who intentionally made an awful game as a cash-in on this poor woman’s memory, but I would put it down as the developers not really thinking things through.I doubt developers intentionally sat down and planned out a game knowing thinking it would be offensive. It’s proably much more likely they though ‘wouldn’t it be cool to do X’ and didn’t really think they’re talking about someone’s life. Is ignorance an excuse, though?
Back to the original point of the article, is it more or less tasteless than anything else out there? In my opinion, no. Is it more tactless? Yes.
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“The argument might persist that “why is this any worse than any other game based on real events when someone died” – well this isn’t based on real events is it? It’s a complete perversion of the real events, and while CoD and the likes are no where near realistic, at least you get some idea of what the people actually went through; not plain lies. By bringing in the tiniest element of fact velvet assassin has destroyed itself.”
CoD potrays all germans as faceless 100% evil monsters. It’s okay to wrongly portray people as long as you do it to enough of them at once and they lost their war?
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@Alaric: as negativedge wrote when he won the thread, the problem isn’t the sexualization of Szabo (er, Summer); it’s the sexualization of her for no artistic reason whatsoever. Actually, I’d extend that argument a bit by suggesting that Southpeak’s sexualization of Szabo had a pretty clear purpose: to make money off a sexually-objectified female body in a fairly libidinous marketplace.
If there were a real artistic motive here, I’d find it much more defensible. The game would then be more respectful to its subject matter and to its audience.
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“CoD potrays all germans as faceless 100% evil monsters. It’s okay to wrongly portray people as long as you do it to enough of them at once and they lost their war?”
From an allied soldiers perspective on a battlefield they probably would be 100% evil monsters – so I don’t think that’s an issue. That’s not to say soldiers didn’t have a problem with killing each other but I’m sure they never sat down and had a discussion about each others lives or had the time to see what they actually looked like other than the uniform.
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You at least get the silver, suibhne!
MK: Well yeah, we can reasonably assume there’s no active malice there, but stupidity is offensive too.
I don’t think this is really about particular people being “untouchable”, it’s more a matter of abstraction. Really way-out stuff like Indiana Jones or Wolfenstein rely upon ‘refuge in audacity’ and going ‘beyond the impossible’; people may still be legitimately offended by this treatment of WW2, but there is at least no pretension of presenting things as reflecting reality — the abstraction from life is extreme.
CoD/MoH/CoH/Commandos and the like take refuge in abstraction at a lesser level — the devs attempt to stay relatively within the bounds of plausibility, but remain abstract in presenting the conflict, its members merely units in an amorphous Axis or Allies mass; these games avoid offense by not depicting any particular person as ‘cannon fodder’, nor attributing any actions to them. This is a much thornier area — most games use this level of abstraction to ply you with ample cannon fodder, which is dehumanising, implicitly endorsing an infantile blanket view of Axis forces that whitewashes (blackwashes?) the painful human reality, and opposes an intelligent understanding of what happened. Ironically, it sounds like the VA team at least attempt to minimise this in their game — Keep in mind though, genre is a big factor. You wouldn’t be getting to know your enemy on the battlefield as much as you would if you were snooping through their barracks behind their backs, so we can see why this abstraction is rife in the action genre, whether we approve or not (as “Waste Manager” says above).
You can argue the merits of these ‘barriers’ to offense, but you can’t argue that something else is also at work when you declare that your game, or its lead, is about Violet Szabo/Otto Skorzeny/George Patton/Albert Einstein/Vasily Zaytsev/whichever individual (the use of “based on” is a pathetic figleaf and can be disregarded; the term “based on” is meant to acknowledge the conjectures you have to make when you’re reconstructing a personal history, not for just making up any old shit). At this stage, you’re biting off a lot, and you’d better hope you can chew it. The abstraction of the protagonist and their actions that frees a game’s writers and designers is gone; you’re referring to a person now, you’re not making generalisations, you’re being specific. You’re either going to have to go charging headlong back into total audacity (Stalin vs Martians?), or you can go for a respectful route (whether that respect is for the person, or for their victims), ie, be as accurate as you possibly, possibly can — you’ve pledged yourself to making a kind of biography now. Or you can render a conspicuously insensitive tonal embarrassment like VA.
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What James said.
Also, to answer a question right at the top, I do feel kind of quesy about any WW2 etc shooter (CoD et a.) and wouldn’t have played, for instance, 6 Days in Fallujah…
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I’m pretty upset that this has generated a reasoned, reasonable debate on the subject of the article instead of being derailed into a discussion of matters callipygian.
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Isn’t Velvet Assassin based on Violette Szabo to the same extent that Braveheart is based on William Wallace?
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Haha, quite…
“A Scottish paedophile… The worst kind of paedophile that there is!”
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The ‘sexyfication’ is unneccassary but, at the end of the day it’s just a game, seems like the same sort of debate that came with RE, though that was a ‘good’ game so it was just a bigger debate…
Colour me insensitive I guess…
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“Are we okay with this? Should we be okay with [sic] is?” Better yet, why give a damn about being OK with it? My daughter’s a 3D scriptwriter / developer for some of the gaming and film studios – she sends her poor ole Dad some advance copies of new things in progress etc.
This beauty arrived nearly a year ago with a stick ‘em attached: “Dad, WTF do U make of this?? We’re 100% baffled.”
“We” includes her husband who’s in the technology business as well, a former CTO of a networking and internet security firm – a smallish European firm actually well-loved by gamers and other types like SMB enterprises and home / home office users. The guy’s considered one of the world’s top 25 hardware hackers and one of the top 100 software hackers. He’s now employed as CIO of the consulting division of a firm in his area of expertise – you also their name very well lol.
To her WTF question, I responded: “It’s a desperate ‘hail mary’ that’s as offensive as it is boring. It has nothing to do with history that isn’t told to promote its singular marketing agenda. As you two very well know, never trust entertainment industry marketing people. Their assignment in general is to turn polluted water into fine wine. Even those talentless chimps dropped the ball big-time with this garbage. Basically, this game 100% sucks.” I guess I’d make a crappy reviewer if paid by the word. lol
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“Should we be okay with it?” Well that depends, what do you think of smut in other forms? I think some people are overgeneralising this a bit. There’s no such thing as “the game developers”. There’s this particular studio, where some people seem to have obnoxiously bad taste, to the point they make me feel guilty by actually getting titillated by the pictures in their game. Now if that was the point this game would be great, but it isn’t, it’s just a stupid way to sell games.
Also, the fact that they’re based in Germany doesn’t mean that all Germans think this game is done in good taste. Etc.
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