Comments on: Velvet Assassin: Sick Filth or Slick Thrills?

By: kr8

kr8 — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:13:25 +0000

“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.

By: Rotter Darned

Rotter Darned — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:30:08 +0000

“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

By: Pzykozis

Pzykozis — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:24:41 +0000

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…

By: James T

James T — Wed, 13 May 2009 01:13:12 +0000

Haha, quite…

“A Scottish paedophile… The worst kind of paedophile that there is!”

By: CrashT

CrashT — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:04:59 +0000

Isn’t Velvet Assassin based on Violette Szabo to the same extent that Braveheart is based on William Wallace?

By: mujadaddy

mujadaddy — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:53:22 +0000

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.

By: Funky Badger

Funky Badger — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:59:57 +0000

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…

By: James T

James T — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:59:29 +0000

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.

By: Waste_Manager

Waste_Manager — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:03:34 +0000

“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.

By: suibhne

suibhne — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:16:59 +0000

@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.

By: DK

DK — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:59:20 +0000

“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?

By: Matt Kemp

Matt Kemp — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:16:44 +0000

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.