Maintaining Creative Expression and Integrity in Video Games
“You down?” my friend asked.
“Always,” I replied. “I’m hopping on Discord right now, join the call when you’re ready!”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, this was often what my iMessage history would look like with my friends. Most days after Zoom University, we’d spend countless hours playing together as a way of keeping in touch during quarantine. One of the titles we picked up, Rainbow Six Siege, enhanced us due to its hyper-realism and the parallels it drew from Tom Clancy’s books. In a game as complex as Siege where both sides are constantly adapting on the fly to each other’s tactics, ingenuity isn’t only encouraged, it’s a necessary element of winning. What people fail to recognize about video games today is that video games are as much of an art form as any entertainment field out there.
It should be noted that gaming was a growing way people were connecting with each other before the pandemic, and the pandemic was the fertile ground for these relationships to fully blossom. It became one of the few economic sectors that have withstood the fiscal effects of the pandemic and have led to more than two-thirds of adults and three-quarters of children in America playing video games. However, as with any mass form of media and entertainment, governments seek to limit its influence through regulation and even censorship. Foreign markets, specifically China, have had much heavier content restrictions in regard to video games. And with Beijing passing recent laws limiting gaming time for minors to less than 3 hours a week, it is clear that the direction they are headed towards is fundamentally at a crossroads with Western video game developers. Therefore, video games should be developed for specific regions as opposed to the whole globe, as it allows both video game developers and players a greater degree of artistic expression.
Let’s consider Rainbow Six Siege again for a moment. The game is clearly tailored for Western markets with the appearance of skulls, drugs, and blood spatters that often appear throughout gameplay. Not only are these elements critical to the lore of many operators (or characters), but removing them would directly dilute the player’s creative experience. Although traditional forms of artistic expression, such as narrative arcs, 3D modeling, illustration, and dynamic music would still occur, they would feel much more restricted and confined. Despite the fact, Ubisoft, the video game developer of Siege, announced plans to remove these specific aesthetics because they were preparing for an Asian launch of the game. But Ubisoft kowtowing to Chinese censors sparked immediate and widespread community backlash that left them no choice but to cancel their initial plans. Siege is just one example displaying how Western and foreign (and specifically Chinese) markets are too diverse to streamline one global version of the game.
The reason why artistic expression for not only Siege but video game “shooters” in general is so important is that they require a vibrant and active community with feedback from both players and developers. Most other gaming categories don’t need to be heavily censored. And shooters are often PvP (player versus player) experiences, which require balancing certain characters or core gameplay mechanics as to not make the meta of a game overreliant on just one aspect. Doing so stales the competitive nature integral to PvP games because there is less choice and inevitably results in the decline of certain video games. There needs to be a healthy discourse between all parties involved. But if players believe that developers are not making a concerted effort to address key issues of games and are “busy” censoring aesthetics instead, they are going to be less inclined to air out their grievances. The freedom of choice is what keeps the shooters “honest.” Without it in respect to the traditional forms of artistic expression, it is difficult to imagine having it in a gameplay sense either.
Generally speaking, the story of Siege and its audience parallels the story of Triple-A games in the 21st century. Capitalism has created fierce competition between companies to maximize profits for shareholders and results in corporate leaders throwing out their moral compass in order to do so. Total revenue is equal to price times quantity, so a simple way to increase the profitability of a video game is to increase the global player base. What they either fail to recognize or choose to ignore is the fact that both players and developers alike detest video game censorship. Doing so not only waters down the content and experience of the game but it ruins its integrity from a moral point of view. Therefore, many video games are inherently structured as zero-sum games. Tailor certain aspects to a global audience, and you risk alienating the original fan base responsible for the growth of the game in the first place. Western and Chinese audiences are simply incompatible at this current point in time.
Admittedly, leaving foreign markets out of the equation will likely lead to the isolation of certain player bases. Global eSports competitions such as the Six Invitational which is essentially the “World Cup” of Rainbow Six Siege, are the pinnacle of competitive gaming and reflect the love for the game that is shared by people all around the world. However, as is the case with many eSports competitions for shooters, China is not represented. This fact, along with the lack of a casual audience and following for the game there, create a self-reinforcing loop that establishes how China’s appetite for popular Western games is overperceived. As previously mentioned, investing in Chinese audiences for the majority of titles is inherently a sunk cost due to the zero-sum nature of the audiences. A global set of video game standards, simply put, is too idealistic to undergo today. With the trend that the Chinese government is headed towards, they are placing a clear emphasis on limiting the sphere of influence that not only video games, but any form of mass media and entertainment has on the Chinese people.
This discussion reveals that the current trajectory of many video games shooters is headed towards a breaking point in the near future. Shooters, which are often played with friends due to their PvP nature, have only increased their prominence in recent years in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Video games are one of the last forms of entertainment with a high degree of autonomy and agency left standing today. But video games must also be recognized not only as a form of entertainment but also as a form of artistic expression now. Although it sounds backward, restricting video games and adapting them only to specific regions would promote the greatest net enjoyment out of its player base.
