Home Forums General Discussion Creating a new mod for HL2 Orange box Engine Reply To: Creating a new mod for HL2 Orange box Engine

#44297
Anonymous
Inactive

It’s great to see someone intent on making something! However your subject choice is somewhat…uncomfortable. As the guys above said probably not the way to go unless you are specifically courting controversy.

You seem to be more interested in just making a fun mod rather than staking a claim to political or artistic statements so your decision to change the subject matter is probably for the best.

If this is just a project for your own entertainment/enjoyment I wouldn’t worry too much about your "target market". It sounds as if you are not trying to go commercial with it anyway. Thinking about how your mod is going to be different to everyone else’s is good, but don’t get hung up trying to get as many people to play it as possible. Just enjoy making it!

On a side note you do raise an interesting point:
If I had said that I was going to write a book or make a film about the troubles, the reaction would not have been NEARLY as negative.

My own gut reaction was "that’s really not a good idea. It’ll start a sh*t storm if the media gets wind of it" swiftly followed by "and I’d probably agree with them". But at the end of the day, if games want to be taken seriously as a medium they need to be allowed to tackle controversial topics. Where do we draw the line? Can we really claim to be anything other than an entertainment industry if we constantly avoid controversy?
To use the comic defense, either everything has to be fair game or none of it can be. People don’t have to like what you have to say and they are more than free to tell you what rubbish it is and why it’s silly/stupid/offensive. It’s an integral dialogue that our society is supposed to be built on.

Honestly I believe we take a beating from the mainstream media because when ever there is controversy about a game it’s because of purile reasons. A game has tried to do something silly and crass rather than trying to engage with a subject that we find difficult for the purpose of furthering a dialogue about it.

Without wanting to cause offence, this mod is another example. We’ll have the IRA fight the PSNI because other games have toyed with terrorism in a fictional setting, we’re just doing the same thing but set in real life. It’s not engaging with the topic, it’s simply using it as an excuse.

That recent Fallujah game that got canned may well have been doing it for selfish or short sighted reasons, but it stated people talking about it. They might also have actually had an artistic or genuine social/political motivation at heart. (Unfortunately they seem to have gotten stuck on the fact that there is a game about it rather than talking about it was based on, which is far more important.)

If developers actually had solid well thought out reasons behind their decisions when dealing with controversial issues I think we’d be garnering a lot more respect on the whole right now.
Instead we’re being censored effectively because you can beat whores to death in GTA.

Even if the subject matter doesn’t tackle violence I’m pretty sure games will get flack no matter what it is simply because of the way games will always present these concepts. They will present you with the task of of thinking through how and more importantly WHY you would be doing things that society finds objectionable. Rather than just having society tell you ‘this thing is bad, don’t do it’, you have to understand what this thing is, why this thing is bad. Then hopefull the user will wonder is this thing actually bad and why the heck would someone want to do it anyway and (just maybe after that) how do we deal with these people and get them to stop doing what ever it is.

To somewhat conclude this irate rant basically the way I see it is that at the moment developers aren’t allowed to say anything important with games. It doesn’t matter whether it is a multi-million dollar game focusing on a politically sensitive battle, a teenage trying to make a mod about his countries sordid history or a flash game focusing on ignorant misogyny. Societies reaction is the same. Don’t you dare.