I'm not familiar with that game (name sounds vaguely familiar). But if it was an interesting enough concept, I'd give a non-violent rogue-like a try. Admittedly, though I'm hard-pressed to come up with any ideas that might work for such a game, and still leave the game as a rogue-like, or at the very least, give it a rogue-like feel.
The issue ultimately comes down to what becomes a challenge, what players have to mitigate or navigate the challenge, and whether that challenge is consistently stimulating. Violence and killing in games is a straightforward and easily understood design, and can be unpredictable enough to be stimulating. (In the case of DoD, in the form of things like octospam or positioning) If activists want to curtail the violence in video games, the best way they could do it is become game designers and find an even shorter path to engaging gameplay. Incidentally the non-violent game I mentioned is called Toejam and Earl. It's a Sega Genesis game that was basically an action game that used roguelike rules. Levels would have a random layout (if you didn't explicitly pick the "Fixed" option) and it was a game about collecting and utilizing an assortment of items at the right time against increasingly fiendish enemies. What's particularly unusual about this game is that there are very few offensive option. The two main characters are two very laid back funkster aliens. They're generally pacifists who prefer to avoid conflict. So almost every option you have in the game is about predicting and evading enemies. This is helped a bit by the fact enemies occasionally wear themselves out and fall asleep (you then hold the A-button to quietly sneak past them). Only two items let you attack enemies -- but it'd only be for a limited time, enemies usually took a lot of hits, and you're completely immobile for a full second per attack. Rarely strategically worth it unless you could manuever yourself into a position difficult for the enemy to reach you but you could still reach them. It's a really simple game, honestly, I'm not trying to play it up or anything. There's pretty much only two things to always do. One is to find an "identifier" NPC (it's an old man in a carrot suit) and have him help you identify a type of item before you wind up using it. Unidentified items can severely hurt you when used -- you never know which one is a "Total Bummer!" which instantly kills you -- and there is even one extremely bad item that rerolls all the items in the game and forces you to identify them from scratch. Also, you have to learn to identify which food health pickups are good and which ones are bad. Healthy food takes life away from you, greasy or sugary food heals you. But you still need avoid root beer even if it heals, because it makes your character burp periodically -- which can wake up sleeping enemies. I got a stupid death out of learning that, but it was still funny as hell. The game goal is simple -- find all the pieces of your spaceship across 25 levels and you win.
Anyone else seen this? http://www.gamespot.com/features/ea...AndBrandIdentity;EaGunsAndTheDangers;ReadMore I am dumbfounded by this. All I can say is 'are these guys on drugs?'
What. I don't even... How can you encourage someone to buy weapons, especially if you are a fucking PC and console game developer? What the fuck?
Because they are idiots. Just like a lot of their players (I'm referring to kids aged below 13, or possibly higher, who play these games) are.
If nothing else, it kind of puts the whole violence in video games issue into perspective. Well, a truly bizarre perspective, but perspective nonetheless. This could so easily have been the basis for an article for The Onion. SCTV could have done something like this with Captain Combat (if anyone else can remember back that far).
I don't think "gamers" are EA's audience anymore. The Call of Duty and Battlefield games have attracted an entirely different audience. That audience might very well be interesting in buying the guns that are seen in the game, so from a business perspective this might actually make some logistic sense. How did Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation describe Battlefield and CoD? Ah yes. "Mindless celebrations of state-sponsored violence designed for paranoid shitheads who sit stroking guns while unblinkingly watching subtitled foreign movies."
