Politically correct and censorship.... what are the issues ?

Helllo guys,
i hope i don't post in the wrong section tough but this subject is related to gamedesign decisions to me.

well, i have an idea that i keep warm since some times, but i'm affraid that this idea , completely politically incorrect but on the funny and prank humor side will probably make the game banned and hated by every kind of defense groups like :
anti alchool, peta, lgbt, anti drugs, morality groups, political and religious groups of every kind ... (think South park if you want)
my goal is , of course, not to encourage any kind of bad behaviour not to harm other's beliefs and feelings...

although i know this is bad, i also know it may be so good.

polemic game have pros and cons but they always make the buzz.

i know appla just won't let it sell , i'm not sure Google will, steam maybe ?

the questions :
what is the room for that kind of ideas ?
have you guys faced such a situation ?
or simply what do you think ?

 

Bans bring publicity. It has been used as a succesful marketing tool in the past. See GTA

 

right, so did "postal", "manhunt" etc , GTA is a good example but i'm not a Rock star so, what about indie projects?

 

Well, on Google Play your game may be removed from the store at some point, but as far as I remember, Google Play doesn't review the apps right away. So you might get away with it there. On the Apple App Store, not so much.
I am trying to touch a risky subject as well in the game I'm currently working on and I hope I can get away with it.
Do you think the title of the game matters? I mean, it can change the way recipients look at it.
Also, I have to think about Conker's Bad Fur Day that was released on the Nintendo 64, which, of course, was completely targeted towards children.

 

Pretty sure Hatred came out this year. Don't know how well it sold though.

Ah, Conker. You don't just tell me a poop joke, you sing me a poop joke.

 

You'd have to not only be careful of what the app stores may allow but what would be allowed in other countries. I'm not sure whether their is a way to restrict country downloads once the game is on the app stores. Maybe the app stores let you region lock games?

 

Apple banned a bunch of games just for having a confederate flag, so you know it's easy or them to decide remove your app too.
Although they later allowed most of those apps back to the store.

Also interesting note: game Hatred is not about hatred, it's about sadism, there is a big difference. I guess it's because the ppl that would buy this kind of game would rather think they hate ppl than that they are simply sadists who want to hurt ppl for fun.

 

interesting...

my point is not exactly about hatred that's more about something like : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Earl

another example could be ALF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALF_(TV_series)
Alf he hates cats, he eats cats... i can imagine that if you publish a game where you eat or kick cats, PETA will quickly ask to remove the game as "offensive" and "encouraging crualty towards animals" although most of people that will play won't be sadistic psychopats.

the main question is : can such a game exist beside the official circuits and resist all "perfect-minded" people.

 

Depends on what situation you take it. Shaking babies to make them go to sleep, a bit in poor taste. Making jokes at political leaders, go on forth. South park have often been on the line, what some people find offensive of it, educates others and south park often has a message they get across.

If you make it a web app, and publish it on your own website, you can pretty much do anything. If you release it via retail service, it is up to what the service will deem fit. Looks at past works that they have banned, see the reason and if possible avoid it like the plague, try looking for recent examples, what used to be seen as to much gore, is now the norm.

 

Context will play a large part in how it's judged, whether it's offensive or just in poor taste, & how realistic it is. You can get away with more against cartoon aliens than realistic (human) looking npc's

 

exactly... as well as laughing to retard people. in fact, the character is evil and miseducated, and you play with it.

 

to explain a little more,
the "hero" is an anti-hero, a loser, a poor guy with poo judgement, has all possible deviant behaviours, he doesn't really hate but like to make provocative fun and that's where the game can be fun. call it poop humour.
the game mechanics include use of alcohol, drugs, protitutes and everything nasty.
so, some example of what could happen :
the hero may kick cats in the street.
he may have enter an afro-bar and say "hey , i'm looking for whitesnow..."
or enter a Church and play "highway to hell"...
enter a prostitutes-bar to gain stamina....
and so on...

to compare.... HBO success is known to be due to that kind of provocative humour

 

Showing drug use or letting the player character use drugs will likely see it refused classification & be banned here. The other stuff you mentioned, as well as drug use, will probably see it banned on the app stores as they won't take the risk of any backlash.

 

yep...politically correct, that was the OP question...
so, beheading is not a problem, shooting at any non armed person is not a problem .
but HBO shows would be banned of any store.

 

thanks for you comments

 

Not sure hbo shows would be banned as many are shown here, but for some reason games are treated differently even tho we now have an R18+ category for in store games. I just don't think the app stores do have an R18+ raging (I could be wrong though) & they'd need one to enable that type of game to be even considered for release here.

 

mmmm ... i love californication... i 'm not sure this show would match any store "ethics", particularly apple

 

That sounds really tame and kind of lame to me to be honest. Take a good look at Hatred, Postal and Manhunt. If you want to be offensive in my humble opinion you should aim to be more offensive than those, because every game that tries that stunt moves the bar a little. There is a great southpark episode about lowering/raising "the bar" btw,

I think this is a good example of something that might still stand out as offensive, but I don't see how you could really make a game out of it. It sounds more like a novelty app that uses the accelerometer on a smartphone. I doubt that there is a big market for something like that.Or maybe an Occulus Rift VR experience, but I hope there is even less of a market for that!

Are you sure they care about things like this? Everything I have read about them leads me to believe they would rather kill an animal themselves than have it live a happy peaceful life as a pet. I didn't do proper research, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've heard soo often that they operate "high-kill" animal shelters or release animals to the wild that are not able to survive in the wild on their own.

Doing a game where you mistreat cats is mainly a bad idea for other reasons imho. You should be more afraid of the wrath of the internet as a whole if you touch their "holy cow", I mean holy cat.



You should make a game where you play as a cat and just be a dick to everyone. The stereotype is already established and accepted, cats are one of the most popular animals in the gamer demographic and there is little competition in the play-as-a-normal-cat genre of games. I'd totally do it, if I felt that was within my abilities, but it isn't. God I'd love to play an open world first person cat simulator!

 

I hate to tell you but it did exist.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/22/feel-like-shaking-a-baby-to-death-theres-an-app-for-that/

 

And 6 years ago even! Comes to show again, that I'm just not one of those creative idea guys.
Talk about S***ty production values though! That was about the least effort that could be put into that concept...

 

the cat thing was just an example, recently, apple removed a game, just because you were able to shoot at puppies, although that was not the purpose of the game, but the simple fact that you could, made aple remove it... so, i was just wondering if a character kicking a wild cat from his path wasn't going to face the same issue

once again, if i wanted to do postal or the like then that would be "easy" to find offensive content..

 

so, i think i have to elaborate more on this idea.

i wrote this idea 4 years ago.

the name of the idea is "looser racer"
it takes place in europe ou even US .
the "hero" is a complete looser, lost in bars..
he's an agressive troublemaker semi alchoolic, sometimes smoking pot and maybe more
people laugh at him and his miserable life...
his life is earning money with bets .... minor steals and deals...
he owns a cranky small bike cause he can't afford a real one..
the main gameplay is racing in town or country with missions like avoid toilets buckets thrown at him etc
gaining point when he kics a cat from his bike, kics garbage etc
sub missions allow him to gain some money from bets (like enter a biker's lair and say "hi girls", and any kind of provocative things) then escape and come back to his bar.
the money he earns is spent on alchool, cigarettes and girls, because he needs to keep alchool, nicotin and stamina levels to be efficient .
there are plenty of missions and he even can customize his cranky bike .

the game is not meant to be really offensive.... just completely incorrect prank. the player won't really self-identify to the character he just wants to see him commit stupid things.

 

I don't know about whether or not you have to verify that you are 18+, but take a look at this:

Resident Evil 4 on the iOS App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/resident-evil-4-platinum/id322523436?mt=8

Resident Evil Degeneration on the iOS App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/resident-evil-degeneration/id321192361?mt=8

Here in Europe, the original Resident Evil 4 has been rated 18+.
Also, Degeneration is free and Resident Evil 4 has a free version, too, which would basically make it available to pretty much everyone without even the need of getting money onto your Apple ID or a credit card.
So there might be 5 year olds playing these games? I don't think so. Well, at least I hope not.

 

I read that discussion. It's weird because I just got Lara croft from the apple App Store & I'm shooting spiders & lizards

 

If you phrase it like this, put in a good amount of humor and give it a retro aesthetic I could actually imagine this to go well on steam. I suggest you watch a bunch of Troma movies to get a feel of a proven brand of bad taste humor. Here are a few:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLnfvt0Tjwhosj4uLP6nJLSSwS_gg_J1x

I'm not an expert on which of those are actually "good". I've only seen Tromeo and Juliet, Terror Firmer and the Toxic Avenger Movies about 10 Years ago. Maybe check imdb or some trash movie afficionado website to see which ones are worth your time. I vaguely remember one of their movies had a scene where a guy runs over pedestrians with his car and awards himself points for that.

Aha! Great, I found it! It's a bit graphic and might be considered NSFW:

A kid on a bike is 28 points! Maybe use that in your game .

You really should watch Toxic Avenger, that movie is a great trash classic!

But those are not cute. And everyone knows violence against cute things is a horrible crime whereas "kill everything that's ugly as sin" is a widely accepted concept.

 

ah aha ah love it ! , good find for me, pretty this but not with cars, with this :
http://garage.1977mopeds.com/build/Rat+Bastard
and eventully end wit this :
http://www.slashgear.com/survival-b...-moped-and-end-of-the-world-arsenal-05339952/

too bad this little franch TV shiow has no translation, the character would very look like this one.

 

It is all about the delivery. Offensive but not alienating is funny/fun. That is a razor thin line but if you can walk it people will love it.

 

completely agree

 

Also if things go south - I'd take a look at how Smuggle Truck became Snuggle Truck after some... politics - and how they capitalized on it.

 

Spiders and lizards aren't considered cute and cuddly. They are fair game. Human beings are very weird about these things.

It's just like that huge furore on Facebook about a festival involving eating dogs in the pacific islands. It was a big deal on some news feeds. And yet complaints about the equivalent American festival on turkey's are almost non existent.

 

If you want to get publicity from it, you could try to invoke the feminist inquisition.

 

I'm going to suggest to not censor yourself. Do what you want. If it generates controversy, you're usually doing something right, and it's publicity. Don't let other people's feelings stop your creativity.

 

You should be fine on Steam or on console, if you get into the Sony and/or Microsoft developer programs. Given that South Park: The Stick of Truth is available on PS3, Xbox 360, and Steam, it means pretty much anything goes. But you could easily get yanked from the mobile stores I would think.

Seriously, that game goes way beyond even what they do on the TV show. One thing about the game though, is that it's a decent full-blown RPG at its core. If it didn't have good gameplay, the politically incorrect elements of it (and just flat-out gross elements) wouldn't be enough to hold it together.

 

I wouldn't worry so much about the censorship, it's more a case of whether you can recreate what's in your head into the game in such a way that the audience will find it humourous as well, not an easy task. When the game is done then reality will assert itself, i.e. genuinely funny, good game = possibility of success; genuinely funny game only in your head, genuinely unfunny game to everyone else = no possibility of success.

This is usually the reason developers do not bother with these sort of humourous games because one can commit to a great deal of work and no-one else gets the joke.

 

oh yes for sure! , one more mission then

@Fishman92 , thanks man
@Steve Tack , thanks for your input, good example
@sicga123, definitely yes

TBH, it would be much easier for me to do a fps, terrain+characters+weapons and that's it...
this concept will need for sure, lots of anims and characters to really immerse the player in the "loser" world, it is a 40 % anime game, as steve tack explained, the basic mechanics can be simple but everything is about the content.

 

I've thought about this for a while. I don't have any politically incorrect ideas I'm willing to share openly but censorship in the name of political correctness is truly BS.
Agree with Fishman - create what you want to create -

And here's an idea. Set up your own PC delivery method - website - hosting - paypal - etc whatever/however to get it hosted and ready for the masses. Then submit to all the popular common stores - hopefully it gets through one or two, for a couple weeks for enough people to see it and get offended.
Then the ban/removal comes, and then get a couple YouTubers to review it from your site and state where it's at, then the gamer web media picks it up, and details the app store bans and all the history of "this game is not available to you because apple and company have decided political correctness and censorship is there role, not the role of parents and people who can decide themselves".

Then sit back and watch the downloads roll in on your local hosting.
You will be a rich man.

Could work if you get the right people (interweb media) to report about it.

 

pretty much this....thanks for your thoughts on that.... i'm currently sittin back and, yep i thibk i may push the concept a little further and.... talk to some people

 

Treyarch better be careful then. Black ops 3 is the 15th call of duty game. Someone might try to say shooting people encourages shooting of people.

So... yea. It's a total crapshoot. You're dealing with humans, they're irrational and emotional. You're always going to offend someone, don't water down your game to appease your non-target audience!