Somehow I managed to catch the right train to Messegelande, though the tram stop was eerily deserted and smack in the middle of a rundown field with the purportedly sprawling conference center nowhere in sight. A 600 meter trek up a hill and voila, the largest megaplex in...well, in Leipzig anyway.
The keynote by Julian Eggebrecht, Factor 5's President and Lead Director/Producer, got rolling about 15 minutes behind schedule due to technical problems with the Playstation 3 (high-definition output doesn't play well with projection technology, which unfortunately caused Eggebrecht's demo of Lair to output in a rather ghastly shade of green). But the talk itself was interesting because of Eggebrecht's energy.
The theme was "No sex, No Drugs, and little Rock 'n Roll -- Ratings and the challenged creativity in games," and Eggebrecht wasted no time lampooning the ratings industry, especially the ESRB.
Lair is as you may know a dragon-riding simulation where, among other things, you can swoop down low, feed on humans, graphically tear off their heads, then use the skulls as projectiles. Except according to Eggebrecht the head thing had to be swapped down for "helmets" because, well, head ripping was a bit too much to finagle a coveted Teen rating out of the ESRB. Lair's dragons somewhat ridiculously now have the decency (and skill) to pluck helmets off while leaving craniums intact, like peeling the rind off a melon with a knife while swooping over a garden at speeds in excess of 100 mph. Go figure.
Interestingly, as the ESRB played successive builds and got better at manipulating the camera, they found more to critique, effectively turning Factor 5's development process into a hoops game about blood, giblets (flying chunks of flesh), and a kind of quantitative referendum on how many constitute "A Chunk Too Far." According to Eggebrecht, the evaluation process is "a flat out bizarre system" and "a charade," if for no other reason than the disparity between game ratings and their kissing cousins in other well-established mediums like film, music, and books.
Cycling through clips of Bonnie and Clyde (the execution scene), A Clockwork Orange (the rape scene), Reservoir Dogs (the ear-slicing scene), and Natural Born Killers, Eggebrecht paralleled the artistic choices directors like Kubrick, Tarantino, and Stone make by creating "sympathetic killers" with what a developer like Rockstar is up to in Manhunt 2. He has a point. But granting that I haven't played Manhunt 2 yet, I'm not convinced the comparison's entirely legitimate. Is creating sympathetic interactive violence artistically equivalent to Kubrick's rape scene in A Clockwork Orange? The execution scene in Bonnie and Clyde? In my notes I've scribbled "Art versus exploitation?" Isn't that where the issue lies? Pornography may, for instance, engage sex openly and freely, but is it art or male/female exploitation? Just because your "art" breaks a social taboo doesn't mean it aesthetically justifies itself, does it?
I love the questions Eggebrecht raises, and I grant without reservation that the ratings system's a tangly, inconsistent mess, but I wonder if the games industry isn't overreacting when it seems to be proposing "anything goes." When money's involved, exploitation's invariably an issue. If, for instance, you want to graphically depict rape in a game, where do you draw the line between "art" and a sort of voyeuristic moneymaking titillation?
