How do you deal with controversy over your game?

[Carduus]

I received my first I'm-uncomfortable-with-this-about-your-game comment today. That's not to say it isn't deserved: my game deals heavily in politics and religion, and a little in sex, and says so in the title, so discomfort is certainly an expected reaction. My kneejerk reaction is to be defensive but polite, reassuring the person that I understand their discomfort but that I'm not changing that element.

I realize (in retrospect, of course!) that this tack might not be the best way to handle this. What do you feel is the best way to handle it when your game invites controversy, or even gets controversy without inviting it?

 

[Fernyfer775]

I've looked at your game, and you explicitly state the topics your game dabbles in. I would just "thank" that person for their feedback and move on. Not every game is made for every person. The way I see it, if there is a person who gets offended at the sight of death, but goes out of there way to play Resident Evil and then moans and groans (zombie pun intended) about how the game is too dark, bloody, full of gore, blah, blah, blah, then the person is doing it to themselves.

I ran into this issue in the past with my Demon Hunter game. I specifically stated that the game had X, Y, and Z controversial topics and had a fairly "rated R" rating to it, but people insisted on playing it and some complained that it was too "adult" for their tastes. I just shrugged it off because I did my part in warning all potential players about it in the game thread itself.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

I would tell anyone who decided to waste my time by whinging about how my game hurt their feelings, to go find the biggest thing they can think they can fit in their orifice of choice, to insert it into said orifice, & then rotate on said object until such time as I develop the capacity to give a single solitary F***!

Then tell them they can just keep swiveling anyways. & that's assuming I am in a good mood & feeling patient enough to be diplomatic.

Whether you are making music, film, literature, or video games there will always be some self absorbed cretin that suffers from the delusion, that the sheer amount of effort involved in creating your respective work, should take a back seat to whatever subjective standards they came up with in a given moment. & those people are about as useful as a blow up doll in the cold hard vacuum of outer space.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

I think all you can do is politely steer them away from your game. I went over to your page and looked at the controversy and while I can see where someone might get offended at the same time it's already so obvious from the mutants, the anthromorphs and the post-apocalyptic setting that your game isn't trying to represent reality in the first place, however you may choose to mirror it. I get where that person is coming from, but its just a game at the end of the day you know.

Not like I'm going to boycott Metal Gear Solid as an American with multiple friends in the military just because the games often pit you up against the American military and generally represent the country as the most evil of all countries (in the middle of a historical narrative no less, far more offensive from an artistic license standpoint than a game set so far in the future), though yes that does make me uncomfortable at times. Last I checked very few people gave a damn about that, why should the type of uniform a character wears be so offensive? Especially with so little context into what his actual role in the story will even be at this point? By the year 2436 after a cataclysm does that uniform even have the same meaning in your game or is it merely an iconic parallel? Seems unlikely given the strains described that the everyday person in game would even know how appalling that uniform is in the first place or that the character that wears it would have anything to do with any Reich third or otherwise. Aside from that frankly I find the notion that a Pole is incapable of becoming a despot and therefor portraying one as such is unacceptable even more offensive, there are good and bad in all walks of life and in a game set 400 years in the future just about anything should be on the table, none of us are psychic or beyond evil just as none of us are to far gone to do good.

Maybe put in a further disclaimer that your game would be outright banned were it to be regulated in Europe as a AAA game, since the fact is that kind of iconography will get a game blacklisted over there and publishers who choose to use it (such as Call of Duty) have to either change it special for that region or leave that region out of their market entirely. Therefor perhaps that person is merely coming from a place where even the most adult of adult games would never dare do such a thing so even with your warning that he might be offended he was unprepared for it. All I know to say, at the end of the day if you play a game that warns you it deals with controversy, then get upset about it after choosing to play the game anyway then they only have themselves to blame and the proper course for them would be to stop playing it. It can't hurt them anymore that way.

 

[Carduus]

FernyFer, XilithHarbinger, thanks for your support. I'm not planning on taking a f*ck-off attitude with fellow members of the RPM community, just as a general principle, but I smell what you're cooking.

Alexander:
It wouldn't mean much, if anything, to a post-apoc society that far in the future. Just a fancy military costume. They'd probably be much more worried about the undead part. Part of the problem is also that while the idea is much less controversial in context, I don't want to spoil major plot points just to reassure people. But that's a good idea re: the further disclaimer for Europe.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

FernyFer, XilithHarbinger, thanks for your support. I'm not planning on taking a f*ck-off attitude with fellow members of the RPM community, just as a general principle, but I smell what you're cooking.

Alexander:
It wouldn't mean much, if anything, to a post-apoc society that far in the future. Just a fancy military costume. They'd probably be much more worried about the undead part. Part of the problem is also that while the idea is much less controversial in context, I don't want to spoil major plot points just to reassure people. But that's a good idea re: the further disclaimer for Europe.

You should try it sometimes,

You would be amazed how cathartic it is to tell some mouth breather that just because their mother didn't have the good courtesy to get intimate with a coat hanger rather than inflict them on humanity, doesn't mean you are obligated to pretend they have any redeeming value to the species.

After all, it's not your fault they crawled out of the shallow end of the genepool.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

@XIIIthHarbinger Okay now; to be fair the person in question wasn't mean-spirited or anything, merely another person voicing their opinion and none of us know where they are truly coming from other than that they find one particular part of Carduus' game thread offensive. I think Carduus handled the situation correctly by giving a little of his own background and reassuring the critic that he's taken consideration to the subject matter and isn't merely including offensive iconography for the sake of being offensive.

When your critics decide to disrespect you unduly letting them have it with both barrels is more than appropriate; but as long as they disclose their opinions civilly I believe they should be treated with civility in turn and given the option to politely walk away when told that the subject-matter isn't going to be changed for them. If they choose to stick around and keep complaining banally though then by all means tell them off, as it is cathartic but in many cases it's also far from necessary or helpful.

 

[Wavelength]

I've given this kind of feedback to a couple of (hobbyist) game developers before, including on one game that I genuinely did like (but less than I would have because of this discomfort). The general response I got was of surprise and appreciation - that the developers didn't foresee players feeling this way and could now consider making changes to round out the rough edges.

Out of respect to the devs I'm going to be deliberately vague here about the content that triggered me - but in every case it had to do with feeling forced into something I didn't want to do. Often this was the narrative having my protagonist act in a way that forced me to not identify with him; sometimes it was the gameplay (via plot flags, etc.) forcing me to do something I felt touchy about if I wanted to keep playing the game. As an example (that I am completely making up on the spot), if an innocent person is killed in a war as part of a narrative scene, that can make people somewhat uncomfortable, and that's okay. If the player is forced to kill an innocent to trigger a plot flag and move the game forward, that is going to trigger a lot of people and turn them against your game. The player is now disconnected from your game and doesn't care about "winning" or "achieving" anything because doing so feels even worse than failing.

The problem was not so much that I encountered themes or images that made me feel uncomfortable - the problem was that, unlike in the real world, I literally could not do anything (in the game) to reconcile it with how I felt (in real life). This is less of a problem in non-interactive works like movies and books where you are an observer and can see the protagonist as a character; it's a big problem in video games where the player has some degree of control over the protagonist (and therefore implicitly sees himself as the protagonist), especially if the protagonist is literally supposed to be the player rather than a defined character.

Ideally, you have a large base of testers for your project early on, which makes it easier to sort out the one-in-a-thousand "weirdo" complaint from a real issue in the way your game is received by players. If more than a couple people key in that they felt uncomfortable about an event or an overriding theme, or even that they found something or someone "unlikable" where you weren't deliberately painting them this way, consider ways to inject more agency into those elements of your game. In the "murdering an innocent" example from earlier - consider ways to allow the player to show mercy, even if it makes his own life harder and the innocent gets killed anyway.

Some advice I can give off the cuff:

• Consider multiple solutions for puzzles/plot flags, and consider making disturbing quest content optional rather than mandatory.
• Where players find one or two actions from your protagonist out-of-character or unlikable, remove those actions. And where players find nearly everything your protagonist does unlikable, do everything you can (in terms of framing, perspective, author bias, etc.) to separate the player from the character.
• If it's something less about actions and more about theme - like gore, sex, religion, occult things - do your best to add this theming into the environment and context, rather than the player's direct line of play. Allow players who like this kind of thing to seek it out in your game, without plopping it directly in the player's path. Again, agency.

The good news is - a game like A Different Clarity and its explorative gameplay should have an easier time doing this than most other games! So I encourage you to keep testing your game with players, and if it turns out that this player isn't the only one that feels this way, it's time to look into ways that you can provide the player more agency about how they experience (and react to) these things that are discomforting to them.

 

[Carduus]

Words

Your three bits of advice are very sage, and I will be using all of them. I've tried to give the character at least a little bit of 'character', but considering the game is about making decisions without game maker hand-holding (or always-true who-to-hate/kill rules like kill-anyone-who's-an-*******-to-you), there is necessarily a lot of give there for the player to shape the character. There will be pathways to avoid traditional morality issues, but I worry a bit what the backlash would be if the player isn't necessarily rewarded for these choices beyond a clear conscience. I'm not going to shy away from traditional moral quandaries, like whether you kill one person by intentional action, or many will die by your inaction. Hopefully I can give the player the confidence that I'm not trying to screw them over, but that'll come in the playtesting.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

@XIIIthHarbinger Okay now; to be fair the person in question wasn't mean-spirited or anything, merely another person voicing their opinion and none of us know where they are truly coming from other than that they find one particular part of Carduus' game thread offensive. I think Carduus handled the situation correctly by giving a little of his own background and reassuring the critic that he's taken consideration to the subject matter and isn't merely including offensive iconography for the sake of being offensive.

When your critics decide to disrespect you unduly letting them have it with both barrels is more than appropriate; but as long as they disclose their opinions civilly I believe they should be treated with civility in turn and given the option to politely walk away when told that the subject-matter isn't going to be changed for them. If they choose to stick around and keep complaining banally though then by all means tell them off, as it is cathartic but in many cases it's also far from necessary or helpful.

Yeah, I genuinely don't care how polite they are being.

If they are complaining about how they find an article I wrote, a video I made, or a game I created was offensive to them, they are operating under one of two assumptions.

Either A) They believe I am not going to change anything, but think I have nothing better to do with my time than to listen to their whinging on about their bloody feelings; in which case they can swivel.

or b) They think that the amount of time I invested in whatever I created & my reasons for creating it, are secondary to their feelings, because reasons; in which case they can swivel.

I don't much care how politely you phrase it, if someone is telling me to apply my lips to their backside, they're still telling me to kiss their a$$.

 

[OneManArmy]

Ohh I see a topic about my comment. I think that a few commenters here have been carried away...
Just to been clear I don't mind controversy, religion, politics, sex and death topics. My point was a bit beyond that. Of course, I do not know the story and what it is about, what is the exact relation between characters etc. I just have read and seen that a dude in Nazi uniform (what you can clearly say) even if it is just similar in appearance who is a right hand to "Polish" ruler is utterly insulting, at least with this amount of information. I don't mind Polish guy to be bad or evil, people are just people doesn't matter what is your nationality idiots are everywhere.

Maybe I have overreacted a bit, but believe me, this is something that is showing up in media from time to time and it is always wrong. Those things were multiple times in court too (mostly in America). I just would greatly appreciate a bit of historical sensibility and understatement, especially if you have like you said Polish roots.
If we are saying about futuristic fantasy and that no one should care about stuff then just call this country instead of Poland - Boland and don't change anything else inspire in it as much as you want or take off a Nazi eagle and ss skulls from hat of the "Nazi" guy and that would make a huge difference.

Edit:

@XIIIthHarbinger Grow up, please

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

@XIIIthHarbinger Grow up, please

Pretty sure you can guess my response without me typing it out.

 

[Wavelength]

Your three bits of advice are very sage, and I will be using all of them. I've tried to give the character at least a little bit of 'character', but considering the game is about making decisions without game maker hand-holding (or always-true who-to-hate/kill rules like kill-anyone-who's-an-rear end in a top hat-to-you), there is necessarily a lot of give there for the player to shape the character. There will be pathways to avoid traditional morality issues, but I worry a bit what the backlash would be if the player isn't necessarily rewarded for these choices beyond a clear conscience. I'm not going to shy away from traditional moral quandaries, like whether you kill one person by intentional action, or many will die by your inaction. Hopefully I can give the player the confidence that I'm not trying to screw them over, but that'll come in the playtesting.

Great to hear! =) By the way, in a sufficiently immersive game where the player has suspended their disbelief, a clear conscience (or other good feelings) can be far more rewarding than any stat boost or weapon. I'd recommend having the NPCs (and/or environment) also make the moral consequences clear, if possible - so that the player not only feels like they did the right thing (in their own mind), but also sees that the game recognizes it. If you're really slick, you can make it so that three or more different types of player moralities all feel like they did the right thing, based on the consequences of their action in-game!

Ohh I see a topic about my comment. I think that a few commenters here have been carried away...
Just to been clear I don't mind controversy, religion, politics, sex and death topics. My point was a bit beyond that. Of course, I do not know the story and what it is about, what is the exact relation between characters etc. I just have read and seen that a dude in Nazi uniform (what you can clearly say) even if it is just similar in appearance who is a right hand to "Polish" ruler is utterly insulting, at least with this amount of information. I don't mind Polish guy to be bad or evil, people are just people doesn't matter what is your nationality idiots are everywhere.

I just read through the thread in question and in my personal opinion the game isn't doing anything wrong by including this character. He is an NPC, portrayed as a villain, in a cast among other Poles that are portrayed as heroes. And this is all taking place in a postapocalyptic fantasy where any number of crazy things may have happened between now and then. Yes, some Poles are evil, just as some people from any country are evil. Yes, some Poles did sympathize with the Nazis (anti-semitism, for example, was alive and well in many circles there before 1939), just as many Poles proudly and valiantly fought against them to protect what they loved.

If this character were a "Shylock" type (as in, he is portrayed as if all Poles are what he is), it would be heinous. If this character were Pepe Hare wearing a swastika (portrayed as a hero and ally that you are supposed to listen to), it would be bad. If this character gave you quests to go around creating futuristic death camps and you had do it to progress through the game, it would be a horrible feeling to play. I don't see any of those violations here.

Would you agree that this despicable futuristic SS wannabe could exist in the setting? If so, then why is it so bad that he does exist in the setting? Especially if you, as the player, can kill him, spoil his plans, and/or tell him to shove off?

 

[Celianna]

Pretty sure you can guess my response without me typing it out.

[mod]Please tone down your posts with this aggressiveness, or stop posting in here altogether, thank you very much.[/mod]

 

[Carduus]

Aaaaaanyways. Any more advice on how to best handle offense/controversy over your game in general, rather than just in my specific example?

 

[lemons]

Aaaaaanyways. Any more advice on how to best handle offense/controversy over your game in general, rather than just in my specific example?

I think there is a very, very fine line between making a game for an intended target demographic... and accidentally closing the doors for other potential demographics. That being said I don't think it's possible to make every gamer happy. I saw on your game's thread that you put a disclaimer about the topics; this is good!!! (It could be bigger, you should make it bold!) This is singling out your target demographic, and letting them know that, hey, this game makes you think about heavy topics, and all the gamers that love heavy topics will happily click on your game to download it (or buy it if you ever plan on selling it). However, I think, if there are people who are going to read that disclaimer, then offer you a critique on your narrative, I think you should listen to them with an open mind. If they are your target demographic, and they find something that rubs them the wrong way despite being okay with the disclaimer, then you've truly found something worth looking into. You want to keep your target demographic happy! And you don't want your audience to become too niche or to alienate too many people.

And, regardless, be humble, respectful, and kind. Don't insult anybody, even if they insult your game. It's nothing personal, don't make it personal!!! COUGH COUGH ABOVE PEOPLE COUGH COUGH

 

[OwMeEye]

I think the usual polite way to deal with unreasonable complains (if they are unreasonable) is to not respond. This tends to work much better than engaging with them in any kind of conversation. In my experience, there are many people who like to dish out complaints and criticism, but most of them cannot deal with any criticism themselves, so if you criticize them back then they will get deeply offended. Talking to people who don't want to have a conversation is not productive. You need to judge it yourself. If the person is reasonable enough to engage with, maybe you could have an interesting conversation with them?

Sometimes responding to a person can placate them, but other times it can rile them up even more.
Also "uncomfortable" doesn't equal bad, sometimes making people uncomfortable is precisely what an artist wants the art to do. In that case, you could respond like "Oh? That's great, that is exactly what it was supposed to do. Looks like I was successful." ^_^

 

[CannabistGameing]

mostly my 2 cents on controversy in games or any form of art for that matter
as others have said its a fine line to walk, especially today absolutely everyone has there triggers some people love being triggered so much they will gravitate towards anything that triggers them just so they can complain, other will usually avoid it and allegedly the sane man just ignores it. making games is an art form in its own right as an artist it is your job to hold up a big giant mirror to society and say hey this is you, depending on how you go about it this will create controversy or give people a chuckle at themselves or all of the above plus more, as a game maker your job is to also entertain on top of that in order to get the rewards.

Personally I just would let it slide not do anything. I've heard of plenty of people getting burnt out on paying to much mind to controversy and the conversation that surrounds it, it seems to me like you set out to create a little could be wrong again I'm just assuming here you did you job and this person in his own way is pointing that out to you without realizing it he is saying good job. how ever if you did not intend for said issue to arise I'd examine if it's going to be beneficial over the course of the life cycle of the game. if you remove the offensive content after all you may be alienating your target audience that you'd rather not do.

You can in fact make a mint out of utilizing controversy in the right way just look at rock star, those guys came out with the first grand theft auto knew damn well a game whose main game play revolves around car jacking everyone, murdering, and making no apologies for being that guy was going to be free marketing because people talk about that stuff which generates awareness which is good. that being said you have to use that properly as to much of a good thing will poison the well.

 

[Pierman Walter]

The important thing to keep in mind is if their accusations are actually true. It's easy to think of your game as horribly offensive after receiving some bad comments, but more often it's just one person getting offended on someone else's behalf over something that probably isn't offensive, but might be in one specific situation, so you should know, just in case. If my game was truly as offensive as some people tell me it is, it would be an Anti-American Pro-Nazi sex simulator for SJW philosophy majors who only read communist manifestos, Brietbart, and Satanic text, but can't read. As amazing as that game sounds, that obviously isn't my game, so I don't take it too seriously. Some story themes and design choices will get a lot of controversy no matter what you do, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.

 

[kaukusaki]

I personally don't like racist/sexist material, child violence or extreme torture for the lulz even if it's masked as fantasy or futuristic but I play games anyway due to story or interesting mechanics
If I'm bothered by something then good job dev you made a story hit the heart strings. I say don't bother worrying about it. If you try to make a game so pc and for "everyone" to enjoy you'd never get done.
Bad press is still press. Folks are talking about your game and that's what matters