Are games violent?
I’ve been prompted to write this, despite my busy schedule, by a posting on gamedesign-l yahoo group that suggests that there a lot of violent games and that to find non violent games you should look at the serious games summit. (actually he was looking for conflict resolution games that dont have violence, which is a bit more specific).
Anyway, I thought about it while making my lunch, and as this is ostensibly my lunch break (thats the bit of the day where I eat and work, as compared to the rest of the day where I just work!) I could blog about this.
We often hear about the violent games that permeate our industry, that all games are violent affairs that will corrupt our childrens brains (much like they castigated rock music, drugs, poxy pinball, tv and movies in years past). I dont think that this is true, so I looked over to my copy of MCV that arrived this morning, which I still get because I think it’s important to keep up on the trade, even if it is more retail based than Develop, and also because it comes weekly, and has the ChartTrack sales charts.
Analysis
I looked over the sales charts, and looked at the top 3 sellers in the UK on platforms Wii, DS, PSP, PS2, XBOX360, PC, PC Budget and All Formats, here is the list.
- Wario Ware: Smooth Moves
- Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- Wii Play
- New Super Mario Bros
- Brain Training
- Brain Academy
- GTA: Vice City Stories
- PES 6
- FIFA 07
- Need For Speed: Carbon
- Scarface
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
- Gears Of War
- Rainbow Six: Vegas
- The Sims
- World of Warcraft
- Sega Rally
- Football Manager 2007
- The Sims 2: Pets
So breaking up by violent to non violent, I make 8 violent to 11 non-violent, with the violent consisting of 5 FPS games, 2 combat oriented games(WOW and Zelda), and SMB, which is arguably violent.
The non-violent games consist of Wario Ware, which is it’s own category, 2 brain training games, 3 simulations, 2 racing games and 3 sports titles.
So I reckon there over 50% of top selling games are non violent in the traditional shooting / stabbing / theowing shells at people sense.
Looking at the Top 40 all formats, Lost Planet is the number 1, but the next top 4 are all non violent, with Canis Canem Edit in 6th place being violent. In fact 10 of the top 20 all formats games are non-violent according to my rating system, and 19 of the top 40.
Summary
So what does this say to us? Well firstly, violent games do sell, and sell remarkably well, accounting for half of the top 40 crossplatform sales this week, but suprisngly even to me, the other half are all non-violent.
Secondly, it seems that Pc game players love simulation games more than anything else, with 5 of the budget price pc games being The Sims, and 3 of the Full price top 10 being The Sims 2, and Football Manager and Champ Man also present.
So my final thoughts (ala Jerry Springer) is be excellent to one another, and remember that you don’t have to look totally outside the box to find non-violent games on your console