Ex-GTA developer explains why he'll never go back to violent games

[Zod95]

"I would always kind of defend the games we were making and I was pretty proud of being involved, but then when I would visit my grandmother in highly religious Alabama and have to explain what I do for a living, I didn't feel so great about explaining to them that I was a part of 'that game' they've been hearing about. I think that's what sort of planted the seeds of me wanting to work on different types of games."

Then, he doesn't know the real extent of a violent game. Violent games are not to make people more violent. They require to be played by mature people that enjoy the experience of a violent story or action. It's like sad movies are not to make people unhappy (so they require to be watched by who has a happy and stable life). Maturity, in its multiple dimensions, can be seen as the key word to explain all of this. People need it to drive a car or to use a knife. It's not that we can say they aren't dangerous objects, I would rather say we need maturity to use them. We also need it to be affected by a sad story or to simply understand a joke. In the end, it's all a matter of understanding what we are dealing with. And the problem with videogames is that they are still a novelty and they are improving very fast, so it's natural there are many people that still don't understand them and are only able to highlight the dangers inherent to them. If this game producer isn't capable of understanding the extent of his own job and explaining it to the others (even to his grandmother), then he shouldn't deserve to be a game producer. In his next visit to Alabama, how will he be able to explain to his grandmother what he does in case someone claims the videogames he produces make people addictive to them?

 

"But thinking of ways to create non-violent games is important to generating meaningful narrative in games"

I simply don't understand why. What does non-violent games have that violent games can't have too?

 

"you want to have conflict because that's how you can generate interest, and oftentimes the simplest or most base way to do that is through violence that isn't necessarily tied into a deeper, more meaningful story"

It isn't necessarily tied into a deeper story, indeed. But is the non-violent content necessarily tied into a deeper story either? I don't think so.