Deadly battles continue to power hit video games
LOS ANGELES: Bandits, soldiers, demons, zombies, aliens and other enemies will be shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, incinerated, or even blow up on the show floor of the Electronic Entertainment Expo yesterday. Deadly conflicts played out with stunning arsenals in creative fictional settings remain at the heart of blockbuster action video games, with imagery getting richer and fight mechanics smoother due to improving technology.
There was no shortage of bloody battle in games spotlighted at media events hosted by video game industry titans in the days leading up to E3 showcase. And a hot video game trend now is “Battle Royale” death-match games such as “Fortnite” and “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” in which players vie against one another to be the sole survivor. Shooting and swordplay have long been staples in a global video game industry that the Entertainment Software Association said took in a total of $116 billion worldwide last year.
Violence in games has the trade group working to make sure politicians including US President Donald Trump understand that there is no link between that kind of play and what people do in the real world, ESA chief executive Michael Gallagher
told AFP on Monday. Trump and the ESA met earlier this year after a slaughter at a US high school.
Some blamed violence in media such as video games, not access to guns, for such shootings. “One thing that has sunk in to a great degree is the truth that video game violence has nothing to do with real-world violence,” Gallagher said of meetings with politicians on federal and state levels. “There are 2.6 billion gamers around the world, yet these outbreaks are uniquely American. It has got to be something else.”
A growing number of policy numbers are “rejecting the notion outright” that video games cause people to commit actual violence, according to Gallagher. “The tide has turned significantly,” he added. In the US, 22 states offer video game companies economic incentives to set up shops and create jobs, according to Gallagher. Some 45,000 industry members are expected to attend E3, along with 15,000 gamers who bought tickets to get access to the show floor and its more than 200 exhibitors, the ESA said.
Blockbusters shaped by fans French video game giant Ubisoft is teaming up with a firm founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt to crowd source material for a forthcoming title, the companies announced Monday on the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Ubisoft has long tapped into feedback from players while designing games, but the latest step will allow some to make content woven into scenes.
An invitation to collaborate went live Monday on the website of Gordon-Levitt’s Hit Record, with the first project being to make music that one might hear on a space pirate radio station in Ubisoft’s “Beyond Good and Evil 2,” a science fiction shooter crafted to be a space opera. “The point of Hit Record is for people to make things together,” he said. “This is the first time we are going to make assets going into a video game; which I think is really cool.” “This is not just submitting songs,” he added. “We will be making the music together.” Someone in one country may come up with a baseline, and another elsewhere the drum beat or various instrumentals, according to Gordon-Levitt. Anyone whose work is feature in the game will get paid, although he didn’t specify how much.
Among other coming games shown off by Ubisoft was psychological thriller “Transference,” a collaboration with another Hollywood star Elijah Wood, which will see players grapple with twists and mysteries in a deranged mind. Wood who described himself as an avid gamer, promised during the event that the game “will leave you with haunting memories long after you put down the controller.”
Ubisoft also provided glimpses of an eagerly-awaited sequel to its historybased adventure franchise “Assassin’s Creed” set in Greece during the time of Socrates, and roused the crowd with a marching band and colorfully garbed performers introducing a new entry to the hit “Just Dance” dancing game franchise.