Call me sick, but in my time with Fable 2, I’ve tried to kill kids. Multiple times. You see, my character’s evil. He’d do that. He seduces men and women and takes them under the bridge and puts a flintlock rifle in their faces and pulls the trigger without remorse. He soaks up the upgrades to evil and corruption stats like they’re candy.

But kids, no matter what you do, seem to have an invisible forcefield around them. Just like GTA IV, just like in Fallout 3. Games that are about moral choices, that seem to say – we won’t go this far.

In the case of Fallout 3, lead designer Emil Pagliarulo had this to say on the topic:

We began to think, really what benefit would there be in killing the kids in the game? It just seems gratuitous, unnecessary and cruel.

Some people would say it is necessary, though.

Simon Parkin over at GameSetWatch specifically. For him, the moral depth of making the decision to kill or not kill a child is something from which games shouldn’t shy away or bar themselves from. In putting up a big “we’re not going there” sign, developers who would make a game that, on the one hand, lets you blow up an entire suburb (and probably kill some kids in the process) but doesn’t let you kill a child face to face, are failing the potential of their artistic medium:

In removing the opportunity to kill children in their anarchic game, Bethesda has admitted videogames’ ineffectiveness in providing meaningful disincentives and negative repercussions for in-game atrocities. That the team chose to carve the issue out of their game rather than attempt to engage it head on, speaks volumes.

I side with Parkin on this. Though I understand the pressure on Bethesda to avoid as much potential controversy with their game as possible, I do wish more games (like the first two Fallouts) would allow these kinds of moral choices – and if they do deliver them, to be mature, realistic and brave about it.

What do you guys think?

After reading about the suspiciously low Metacritic user score of 6.3 for Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet, I decided to dig into the story a little deeper. For those unfamiliar with the situation, allow me to fill you in.

Metacritic, who by and large is considered the main source for aggregated scoring on the web, offers two score flavors (one for critics and one for users). This is the case across most sites. The problem is, when you are considered the “go to” resource for pretty much anything, there’s a chance that people will make a big deal out of something on your site that they would normally overlook on another.

That said, this specific instance pertains to the scores currently presented on Metacritic for the LittleBigPlanet game. The first, a 9.5 at the time of this article, represents the aggregated score based on several well accepted gaming review sites such as GamePro, IGN, and EuroGamer. The second, more controversial score, is a 6.3, and is compiled via the average score given by a pool of 2,225 user votes.

Gaming news site N4G, which pulls related news from various websites around the web, features a blog post titled “Fanboys pull LittleBigPlanet’s Metacritic score down”, discussing this very topic. Reading some of the furious responses to the score piqued my interest, so I visited the Metacritic site to see first hand what all the fuss was about. Clicking on the “Read user comments” link near the overall user score brings you to the bottom of the page, where the following statement by Marc Doyle, the sites founder, awaits:

“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.”

This prompted me to contact Marc directly in order to get a more complete picture of the situation from his end. Specifically, I felt that gamers would want some clarity regarding the portion of his comment stating that most of the user reviews submitted for LBP were made “before said users [had] played the game.”

Firstly, I wanted to know if he would consider eliminating user reviews submitted before the full release of the game, i.e. reviews clearly submitted based on the open beta alone, or even worse, no experience with the game at all, to which he responded:

” … we won’t be clearing those old scores from LBP when it launches, but we will only post reviews from people who have clearly played the game. All the reviews from fanboys and haters who haven’t played it will just be left out. That is true for all products on Metacritic. Humans actually read all of those user reviews (so we can delete profanity, spoilers, etc.), and those humans are told not to post reviews from people who clearly haven’t played the game.”

He then added that the burden of proof they demand from users submitting reviews prior to a game’s release date is be much higher than those doing so after the fact.

Slightly confused, I asked Marc for some clarification as to how the game could have such a low score, if his team was manually looking over each user review submitted. He stated:

“All the [numeric] scores “count” in the overall user average and total votes tally, but we only post a subset of those as [written] user reviews.”

When talking about the future of the site, as well as other things they are doing to help eliminate this type of fanboy nonsense in the future, Marc had the following to say:

“There will be a Metacritic re-design in the future (can’t say exactly when), and as a part of that process, we’re going to beef up our user registration and community functions so that “stuffing the ballot box” won’t be nearly as easy.

The original idea behind allowing users to write user reviews (and vote on them) was to allow those people (like me) who see advanced screenings of movies and sometimes play games ahead of their true release date to write reviews and have them posted on Metcritic. That’s still the case now.

Over the years, people have, by and large, not exploited the fact that you can vote early. Only recently have people started voting en masse for (and against) games like they’ve done with LBP.

Metacritic’s primary “product” is the Metascore, which is the weighted average of scores from professional critics. We include user reviews for obvious reasons, but because that score can never be 100% reliable, it’s given secondary importance on the site. For example, you can’t sort or search by user scores for any products. That will likely change with the redesign.”

Marc obviously has a solid understanding of the space, its evolution, and the challenges that lie ahead. The fact of matter though, is that currently, anyone can visit Metacritic and leave an abnormally low user score, skewing the average, without necessarily saying anything of value at all. I asked him if this was something the site would be revisiting in the immediate future.

” … nothing should change in this regard until we do the redesign. That tally will remain a raw tally, and only the printed user reviews will be “vetted” as useful reviews from people that we think actually played the game … “

He closed the topic by adding that the specifics of “whatever [they] do with the voting system moving forward [have] yet to be established.”

With October 27th just around the corner, LittleBigPlanet is four LittleBigDays away from being officially released. So while the current 6.3 Metacritic user score has been getting most of the attention on the net, I (like Marc himself), kindly ask that you shift your focus to the 95 out of a 100 Metacritic score the game is receiving from the mainstream media. Everything else will sort itself out in due time.

In the past few hours there have been rampant reports of a LittleBigPlanet delay in Europe.  Retailers have emailed customers who pre-ordered the game, telling them that the title won’t meet its 24th October release.  Sony has now confirmed a worldwide delay, citing an almost unbelievable reason.

LittleBigPlanet has been delayed due to Qur’an references in one of the game’s tracks.  The song, Tapha Niang, appears in the Swinging Safari level, showing the strength of LittleBigPlanet’s soundtrack as you climb the necks of giraffes in an African inspired level.

The album the track is from, Boulevard De L’independance, was released in 2006 by Mali artist Toumani Diabate and revered as a modern African classic. Diabate’s talent for Kora playing (a 21-string harp-like instrument) was described as “a magical ability to improvise scintillating runs out of thin air” by UK Newspaper The Observer and Tapha Niang itself, which you can listen to after this link or at his MySpace page, is a modern adaptation of a traditional piece.

The Qur’an references were brought to the attention of Sony by a PlayStation 3 owner who had early access to the game.  The included quotations, which are currently unconfirmed, are said to include;

‘kollo nafsin tha’iqatol mawt’, or ‘Every soul shall have the taste of death’

‘kollo man alaiha fan’, or ‘All that is on earth will perish’

The forum poster, whose identity will remain unknown, continued to state;

We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Qur’an deeply offending. We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it.

We hope you act immediately to avoid any confusion and unnecessary controversy, and we thank you for making such an amazing game.

Considering Diabate is a devout Muslim, as reported by the Taipei Times, the complaint is even more puzzling.  Whether all Muslims find Qur’an quotations in music offensive is not a question I can personally answer, but there was a similar controversy in the 1980’s when Brian Eno and David Byrne removed a track titled Qur’an from their album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

It’s debatable as to whether Sony should have made the decision to delay the game subsequent to including a two year old song by an African Muslim artist. However, after the controversy over Danish comics including the Prophet Muhammad this could have been a PR disaster for LittleBigPlanet.  SCEE released this statement;

During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Qur’an,” admitted the company in a statement.

We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologise for any offence that this may have caused.

Media Molecule have already created a day 1 patch for the game, but in a strange turn of events, Sony have decided to replace all current discs so as to support those without internet access.  This will be especially costly, since many US retailers have already broken the game’s release date.  Media Molecule writes;

We learnt yesterday that there is a lyric in one of the licensed tracks which some people may find offensive, and which slipped through the usual screening processes. Obviously MM and Sony together took this very seriously. LBP should be enjoyable by all. So within 12 hours of hearing about this issue involving a lyric (in Somalian, I believe!), we prepared an automatic day 0 patch and had a new disk image ready; however a decision was made within Sony that the right thing to do for quality and support of people with no on-line was to replace existing disks. They assure us that they are doing everything in their power to get things straightened out as fast as possible, and will announce dates soon.

Some retailers estimate a delay until November 14th, but GamesIndustry.biz understands that LittleBigPlanet might not be pushed back quite so far.  We’ll keep you informed.

[UPDATE] – Sony will begin to ship LittleBigPlanet copies to retailers in the US on October 27th. There have been no announcements concerning Europe as of yet.  Source: PlayStation Blog

[UPDATE 2] – LittleBigPlanet should be released on October 31st in the UK and presumably the rest of Europe.

[UPDATE 3] – Sony has confirmed that LittleBigPlanet will release in Europe week commencing November 3rd, and more specifically, November 5th in the UK. MCVUK

Is That a Bull Doing a S*** I Spy?

I’m sure you’re all well aware of the controversy at this point, but we haven’t gotten a whole lot out of Jeff Gerstmann’s firing out of ex-employer Gamespot besides a few vague comments out of public relations. Well, now they’re ready to talk. A new “full disclosure” post on the site attempts to address several questions, but their answers feel less like explanations and more like excuses.

First and foremost, it’s important to note that Gamespot insists they have nothing to hide and that you’re getting the whole nine. “In the spirit of full disclosure” has never been more figurative, though. The post consists of questions “authorized” to by management and we suspect the answers are, too. Take what would likely be the most important of them, “Why was Jeff fired?” The reply:

“Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser–it was due purely to internal reasons.”

In the previous query as to whether or not Gerstmann was actually fired, they do mention that it was after an “internal review process by the managerial team.” Still elusive, doesn’t explain a thing we don’t already know. But it gets better when they get into the reasons for modifying the written review as well as pulling the video, including an open admission of retroactively modifying content.

“Jeff’s supervisors and select members of the edit team felt the review’s negativity did not match its “fair” 6.0 rating. The copy was adjusted several days following its publication so that it better meshed with its score, which remained unchanged.”

“The morning of Wednesday, November 14, the video was taken down due to concerns of quality. Specifically, its audio was deemed inferior due to a faulty microphone. There were also concerns about the limited amount of footage that was unrepresentative of the game in the review.”

And why wasn’t it reposted?

“Due to the crush of high-profile titles being released the following week, there were insufficient resources to reshoot and re-edit the video review.”

In order to save face, they decided to repost the original video review (opting out earlier because it would “exacerbate the situation”). It would seem more damning now, considering they also point to the Youtube version as if to say, “Look! See! We’re not trying to pull the wool over your eyes! Really, we aren’t! Believe us? Please? We have cake!” But really, microphone issues? If they even tried to hint at a precedent for pulling reviews on bad audio, it would actually sound reasonable.

The article goes on to talk about the way the Kane and Lynch skinned ads were handled, why fellow staffer Tim Tracy split in the midst of the whole debacle, and other credibility issues.

Unexpectedly, Gamespot continues to stand behind a veil of ethical impunity, but it seems to do more harm than good. It’s hard to believe that this was a series coincidences, especially when the answers feel so scripted.

If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the report (and we suspect you are), hit the link below. Apparently, the discussion will continue on the site’s podcast “The HotSpot,” while “On The Spot” will feature a Gerstmann tribute of it’s own.

Source: Gamespot on “Gerstmanngate”