LadyICE van Unreal Kingdom heeft ivm de recente aandacht voor geweld in games in de Amerikaanse media een mailtje gedropt bij Tim Sweeney van Epic. Hier heb je z'n reply:
LadyICE: I'm sure you're aware of the recent bruhaha regarding the possible correlation of violence in video games, and the steady increase in violence amongst our nation's teens.Tim: Yes. Very much to the contrary, teen violence has been decreasing steadily over the past 20 years. The world really needs to make a distinction between media coverage and genuine statistics. The statistics paint a very different picture, regarding the magnitude of teen violence and correlation with various forms of media, than one would guess based on volume of coverage of the tragedies that have recently occured.
LadyICE: I came across this article today at Next Generation Online ( http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/6590.html ), and in reading it, was curious to see how Epic will handle the possible onslaught of negative media coverage of Unreal/UT. If this article is correct in predicting that there will be major media outlets looking to uncover only the negative aspects of our industry, I personally feel that Epic will be a sure target. The reason I say this is because a couple of weekends ago, during a segment on the incident in Columbine on 60 Minutes, there was a screenshot of some kids playing video games and Unreal was one of them. My question to you is will Epic be doing anything different in their E3 preview version of UT in order to circumvent possible negative exposure by the media?
Tim: Unreal Tournament contains violence, and we're neither going to play that down to calm the media, or overemphasise it to get free publicity. Given our gameplay and visual/artistic goals, we think Unreal Tournament has an appropriate level of violence for the genre, and also that games of this sort aren't appropriate for everyone, especially young children. We believe in labeling our games with ratings (as we did with Unreal), so that people know exactly what they're getting when they buy Unreal and Unreal Tournament. As with R-rated movies, we don't believe our games are appropriate for young children, and we advocate parental involvement and responsibility in their kids' game buying. In the long-term, we expect the industry and/or government will get together and put the same appropriate controls over video games as with movies, and we support that.
-Tim
