Letters to the Editor 10/6

To the Editor,

Your Oct. 5 editorial subscribes to an unfair double standard. Judging by your… To the Editor,

Your Oct. 5 editorial subscribes to an unfair double standard. Judging by your weak counterargument and the fact that you cite only Fox News and MSNBC, I’ll assume you’ve overlooked this double standard. Allow me to explain. The film “Hurt Locker,” for example, takes place during a contemporary conflict, and it wins awards. Why shouldn’t game developers be granted the same freedom? Indeed, games are for “entertainment and profit,” but so are movies. The video game industry will never mature if it isn’t given room to explore more relevant themes and issues. Besides, the same way a young man or woman can choose to enlist, “families who are burying their children” can choose whether or not to view a war film or video game. The majority shouldn’t be denied a more meaningful experience because a handful of people — who likely wouldn’t have played the game in the first place — claim offense. Your disproportionate counterargument states that “it could be argued that the game will educate players about the true experience of Special Operations soldiers.” This is downright asinine. No one is really arguing that a video game will produce a “true experience,” with its regenerating health, combat perks and respawn points. See, that’s not the point. The point is that game developers deserve the freedom to portray, within reason and good taste, what they want to portray. That EA was pressured into removing the word “Taliban” in the first place is what we should really be mad about.

Dan Hoyt

School of Arts & Sciences

To the Editor,

I would like to respond to your editorial piece yesterday on the forthcoming Medal of Honor game. Your argument has a few key and irresponsible flaws. First, your concern over its reception has everything to do with an ignorant public and nothing to do with the game itself. Take issue with people, not EA. Second, you make a large leap in the second half to call the game “distasteful, disrespectful and inappropriate.” As stated in your article, the game has yet to be released, meaning no one on your staff has played it. In fact, EA has been unwilling to release much information on the game at all, so you would seem to be without grounds to proclaim it as such. The attention to detail EA has paid is not just to sell games but to make them accurate, and therefore respect the men who are involved in the conflict. Last, your wrap-up calling games nothing more than attempts at profit is insulting and shows a lack of awareness toward current media. If it is inappropriate to make a game, it should be as well to release any book, movie or other piece of media. And that certainly is not the case. Until people from other media cease to regard video games as a lesser entity, they will continue to look foolish, biased and ignorant as you have made yourselves appear. But if you wish to deem it nothing more than profit, you cannot take issue with its impact. After all, it’s just entertainment right?

Samuel Horn

School of Arts & Sciences

To the Editor,

Yesterday’s editorial, “EA should stick to The Sims,” makes it sound as if entertainment media depicting concurrent wars is a new and disturbing trend. Wonder Woman fought Nazis (by their name) in the 1940s. Afghans and Iraqis die on cinema screens and television sets by day. There’s no difference when the Taliban appear in a video game — its presence even serves to educate players on the asymmetry of the conflict. But video games are “just for entertainment and profit?” Video games are an emerging art form with the same capacity for education, narrative and characterization. You would not condemn cinema or literature with this generalization.

The Pitt News adopts the position of the cowardly who would censor for sensitivity.

EA has every right to portray the Taliban by name — and art (like newspapers) has a noble tradition of offending audiences through realism and honesty. When this offense occurs, our society benefits from discourse and education, never through censorship. Stand up for their right. Subtly, The Pitt News again mistakenly called the Park51 community center a “mosque at the site of the Sept. 11 attacks.” The center is planned two blocks away and will not be visible from the site of the World Trade Center.

This repeated error shows despicable journalistic laziness and, again, a subscription to the epidemic opinion of the ignorant.

The Pitt News’ position is misled and fallacious. I hope that, in the future, the editorial writers offer provocative, original opinions ­— with balls.

Connor Shioshita Pickett

School of Arts & Sciences