[BLOG] Major US advertiser bans adverts of "the ultimate political strategy game" for political content.

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CrimsonShade
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[BLOG] Major US advertiser bans adverts of "the ultimate political strategy game" for political content.

Post by CrimsonShade »

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Some news stories make you smile or laugh, others make you cry or rage. Then there are the elite few that make you go "WTF?" Put this firmly in the latter category.





When Democracy 3 - the latest title in Positech Games' series of PC-based Political Strategy games - was preparing for its US launch, not one person broke a sweat. The game, self-dubbed "the ultimate political strategy game," was launched on Steam on October 14, 2013 - as well as a retail game for PC, Mac and Linux - with nobody raising an eyelid to its game-play simulating the career as president or prime minister of a democratic government, the very theme of the series' eight-year history. So why, in all seriousness, is a "major U.S. advertising agency" refusing to run banner ads promoting the game due to its "political content"?





Cliff Harris, the founder of Positech Games, reported on his blog yesterday that an ad for the recently-released Democracy 3 was deemed by a "BIG game-advertising agency" to be inappropriate to run on a particular website. When Harris asked why, he was told, "We can not promote any politics as this is a sensitive topic."





Harris was noticeably unimpressed with the response, believing politics is a MUCH less sensitive subject than some of the OTHER things commonly featured in today's games that go without criticism - as evidenced by the next statement on his blog:



"I bet ads for games like Hitman, or GTA, or games where you get slow-mo closeups of people's skulls being blasted apart by high-caliber bullets are just fine. But discuss income tax? OH NOES THE WORLD WILL END! It's stuff like this that sometimes makes me ashamed to be in this industry. Half of the industry wants to be grown up and accepted as art, the other half have the mentality of seven year olds. I'm pretty cynical, but I never expected my ads for a game about government-simulation to be too controversial to be shown (for money no less...)."




True enough. What's more, the whole controversy smacks to me as discriminating against Democracy 3 rather than a genuine concern. After all, politics in video games is not exactly unheard of - there have been games as far back as the NES era where you played as a president of the United States or leader of some fictionalised land. For example, how about Civilization? A real-time strategy series inviting players to "Build an empire to stand the test of time", Civilization has a much longer history than Democracy, beginning in 1991 in the DOS computer era and still going 20 years later. The games involve you making decisions on places to build; wars to fight; and even setting diplomatic rules - which makes them also political in nature even if it's not as obviously signposted. If political content is really as big a problem as this unidentified agency is implying, why has Civilization had a free pass for so long? Here's hoping common sense prevails - though sadly, it seems to do so less often these days...
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