The Last of Us Part 2 is the culmination of this decade of big-budget games interrogating dissonance. Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted, have finally bridged the gap between story and action, dragging the story kicking and screaming and gurgling on its own blood to align with what you actually do in their games: kill people. The result is surreal, an expensive narrative experiment depicting what would actually happen if a real human being behaved like a video game character.
Ellie can’t change. She can’t change because AAA games can’t change. Let’s say Ellie learns her lesson, that violence begets violence. That to save the world and herself, she must put down the gun. What would she even do? Literally, what would a AAA game even allow for her to do? AAA game design is built and marketed around killing.
"It’s s a real big problem because killing people — it’s easy to just kill people,” says game director Tom Heaton. ‘We have to kill people in really entertaining ways."
— but the team does have limits to what they’ll include. “We wouldn’t show really gory stuff,” Heaton says. “But we might pull the camera away at the last minute. The other thing we’d stay away from is anything coercive or things like that.”
“The most provocative thing about the meeting may have been the presentation of an 88-second reel of footage from violent video games. It contains footage from M-rated games such as Wolfenstein, Fallout 4, and Call of Duty, including the notorious No Russian mission that allowed players to witness or participate in a massacre of civilians at an airport. The video is currently hosted on the White House’s YouTube page, unlisted. The clips appear to be ripped from YouTubers’ footage of the game as well as from the gaming outlet Giant Bomb.”
Here’s the funny thing: When I took this on everything I’ve done was an R-rated comedy. I got so many emails from moms saying, ‘I just hope you can make this family-friendly like the original movie.’ I was like, wait a minute! They say ‘shit’ constantly, there’s a blowjob scene, they smoke endlessly…
‘Ghostbusters’ Director Paul Feig on the Film’s Misogynistic Trolls: ‘It’s Not for All These Guys!’ (via merlin)
As long as there is no violence, everything’s OK.
A Brief History of Gore [in Video Games]
Sources say it's expected to be an edgy, R-rated take on the material.
Based on my time playing Borderlands 2, and Tales from the Borderlands, I would say that this is not an "R-rated take", but just a direct translation.
Source: hollywoodreporter.com
This is just the beginning of awkward things VR will bring us as entertainment experiences.
Source: polygon.com
AV Club review by Alex McCown
Who doesn’t love watching scantily clad women having their body parts sawed off? Lots of people, really: In its simplest form, horror is grotesque emotional allegory, taking the usual beats of drama (Going through a breakup feels like having your heart ripped out!) and cutting right to the icky stuff (Oh God, someone’s heart is literally being ripped out!). What’s commonly referred to as “exploitation” horror does one better: Dispensing with anything not essential to the primal concepts of sex and violence, it gleefully leads the viewer straight into the Manichean world of murderers and nymphos, where you’re either killing or being killed—or getting naked, in which case you’re probably halfway to the second option already. The appeal, as with anything, lies in the execution (or executions, really), and in the world of crazy, bloody mayhem, 1982’s Pieces remains an under-seen treasure.
Source: The A.V. Club
Allegra Frank at Polygon:
But 17-year-olds aren't actually adults, and many R-rated movies aren't mature, either — Deadpool included, in many ways. Adding in so-called "adult themes" for extra attention and shock value doesn't make these movies sufficiently or appealingly mature. It's just a cheap ploy to get people talking or to mislead them into thinking that these action flicks are growing up.
When superhero movies do want to grow up, that should be welcomed, regardless of rating. But adding in pointless gore and abrasive language in the hopes that people will swarm to the box office is disappointing on every level. Not only that, but it's grossly unnecessary.
Source: polygon.com
Ben Kuchera at Polygon:
Before we even get to parenting, it's important to note that violent situations feel different in VR for everyone. It has nothing to do with your age.
"VR absolutely changes how we think about violence," [Steve Bowler] told Polygon. "It's frighteningly real when you're in there. I jokingly aimed the gun at my face and pulled the trigger, and the act of doing that drastically changed my heart rate."
[…]
"The violence, any violence, feels so much more real than anything else you've ever experienced that your body reacts to it immediately with fight or flight responses," Bowler explained.
Source: polygon.com
Again, all of these works use their extreme content in the service of stories that reflect on themselves and their genre. They’re also all narratively sophisticated - not only is the content for grown-ups, but so is the storytelling (in 1987 Time gave The Dark Knight Returns a bad review, complaining "The stories are convoluted, difficult to follow and crammed with far too much text.”). All of these works also break superheroes completely - in Marvelman they become literal gods, in Watchmen they end up as ineffectual dorks who are unable to stop the villain from saving the world, and in The Dark Knight Returns they are explicitly political operators and, in the end, revolutionaries.
Source: birthmoviesdeath.com