CREATIVE vice-president of Rockstar Games, Dan Houser, has spoken out about the criticism the company has received for games with violent content.
Houser told the New York Times he thought critics of the gaming industry skewed the way people perceive games. “Certainly, he said, “it’s frustrating when people don’t wish to understand what you do and don’t wish to learn.
“Anyone who plays any of our games and wishes to criticise it, having played it, experienced it and thought about it, they are of course welcome to do that. But when large numbers of people criticise something and haven’t even done it, it’s very frustrating. There’s a large amount of the population that lives in relative ignorance and only hears scary stories about what we do,” he added.
Beyond criticising the critics, Houser did grant the interview on the premise that he be asked about upcoming release, The Warriors. He claims it to be a fighting game for people who have been driven away from hard-core fighting games by “15-year-old idiot savants with incredibly good hand-eye co-ordination.”
People get turned off of games, he said because “repeated failures aren’t appealing to them – because that’s what the rest of their life is like. People aren’t playing a game because they want to fail, and we need to understand that.”
While Houser went on to claim that games will become an accepted part of culture in what he called, “a function of time” it is interesting to note that Governor Schwarzenegger once played a villain named Houser in the ultra gory Total Recall.
