Potty mouths in gaming

[yourbeliefs]

I recently got a copy of Battlefield 3, and unlike most I decided to try out the single player campaign. And the first thing that I noticed was not the beautiful graphics or the frantic action, but rather the fact that all the characters in the game were throwing around the F word like they were going to win a prize if they kept doing so. After a while I started to get distracted by it, almost like in my head I was trying to keep a counter as to how many F bombs they could drop and whether or not it was greater than actual bombs I would see in the game.

Am I the only one who is starting to get sick and tired of games crowbarring in swears (particularly the F word) into their scripts? Don't get me wrong, I understand that swearing is a natural (if rather crude) part of our language, and honestly if one were to hang out with me for a half hour odds are they'd hear a few F bombs thrown into the conversation. Still, I don't understand throwing in so many swears. It's like hearing a kid or a tween using them, like they just learned them and they think it makes them sound cool.

Perhaps I'm just a bit jaded because I remember a time when swearing in a videogame was like "Woah, did they really just say that?" I remember being less than 10 years old and seeing the game "Aliens" on my cousins' Apple IIc and being floored when they showed Ripley saying "Get away from her you BITCH!" I remember being taken aback by the salty language Duke Nukem spurted out in his classic game (obviously not talking about the one that came out last year.) Hell I remember being surprised when I played GTA San Andreas and they used the F word and even the N word.

To be fair, sometimes excessive foul language is appropriate or is at least understandable in certain games where it's being used for a crazy effect, such as by Suda 51 (Killer 7, No More Heroes, etc) or where it's done in complete self-parody (House of the Dead Overkill, Madworld.) When it's being passed off seriously or completely straight faced like it is in BF3 it just feels out of place and hurts the experience in my opinion. I definitely understand that odds are, US soldiers do not have the cleanest of mouths, but I seriously doubt they really use the F word in literally every other sentence and even in scenarios where they aren't even using it for effect.

Am I just crazy or do I have a legitimate complaint here?

 

[raoul5788]

No, you aren't crazy, at least this isn't the proof! It's part of the dumbing down of nearly everything.

 

[dangue]

No, you aren't crazy, at least this isn't the proof! It's part of the dumbing down of nearly everything.

I'm not sure how this is reflective of the dumbing down of things. Unless you mean to imply that repeated use of the F word is lazy and the content creators need to be more inventive and add variety to the expletives and avoid overuse of a basic like the F word.

It reminds me of an MP3 I once downloaded off of Napster in college describing the various meanings/contexts in which the F word can be used. It was both hilarious (narrator had an erudite British professor voice working) and quite informative.

Cursing being more prevalent may be an indication that society is becoming cruder, but I don't think it's a sign of dumbing down of something. I will say that it does make me that much more appreciative of lines like in the Avengers when Loki called Black Widow a "mewling qu*m" (my apologies if that is not bleeped out enough). First, I was amazed that it got past the censors. Second, I felt like the diction was exactly what Loki would say in a situation like that. Third, it was rather brilliantly executed, the people I saw it with didn't catch it and it probably went over the heads of those oh so impressionable youths. For the record, I appreciated the line in the context of the characters in the movie, I do not endorse the use of such sexist language in real life.

 

[yourbeliefs]

I don't know if it's necessarily dumbing down or bad writing or a combination of the two. I think I'd have to lean towards the latter because to be fair, while video game writing quality has increased significantly over the past few years, it's still not what I would consider "Good" overall. For every Bioware and Rockstar there's about 5 companies still pumping out stuff that wouldn't pass a college script writing class. I find it amusing that so many people complain about salty language used by players online, yet I find that they tend to swear less than the various NPCs and such in the single player campaigns. I do wonder what happened in the industry that made "R" rated material so acceptable, when for so long, mainstream games rarely went beyond "PG" rated stuff. And while I'm not claiming that things were necessarily better in the "PG" era of language, I just wish that game writers would exercise some more restraint when throwing around these heavy hitting words.

As far as that Avengers reference goes, I think that went through because probably 99% of the American audience had no idea what that phrase really meant since it mainly use in England. I had no idea it was even in it and had to Google the phrase to realize that it is essentially like calling a woman the C-word (which I must say British people seem to throw around with alarming frequency.) With that phrase, I'm an adult and I had to look it up. With the F-word, I and LOTS of other people don't need to look it up to figure out what it means. Maybe I can add that to my repertoire of things to call my wife when she's making me mad (kidding).

 

[raoul5788]

My comment wasn't directed at the gaming industry. I know nothing about it since I don't play video games. I was referring to the general overall slide in respect that many seem to have for others. The fact is that you could say that about any point in history!