3. Introduction to Critical Perspectives

Legal Issues

As we further stray into a more electronic and internet based life style, we as a society are being faced with problems regarding to multiple outbursts of offensive and mature content. There’s a lot of legal issues regarding to games, one big point being that i myself have played over 18 games yet i am only 16. This is a problem, and i easily was able to access these games, with only a few clicks. If i can, that means anyone can, and younger audiences can. From a personal stand point, i play the game Rainbow Six Siege a lot, where it is rated 18 and is an online multiplayer shooter. Every time i go into the in- game team chat, there is guaranteed a younger person than 18 playing with me, (Recognizable by their manner of offensive language and high-tend voice).
It is illegal and you are not allowed to play an over 18 game if you are younger, yet so many people do it, and it’s that easy that everyone does it. Game companies do nothing to stop this, except go the easy route and have a flashed “Are you 18” or “Enter your date of birth”. Example of this is steam, this is my going on a 18 rated game.

Another act of a legal issue would be that of Loot Boxes.
The community of gamers and society as a whole have different views on loot boxes, that of negative and positive and even no views on the matter. I am personally in act of having loot boxes stay, as i have strong views on for which they are not as bad as first presented. Though many legal actions have been taken against game companies (Such as EA and Blizzard), they are still here and lurking inside of most AAA games. One that comes to mind first is the online multiplayer game Overwatch.

It features “Loot boxes”, which gives the player four items every time they open it. This is guaranteed every time, and there is four kinds of item you can get, that being; Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary. With every lootbox, there has to be at least one thing that is rare and above, and it’s impossible just to get all common items.

Many players find loot boxes to be addictive and real life problems, such as gambling addictions, can be affected by the loot, and yet Overwatch doesn’t do anything to stop this. Neither does any game company, and there it remains until a law suit goes through where loot boxes get banned. But until then, we are in a world with loot boxes. Legally, they aren’t issues with them. However it depends on what country you are currently living/based in, as they are under review in many places in the world. However ethically, i believe that it is your choice at the end of the day and though it is very in-sensitive to say, the player chooses to buy the loot boxes. But in some cases, as in if children were to buy them, many parents add their credit card’s to game console accounts and the child can easily access this and buy multiple loot boxes for their own delight. Personally, this has happened in my house and my younger sibling had bought several loot boxes on Overwatch. Obviously with the case of children, there is not much parents can do apart from taking their details off the game/console.

Equality and Representation

Within the games industry (That and the whole working class), there is a small amount of women working in the industry. Currently, 51% of people who play games in the world, are women. That is over fifty percent, more than men, yet they’re dominating the working scene and have women being the minority. This is a terrible thing that needs to be sorted, and the fact that it still hasn’t, even in 2019, is appalling. The industry believe women to be less work-fit than men, despite them being just the same. The stereotype that was formed greatly by previous decades and the world wars have carried on, and needs to stop. Women, all women are just the same as men. Men are just the same as women, we are all equal, we shouldn’t discriminate each other based on appearance or the sex for which you identify as. The games industry is a no exception to this crime, and continue with not paying women as much as their male co-workers as if they are doing nothing wrong. A study was done in 2018, where different companies were focused on to see how big of a pay gap was shown, and the results were terrible.
Rockstar North, (Known for series such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption) has a 64% cut between male to female hourly wages, which is the largest gap in the whole game industry in the United Kingdom. An example, is that if a man is payed £1 a female would only get 36 pence. Again, i have to raise awareness that this is a horrible act of misogyny and has to be stopped. However, Rockstar North also has recently published a picture on their twitter of the “#womenbehindthegames”, where it had all the female employees at Rockstar North (As shown below).

Though here i can count only 73 (Done by counting how many people were present in picture, this is an estimate and some employees could have been absent for this picture) there is actually 650 employees currently working there, and as that picture of the women employees was taken on twitter in March 8th of this year, that means that there is only 11% of females working, whilst there is 89% of men. There is no official employees data anywhere for Rockstar North, nor on their website. And i had to carry this out myself, which means either Rockstar North is keeping quiet about this or they do not care enough to be more grateful towards their female employees.
https://womeningamesconference.co.uk/

Semiotics

Semiotics is the act of knowing what a certain sign or symbol means because of it’s mass appeal, which goes into general knowledge. For a most recognisble example, looking at the McDonald golden arches, you could easily recognise that it is of the Restaurant, and i performed a practical example on this by asking my friends if they knew what it was by just looking at it;

This practical worked, with several of my friends (Without being prompted) realising that the M represented for McDonald’s. This is a famous use of Semiotics, as McDonald’s golden arches are easily recognizable by the public because the mass amount of market and restaurants that are around us every where.
They use this as a semiotic to have people look at the aforementioned golden arches and know that their is a restaurant there. Or even the colour, which can be used in every day activities, reminds the person of McDonald’s which could cause them to go at a later date. It is a clever act of semiotics, and there is nothing quite as recognisable as McDonald’s arches.

I belive that an inclusion of this in general media can help improve it’s popularity and/or help people with understanding what it is, so that they can easily spot it out and know from one symbol what it is. It can be a great marketing technique, as you could put one symbol on a billboard with the text “Coming soon” or something as generic, and people could potentioally understand what they symbol is coming from and what it’s trying to represent, or in this cause actually doing.