As the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) gets set for its 21st annual show this week, game publishers are faced with the dilemma of how to integrate their bombastic, explosive, often gun-soaked entertainment marketing blitz with the sense of national tragedy emanating from the historic mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Speaking to Ars, the head of the organization running E3 says that participating companies are tweaking their convention plans somewhat out of respect for and sensitivity to those affected by Sunday morning's tragic events.
Gallagher elaborated that individual publishers have "limited some of the tag lines or Twitter handles that might seem to be non-responsive to the national mood" but didn't go into specifics on which companies had changed course or specifically how. "I think those are good steps that they've taken, and we commend them for it, but each company is approaching it in their own way," he said.
"I think you'll see this manifest in different ways by different companies. Overall, there's a sensitivity, there's absolutely a sense of shared grief, I'm quite certain, in this industry with the families of the victims... There's a respect for that."
Electronic Arts' pre-E3 press conference, which took place early Sunday afternoon, didn't make any specific mention of the tragedy or make any apparent alterations to the presentation of gun-heavy gameplay of games like Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2. Bethesda's Sunday evening press conference featured presenters wearing rainbow pride pins in an apparent subtle nod to the victims of the attack.
Elsewhere in the entertainment world, the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton removed muskets from a performance at the Tony Awards Sunday night.
Even as the game industry reacts to a "monstrous" attack that has cast "a significant cloud over our country at the moment," Gallagher said that reaction would not extend to altering the underlying games being shown. "It's more in how the products are projected from here... not changing anything about the games themselves... "
"That [attack] was an act of terrorism and an act of hate," he continued. "It has no place in this industry, it's not on the show floor, and it's absolutely, completely unrelated to anything that we stand for as the ESA or E3."
Despite the tweaks in the marketing image coming out of E3, Gallagher was adamant that the game industry shouldn't feel any sense of responsibility for the "atrocity" in Orlando. Furthermore, he said, the very idea that in-game violence contributes to real-world violence has become increasingly outdated in the five years since the Supreme Court decision granting games full First Amendment protection as speech."When it comes to the larger issue of violence in our country and gun violence in video games, I think we're in a much better place today with people's universal understanding that this industry does not cause any of the violence that you see in our society," Gallagher said. "You have a realization that this is entertainment."
That realization extends to the research community, which had 200 scientists sign an amicus brief rejecting the notion that games lead to violent behavior, Gallagher said. It also extends to members of Congress, 104 of whom are members of the bipartisan E-TECH caucus and who, Gallagher says, "stand with the industry" as a force of job creation and innovation.
"[The game industry] has been incredibly proactive about answering any concerns that reside in that space," he said. "The legal system and regulatory system, on a state and federal level, have showed we're at a very different place, that the connection that was alleged in the past has been proven not to exist today."
"E3 is not related to or contingent on [last night's] act of horror," he added. "This is an industry that's very vibrant, very much part of our culture, part of our society. It's an economic juggernaut, and E3 is about projecting the full depth of this industry, including all of the titles you're going to see on the floor."
reader comments
254