Well IGN had an article indicating guns are holding back video gaming, and talked about some Australian made VR game called "The American Dream" where instead of hands, you have guns. There was even a line in the article about the United States Defining itself by guns. The author of the article is also Australian. A little too much characterizing America by what they see in the media and in movies I would say, as if I shaped my view of Australia by Crocodile Dundee. She said it wasn't a "pearl clutching article" and her top 5 games of all time are Half-Life 2, Shadow of the Colussus, Mass Effect 3, Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 4. So 2 of her top 5 games have shooting as the primary gameplay, and 2 more have a lot of shooting in them. Anyway, her point was that shooting as a gameplay mechanic was stifling innovation, and that all developers seemed to feel obligated to put guns in their game.
Even if you ignore all of the fantasy RPGs and platformers that don't have guns and want to extend the argument against guns, to video game violence in general, there are plenty of games not based on violence.
In the comments, I named about 5 well known games that have come out in the past year alone that didn't have killing as a gameplay element and I was poo-pooed and told that wasn't nearly enough.
Just seems to me that there is too much complaining from a vocal minority telling developers what they need to put in games. Developers and publishers need to ignore the noise and determine what people want by the sales.
How many people complaining about not having enough female protagonists bought: Gone Home, Life is Strange, Dishonored 2, Beyond Good and Evil, Recore, Mirror's Edge, Syberia, American McGee's Alice, Perfect Dark, Bloodrayne, Bayonetta?
How many people complaining that there aren't enough games without violence as a gameplay mechanic bought: Myst, Portal, The Witness, Firewatch, Inside, Life is Strange, Gone Home, Everyone's Gone To the Rapture, Virginia, Journey, Abzu, The Last Guardian, Ico, Brothers a Tale of Two Sons, Little Big Planet, Unravel, The numerous Telltale games with no violence, Her Story, Papers Please
Well, I'll agree that mainstream gaming can be a bit lacking in non-violent options. So, you often have to decide between the overdone mechanic that works well or something that's some mix of really shallow, really short, and unpolished. Combat itself doesn't have to be stifling, though. Blaming guns as a whole, that's just laughable. Which 2 games have I played most recently?
Pokémon X and
MLB 16 The Show. I also purchased
Shadow of Mordor for the second time, along with
Forza Horizon 3. My favorite game of the generation (and in a long time in general) is
Dying Light, and while it has guns, they're a backburner option for engagement, and not very interesting when the alternative is a sword that does a lot more damage and lights a guy on fire.
Not long ago, I would have maybe even argued the opposite. We had an excessive number of walking simulators and platformers flooding the market. If I were to point at anything that was problematic now, it might be Kickstarter stuff, where all the risk is thrown on the consumer and the developer is then able to get away with making something crappy because the money's already there. A lot of people can have good ideas that others get behind, but so many do it without having a real product, and it falls short. Honestly, did
DayZ ever get out of beta, and how long did it take before people were satisfied? How about
Mighty No. 9's disastrous existence? I do find funny how people are both shouting "no more pre-ordering AAA titles!" and turning to not just pre-ordering indie stuff, but pre-ordering it on concept alone, with no proof of game or developer quality.
Well to be fair I don't pay attention to politics in the real world either so there may be things I don't even get.
I mean, I really didn't give politics any attention until very recently, and I still saw this trend of bullshit for the past couple of years. I don't think there was any one instance that made me see it or anything, it was just the inundation of obvious pandering. Like, when a crowd cheers at female characters in
Fallout 4, it's like watching an Apple event and the crowd cheers for a pink iPad. They make such a big deal about it at every turn (like
Engadget's "you can fight women in
Deus Ex" article), and it becomes so overt that as someone who isn't keen on looking deeply into this crap, it's just too overt for even me to miss.
I ultimately don't find myself bothered by the presence of female characters, only at the way we spent the previous few years talk about "inclusion" and "diversity," to watch it become more like "fewer white males, guys!" And, again, it's when you do things like Ubisoft, breaking historical accuracy in
For Honor and gutting co-op play in
Assassin's Creed, that it truly becomes a problem. I had interest in
AC: Unity because I liked the idea of a Brotherhood of Assassins actually interacting and working together. I hadn't played one wince the second, and considered getting it before I heard it was so full of bugs. Then I see
Syndicate take it out and throw in a girl, and I was back to not caring about a franchise with an OK story that was tossed aside and really weak combat. Co-op play would have gotten me into that. I was really excited by
For Honor, until Ubisoft used it as yet another chance to make a diversity statement, and I went from excited to flat-out not buying anything from UBisoft, I'm done with them until they can stop trying to be a political machine.