Topic
in-game alcohol
i've noticed that there's a lot of alcohol available as game items, and indeed one quest requires its consumption.
we're all adults here and probably don't think twice about this stuff, but i'm curious how the developers anticipate parents to react once their kids start playing a game where beer is a common item and cocktail crafting is a branch of the cooking skill tree?
i know kids see plenty of drinking in movies, on TV, in restaurants and around the house, but do you think some parents will feel differently about it being in a game where their kids consume it by proxy through their characters?
Replies
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That's a good question. I think my tween would probably handle "playing" at cocktail crafting without it having a negative effect on her (I think her friends may give me a lot more trouble in that area than Glitch will), but for personal reasons, I am very conscious of the whole presence of alcohol too, and not completely comfortable with it.
What if not all the beverages were alcoholic? When I was a kid, "cocktail crafting" frequently featured a crazy mix of fruit juices and club soda, or what we called a "Suicide"---basically every flavor of soda available at the 7-11 fountain. Egg creams, that kind of thing.
eta: hey! my balloon has tiny words in it! - o, i am am not suggesting that the alcoholic items might influence kids negatively, i am suggesting that their parents might influence glitch negatively, if you catch my drift.
- There is also non-alcoholic beer.
- I was trying to drink the beer but my mood was too good to drink! Was funny and frustrating. Could not find a way to unhappy myself.
- It doesn't bother me as a parent, but I suppose you could just remove alcohol and any options related to it from being purchased or used by "child" accounts. That's why if kids are allowed to play, I'd like to see them having different accounts.
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I didn't think about it before, but someone said in the global chat yesterday that they don't drink IRL. And now I'm wondering if the beer quest is somewhat sophomoric. Couldn't it also be fizzy lifting drinks or something?
There's a fair amount of alcohol in the game... it seemed to me that that was the most effective way to keep my mood up, was to drink. There should probably be an alternate path for this. -
I have to chime in here as a teenager. I personally do not drink. I have many friends who do not drink, and I do not think their opinions would be influenced by this. However, I can see how some kids would take this as a sign to drink. At my school, there are various things that have had name changes to be more PC, and I think that this is a good idea. Anything that encourages drinking is potentially a Very Bad Thing.
My 2 cents - Will this game really be intended for /children/ though, or 13+?
- Either way, it's illegal under 21. And mixing alcohol and minors (especially the way the game does, which IMHO says drinking is good because it makes you feel better) is never a good idea, legally or practically
- "Drink responsibly."
- I think the "Hooch" is preferable to the "Beer" and for me adds to the whimsical nature, conventional cans of beer seem a bit out of place and too contemporary. Not to mention just from a "Making" stand point, hooch is usually home made and intended as a personal or shared consumable as where canned beer is a product usually created and sold for profit.
- Drinking age is only 21 in the US, which seems irrelevant in an online game. I remember an AI simulation game I played as a kid (Creatures/Docking Station) had hooch or something similar, and it didn't affect my views on alcohol at all. It had a negative impact on the creatures' energy levels (I think it's the same in Glitch?), so I came to the conclusion that adults like it, but it doesn't seem good for you. I think younger players can probably be given enough credit to realize that too, if drinking too much hooch saps your energy and sends you to hell.
- I don't think alcohol should be banned. Kids are not stupid and drinking in a game is not going to make them drink irl (unless, perhaps, they are a bit stupid?) I remember playing games as a kid where alcohol featured and it didn't make me want to drink. Alcohol is just a part of life. I think there is a place in the game for 'mind altering' substances. It just adds another tangent.
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"Alcohol is just a part of life."
true, but shotgunning 12 beers being a necessary step to advance through the game isn't. thats the kind of game content that might be considered objectionable.
it is less an issue of promoting drinking, or kids being prompted to drink by a video game than it is setting a tone in the game that would make kids feel out of place playing the game, and create one more barrier for parents letting their kids play it. - I thought it was funny.
- I don't drink IRL, but nor do I massage butterflies...
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"There's a fair amount of alcohol in the game... it seemed to me that that was the most effective way to keep my mood up, was to drink. There should probably be an alternate path for this."
I am not sure that drinking is the only way to elevate mood effectively--I didn't drink at all in the game except for the beer quest and my mood stayed good all the time (well, except for that dying thing) and I never really had to take action to keep my mood up. Not sure how my specific gameplay would show my pattern of mood elevation.
I suddenly have a craving for some stats. That would be nice to see--an graphical analysis of your game play. -
I found Butterfly Milk to be good for keeping mood up.
Perhaps the chugging-12-beers quest is objectionable for some people, but what concerns me more is taking out content to be PC. If beer gets taken out to please people, will others complain about God/Hell? Or will vegans object to nibbling on piggies and running away with slabs of meat? And so on and so forth. Just seems like a slippery slope to me. -
the meat from piggies is already sorta PC. you merely nibble on them, and they like it! then they quite willingly grant you some meat : ]
in the past i've suggested possible vegetarian play modes with both benefits and drawbacks .. but i think the piggy nibbling is hilarious, inoffensive and a lot more interesting than just hacking up dead pigs. it is neat! -
There are a few achievements for eating meat. slippery slope = no beer, no marshmallow daggers :o
I don't think alcohol is a realistic issue except for it causing a minority of parents to steer their kids away from the game. Chat's presence will cause more parents to do that than having alcohol. -
Keep the alcohol, get rid of the shotgunning bit.
Can the effects on mood from alcohol be made less predictable, e.g., not always positive on mood?
I would also like to propose a belching quest, which could be accomplished with alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages. - *urp*
- Could limit it to a couple beers per hour or day. Or make the number truly unrealistic, like 36 beers. Then you die and squish grapes to teach the kids a lesson?
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My scattered thoughts of the moment:
I think the 12 beers thing is unimaginative and maybe also unhelpful as compared to other parts of the game.
By unhelpful, I mean... most of the quests steer you towards trying something new. A better quest might be to have to do N different things that would elevate (and/or lower?) your mood in different ways.
Also, I agree that the existence of "beer" itself is incongruous with the game. It's too normal.
(Also, I can't help thinking that if there's going to be required alcohol, you might as well add a nod to Haunt and require LSD to have a vision that will help you solve a puzzle. Or, okay, not.) - p.s. As the parent of a teenager, the in-game alcohol doesn't bother me at all. My dislike of the 12 beers does not come from that direction.
- until the 12-beer quest, I had no idea that beer elevated my mood. I was doing ok-ish before that. And, I agree with Tingly, the chat is a WAY worse issue for kids than the beer! but yes, it does seem too 'normal' for the game. "nibbling piggies, massaging butterflies, and ... drinking beer?" It's not on the same continuum really is it.
- coffee is great for mood too :) i would get a kick out of the 12 coffees challenge
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This thread is a whooooole lotta overkill.
It's a game. Simple as that. - I like hooch. It makes me laugh and think of banjos.
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In all seriousness though, my almost 15yo daughter has been part of the alpha testing, and she says 'I'm fine with it, but maybe some parents would be upset, but it's really not a big thing at all'.
Alcohol exists in real life - and not as an illegal substance either. If you think your children would be unduly influenced by a video game to use alcohol in order to lift their mood then maybe games aren't for them. Perhaps you should also stop them seeing/hearing ads for beer on TV and radio, and make sure they don't read Rolling Stone magazine because it has ads for tobacco in it.
Oh, and there were plenty of jugs with XXX on them in old cartoons.
I won't even go into the Budweiser frogs...
...if they're on the internet already, there are far worse things they're being exposed to, and that's what you should worry about. -
*urp*
Let's give my almost 14 year old daughter an account and see what happens to her. -
Ooooh, social experiment!
Toying with young impressionable minds!
I'm in! -
Interesting conversation.
I don't have a personal problem with the alcohol in the game. I do think that the quest of chugging the 12 beers in order to "achieve" something sends the wrong message though.
Would that stop me from allowing my 12 year old to play? No. -
I alpha-tested GNE when I was 14 or something and I turned out alright ;)
Anyone remember if there was any questionable content there? - There were lots of stabbings. That would explain all the marshmallows embedded in Canadian backs in recent years.
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"This thread is a whooooole lotta overkill."
"Let's give my almost 14 year old daughter an account and see what happens to her."
i think that many people here are misunderstanding the thread.
there has been no suggestion that the presence of in game alcohol will actually 'warp impressionable minds' or whatever.
maybe we're all fairly liberal, media savvy folks, able to keep a mere video game in perspective - but not everyone is.
i *know* that if the main character in Pokemon was able to mix and drink cocktails and chug beers by the 12 pack, there would be a cultural hubub about it. if glitch ever does reach a similar critical mass of players, i'd imagine a similar hubub would occur.
maybe glitch really isn't for 'everyone', and that's cool. maybe the in-game alcohol sends a message that glitch isn't for a lowest common denominator audience, or a pokemon type audience, or what have you.
this is not a question of ethics or developmental psychology, it is a question of who the game is and isn't for, and the possible impact on the game's audience and revenue and cultural impact and stuff. -
I'm remembering the controversy around Grand Theft Auto... The Sims... Spore. What's that quote I'm thinking of... if you don't have people violently opposing what you do, you're not doing it right. Tea Party. Socialists. Yadda yadda yadda.
In short, "a whooooole lotta overkill" refers to the notion that this is an evolving work and that I don't think it's useful to backwards engineer who the game is meant for at such an early stage. I'm sure the Glitch team are more than capable of defining this (and their revenue model, etc.) and I'd rather stick to being involved in an awesome evolving world where hootch runs rampant and give comments/suggestions on gameplay. That being said, it's my goal to be the town drunk by the end of the next testing period. -
I don't think I am misunderstanding this thread., and I think that the potential cultural hubbub would unfold pretty much the same way that this thread has unfolded.
The issue appears to be "can inflammatory aspect XYZ (in this case virtual booze) have a negative effect on the game's success". I think wading into assessing whether or not in-game alcohol consumption is actually an inflammatory issue is going to be part and parcel of the discussion.
But I also think that we have basically established, via a wide variety of opinions in this thread, that people are going to react in a lot of different ways and I am not sure how useful a conclusion that is. In addition, a cultural hubbub about booze in Glitch would probably be the best thing for it, but I also think as cultural hubbubs go, a booze-related one would be quaint by comparison to those surrounding other games.
Adults whose religion forbids the consumption of alcohol will also have to deal with some discomfort about drinking in the game, so there is the potential for turning off those players as well.
So, in keeping with the question at hand, I summarize: Yes, it could have a negative impact on the success of the game, due to upset by recovering alcoholics, devout muslims and baptists, non-liberal and non-media savvy parents, and maybe the makers of O'Douls.
I still say keep it in, but I will add that the beer quest should not be obligatory to level up. Plus what I said up there earlier. -
"That being said, it's my goal to be the town drunk by the end of the next testing period." - Saint Wootam
I think that's a very noble goal. :))