10 Overblown Video Game Controversies

Video games have brought amusement and joy to countless gamers across the world for several decades now. Despite their growing popularity, they have been subject to numerous controversies for quite some time.

In the nineties, there was a big scare on video game violence potentially turning gamers, especially young ones, into becoming killers. A ridiculous idea, yes, and a lack of actual evidence put towards said argument did not help. Unfortunately, it did not stop uninformed parents and American senators from demanding bans upon games numerous times throughout the decade.

Today, there's rarely a day when a game, developer, or studio is not receiving flak. Social media is a double-edged sword. Whilst it offers easy access to information on almost any topic, the problem is, there is just as much opinionated, bias, misinterpreted assumptions that might come across as the truth.

And that's one of the biggest issues with video games these days: arguments can kick off over the most trivial things. Sometimes a lack of context and research will result in the misinterpretation of an otherwise tame scene as a notorious and horrible spectacle that only the cruelest of the cruel could possibly stomach.

Prepare to scowl at your monitors in confusion and anger at these ten overblown video game controversies.

Armour is worn to protect the player from devastating attacks, and trying to impress other players into thinking you're the coolest dragon-slayer on the server, even though picking fights with rats and boars are a big problem for you. Protecting yourself in medieval-themed games is always a necessity.

Admittedly, female characters aren't as lucky as the men. On some occasions, their armour seems to offer the same amount of protection as a male's attire, while exposing more of their flesh. Divinity: Original Sin's original front cover depicts a fully-fledged male holding the hand of a female with her navel and breasts partially exposed. Armour like that doesn't exactly scream "warrior".

According to Larian Studios' Thierry Van Gyseghem, the criticism received for the artwork over Kickstarter was minor at best, and he also noted the team's trip to E3 2012 was free of hatred towards the cover. Nevertheless, it was still controversial enough to persuade some people to send threats and harassing e-mails to the team.

Gyseghem told BlogJob in an interview, regarding the threats that were being sent, “When you own a pizza place and one day the mob enters your little shack, threatens you by saying if I don’t stop selling pepperoni pizza’s they’ll do anything in their power to make sure you go out of business, then what should we call this? Blackmail? Censorship? Harassment? Extortion? or simply a trade embargo?”

While they made something of a faux pas with the revealing cover design, the backlash the developers received was far disproportionate the the crime.