resistance: fall of man
June 11, 2007
If you haven’t heard, the Church of England is considering suing SONY because it reproduced Manchester cathedral in last year’s premier first-person-shooter for the Play Station 3. Needless to say, this is not being received well within the gamer community, which has responded with a great deal of polemic about Christianity’s inability to differentiate fantasy from reality. Hmm.
It seems to me that the real issue is not whether a violent, bloody action game like Resistance falls in line with the church’s values. Rather, the real issue is about intellectual property: if the Church of England owns the interior design of a space, does someone else have to get their permission to reproduce that design the way they would for a photograph or a poem? I don’t know anything about British IP laws, but it seems a reasonable question to me.
Unfortunately, however, everyone is treating the church’s complaint as if it’s a battle over values, and therefor the church is again coming off like a tired old man shaking his fist at a bunch of kids smoking on a street corner. How could we react to this sort of thing in a positive way? I applaud the fact that they’re trying to get Sony to fund anti-gun crime groups in Manchester - how could this sort of activity be brought into the foreground?