Interactive electronic entertainment has never quite made it out of its troubled adolescence. As far as we've come from simple chunky blocks of primary colours, the most basic of interactions and nonsensical stories told exclusively on the front page of instruction manuals, gaming is firmly entrenched as the surly-faced teenager, obsessed with ever-increasing kill-counts, bust sizes and ruthlessly iterated profanity. A brief glance across store shelves demonstrates how seriously most games take themselves, from endless gurning spacemarines to Kratos tearing the wings off harpies with a scowl and a snarl.
It's a stereotype we've been trying to break out of for the past decade. Despite the increasing market share held by gamers over the age of 18, the industry has struggled to find a place for games designed for the adult market. Gaming insists that it's grown up, demands it be granted the same respect afforded the leisurely, senescent elders of entertainment - books, movies, tv - yet in its fervour to be taken seriously it reaches too far, appearing amateurish in its desire to ape its illustrious predecessors. And yet when a title attempts something new, reaching for a niche of the adult market, the internet explodes with adolescent mockery.
Which brings us to the much-maligned We Dare. In case you missed the furore, We Dare is a Ubisoft Wii and PS3 title announced in mid-February, marketed as a "sexy, quirky, party game". A horrifically-misjudged series of trailers followed, sparking an online firestorm which soon caught the attention of the mainstream media - whose rabid scaremongering was only intensified by We Dare garnering a PEGI 12 rating, a stark contrast to the unashamed titillation of the trailers. In an attempt to extricate themselves from their own blunder, Ubisoft struck the game from the release schedules in the US and the UK, and attempted to scour the trailers from the face of the internet. They failed:
As ridiculous as the trailers were, there's a place for games like We Dare. With a growing audience of consenting adult gamers, why shouldn't there be a market for sexy, fun, flirty games to be played in the comfort of your own home? Part of being an adult is the understanding that there's a time for frivolity and fun, while the gaming adolescent struts and scowls, insisting on being taken seriously. We Dare may not be a revolution in adult gaming, but surely it's a positive step forward compared to the Rez trance vibrator, a mountain of identical Xbox Indie massage apps and the Japanese rape simulators so beloved of tabloid headlines.
I suspect most people would have no objection to the existence of We Dare in principle. You might giggle, or find it hard to take seriously - even in the best of circumstances it would be a niche product - yet it was Ubisoft's mind-boggling decision to announce We Dare's existence with a series of swinging-themed trailers which raised the axe over its release. Ubisoft's marketing team vastly overestimated the sexual proclivity of the internet, and permanently associated their product with the stigma of group sexual activity, a taboo more likely to be associated with seedy HBO specials and swapping car keys than playing after-dinner games with friends. Whether that's a fair association or not is immaterial once a public perception has been formed, and while the risque trailers certainly got the internet talking about We Dare, it was negative publicity.
What could've been a fun amusement for a pair of consenting adults was coloured by the association; once the connotation of swinging was attached to the game, to have it sitting on the shelf when you invite your friends round to dinner would be a loaded proposition indeed.
Despite everything, the finishing blow proved to be the PEGI 12 age rating (followed by an equally puzzling Australian Classification Board 'Parental Guidance' rating), with the obvious knee-jerk implication that this sex-themed plaything was being targeted at children. The media leapt at this scandal, and Ubisoft had little choice but to pull the title from release in two major markets.
The truth behind the rating is a different matter entirely; from the tone and positioning of the marketing materials released up to that point, We Dare was being clearly targeted at sexually liberated twenty-or-thirty-somethings, and while the 12 rating seems inappropriate, a limitation of the PEGI system is that the ratings are based exclusively on the content of the game, not the wider implications of behaviour promoted by a title. Since We Dare did not directly promote or imply sexual activity - just activities which could be considered precursors to sexual activity - and contained only the briefest suggestion of bare flesh, it couldn't be awarded a stricter rating no matter how much Ubisoft might have desired one. Without the watchful eye of the media already watching We Dare suspiciously, perhaps they could've survived even that, but with the internet already riled up it was enough to put the final nail in the title's tumultuous coffin.
We Dare was released with as little fanfare as possible in mid-March, making its way into stores around Canada, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time of writing, no sales figures are available to see whether its baptism of fire and subsequent notoriety helped or hindered its prospects, but whichever turns out to be true - and I suspect the latter - the industry loses. We Dare tried to do something different, a fun distraction for adult gamers, and in doing so invoked such controversy that any publisher in their right mind will think twice in the future about trying something different and unique of their own.
Why bother, when they can make a whole lot more money from beige marines scowling their way through uninhabitable terrain?
Originally posted at Generation Minus One, the webcomic of last-gen gaming.
