Before I head into any specifics, I'll start with a brief overview of the game.
You are a mysterious gardener who appears on Piņata Island, and you subsequently have a decrepit patch of land shoved into your care by a strange, accented, masked (and possibly pre-pubescent) female. Not a lovely way for the game to start; is this possibly implying that foreigners can't care for their land?
You have to work your way up, buying items for your garden, expanding, getting more piņatas. Your ultimate goal is to basically make a thriving garden where you can ship off your piņatas to Piņata central and have them shot to birthday parties and beaten to death. Way to go.
The first thing I wanted to talk about is the eating of piņatas. It's an integral part of gameplay; certain piņatas have to eat other piņatas to become residents of your garden, or to mate (which I'll get to in a little bit). Viva Piņata is marketed as a children's game, so why put in the feature of having a child's favorite cute and papery piņata be devoured by other cute and papery piņatas? Perhaps to possibly add some semblance of realism or natural order? No, of course not. This is the gaming industry, so there's obviously an ulterior motive here. Perhaps game developers are trying to say that children need to be acclimatized to murder. Perhaps they're saying that children should be comfortable with
committing murder. There are certain situations where you yourself have to whack the poor creatures until they explode, shooting their candy-guts all over the nearby vicinity and having them devoured by neighboring piņatas. What kind of gruesome acts of violence are we teaching children to "be okay" with?
Now, onto the sex part of sex and violence. There are requirements to fill before your piņatas can "romance", such as having a certain kind of home in the garden, or having fed a certain kind of piņata to another. Are these references to how specific we should be before romancing in real life? What kind of house does someone live in? What kind of food do they eat? What condition are they in? After fulfilling said requirements, your piņatas fly, walk, slither, etc., to their home, which then transports you to a cutscene once they're both inside. They might fly around each other, "bump" up against one another, or even twist their bodies together (references to karma sutra? Maybe) in some strange mating ritual. It doesn't even matter whether your piņatas are male or female! Are we telling our children it doesn't matter who you sleep with? That homosexual relations are "okay"? What kind of signals are we sending to our nation's future?
So in essence, the bright colors and fun noises of the game are simply there to mesmerize children so they can be adjusted to what the video game industry
obviously thinks children need to be comfortable with:
sex and violence. You can't judge a game by its cover; no matter how kid-friendly and fun it looks, there's obviously something wrong with it, like the ulterior motive of "adjusting" kids to be okay with murder and explicit themes. With all these graphic details, they might as well re-name this game "Grand Theft Viva: Piņata Island".
In addition to this startling revelation, I've got some links you might want to check out:
PETA's website
About Jack Thompson and his enlightening message
The importance of abstinence
ShiverBoo's blog
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