Stranger 109

In response to the June 19th banning of Manhunt 2 by the British Board of Film Classification, Rockstar has filed for an appeal according to MVC. As only the second game to be banned by the BBFC, the title’s subsequent AO rating from the ESRB left it dead in the water as both Sony and Nintendo banned it from their consoles. Now I will be the first to admit that Rockstar has demonstrated some questionable decision making on both the development and PR levels the past couple of years. But I have to wonder what the probability of this banning would have been had the Hot Coffee scandal never happened. The GTA franchise has long been an easy target of mainstream media and politicians, and the poor handling of Hot Coffeegate has increased the level of scrutiny of the developer (perhaps rightfully so).

Bully was the first to be effected by the fallout, the release being pushed back a year. But because it only contained adolescent violence on par with a Warner Bros. cartoon, the game received a rating of T despite the clamoring of conservatives like Jack Thompson. So aside from the re-releasing of previous material in the form of Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, and the rather innocuous title Table Tennis, Manhunt 2 is Rockstar’s first attempt at a new adult title since Hot Coffee. It then should be no wonder that the response has been so strong. I don’t necessarily want to defend the company’s design choices as much as I want to point out this this marks a significant moment in gaming’s history. The banning of a title, either legally in the UK or economically in the US, raises a number of concerns for the future of games. Politicians continually like to make the ‘interactive’ argument about the danger of games. The fact that the player is doing the violence makes them considerably more vulnerable than just watching the violence. And to be honest when I first heard the announcement of it being released on the Wii, I knew there was trouble ahead. Having played the original and knowing the level of violence involved in the gameply, I can only imagine what Jack Thompson would say about the ‘gesturing system’ the Wii uses in games like The Godfather. Visions of kids in living rooms across the country making strangle moves with Wii Remote and Nunchuck in hand provides plenty of fodder for those trying to save today’s youth from the deleterious effect of gaming. But even if it were only on the PS2, it is safe to assume that it still would have been banned.

Not having seen the footage submitted to either BBFC or the ESRB, it is hard to say whether there was a ratcheting up of the violence. And given the common practice of submitting over-the-top material never intended to be included in the game so the ratings board sees a marked decrease in violence in the final version, the game may not be anymore violent than the original. Based on some gameplay footage from a SCEA event, there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference in the level of gore or violence from the first. Hopefully the appeal will go through and the game will be released, not because I am a fan of first, but because we don’t want to see this sort of precedent set for any game or any developer.

You can think that much of what Rockstar creates is in poor taste and choose not to support them by buying their products. Though the recent success in the hypergore genre of horror films like the Saw and Hostel franchises would suggest a current penchant for such violence in media (and it is safe to assume that nothing in Manhunt 2 can top either of these in level of violence). But should games be measured by a different set of aesthetic values because they are interactive? I certainly don’t want to downplay the videogame’s unique attribute of being interactive. Ian Bogost’s work on Persuasive Games points to a number of ways in which their interactivity offers tremendous potential to the political influence of games. However, the way that violence gets abstractly input into a game (either from a gesture or pushing the X button) does not translate into enacting that violence in any real sense. Maybe Manhunt 2 is an exercise in poor taste and not the game we want today’s youth playing. But going so far as to ban it seems like the wrong direction for the future of game development and certainly seems unfair in targeting a company whose most egregious offenses have come not from its development team but its marketing department.