posted
So apparently the BBFC has done their second ever bit of banning of a computer game release (although the first, Carmageddon, was subsequently appealed and released anyway)
Are the BBFC acting in the general interests of the public, protecting people from a game which may nurture violent tendencies in the emotionally damaged, or is it just a reactionary step brought about by the screaching mother of a murdered boy?
I'm not sure to be honest. I think you have to take a slightly different view of interractive media to films and TV series' etc. While in a film you may be watching graphic representations of violence, your role is an entirely passive one. In a computer game however you're the one doing the killing, and by the sounds of it this game encourages people to be brutal and sadistic, to indulge the darker side of human nature.
I know Thorn has previously been very opposed to censorship. Perhaps this though is an instance where censorship genuinely protects rather than restrics?
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posted
ridiculous and embarrasing. Whatever it encourages is confined within a ficitonal narrative, exactly like anything else that isn't real life. The argument you're wheeling out is exactly the same as the one they had when they banned one of your favourite films - evil dead. You're not doing the killing, it's a computer game. You know, sure, you can get pretty into a computer game, but then you can get into any fiction. Where is the proof, the connection, that this game is somehow so bad, and that it's such a menace to society at large, that you could end up in court for owning it? This isn't a knife, its not offensive hate-filled propaganda, you can't hurt or kill anybody with this game, but - wait - people might enjoy playing it and it's got a violent context. Stupid. This is just a demonstration of the kind of gaps that still exist in this country, thanks to the media stirring up a fear of the unknown in people who are lacking any curiousity about the world they live in.
[ 19.06.2007, 10:56: Message edited by: Jimmy Big Nuts ]
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quote:Originally posted by Jimmy Big Nuts: ridiculous and embarrasing.
Yeah, that's the truth of it. Protecting the citizens of the UK. How absurd. The only groups of people that fail to distinguish between the real world and the fictional world of a computer game are psychopaths and censors. I wish I was a notable cultural commentator capable of delivering pithy analyses of the cultural landscape so I could have a quote from me in one of these articles going "It's a load of shit. No worse - than that. A load of fucking shit."
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posted
I don't know. I think it's a bit unfair to characterise the people at the BBFC as being ban-mad. There's been an awful lot of deeply unpleasant films passed in the past five years that wouldn't have had a hope in hell of classification 15 years ago. Whenever someone from the BBFC crops up on tv they do come across as old-fashioned liberals in the best sense of the term, struggling to place depictions of, say, sadistic violence in context rather than just getting all shrill and condemnatory. They probably get a bit sick of trudging through hour after hour of hack-n-slash aimed at fuckwits; hence the despairing tone of their reaction to the game.
Even so, a ban seems pretty counterproductive - if anything it's likely to help Rockstar shift more units of its other offerings, as well as boosting its cachet among the impressionable.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: the screaching mother of a murdered boy?
How would your mother react if you were stabbed and beaten to death - nonchalant shrug? If anyone wanted to argue that these sort of games have a coarsening effect, the above line would be plausible evidence in favour.
posted
It's true that the BBFC is loads more forgiving than it was when James Ferman was running the show, which is part of the reason I was genuinely suprised by their decision to ban here. It just seems really sudden. Anyway, as an impressionable fuckwit, and probably pretty much the bullseye target audience for this game, I was kind of looking forward to it, and if the inevitable appeal is successful I'll be looking to buy it in six weeks time.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: How would your mother react if you were stabbed and beaten to death - nonchalant shrug? If anyone wanted to argue that these sort of games have a coarsening effect, the above line would be plausible evidence in favour.
Show a fucking heart.
Mmm. Bit sanctimonious? One moment giving the thumbs up to a series of queasy Fred West gags, and the next putting the boot into Ringo, when he identifies what he sees as misdirected hysteria?
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posted
I liked your Fred West post - and as usual with your fucking gags it came just after I'd tried something half-similar and made me look lazy and uncreative by comparison. I'm just not sure why what Ringo wrote is a disgusting approach to a real-world tragedy, while what you wrote is acceptable.
I dunno. Ben strikes me as maybe on thin ice with his talk of immature fuckwits, and the coarsening effect of computer games and so on, not least because he's a fan of stuff like Jedi Mind Tricks, and a viewer of movies like Irreversible and Evil Dead, all of which attracts the same criticisms and even the same grudging comment on the effect of banning - that it will only make the product more desirable.
What's depressing is that he takes this stance when faced with something that's as alien to him as gangsta rap is to the moral guardians who would have that silenced. It's just like, as soon as something's alien to him, something's equally different to him as a rap album to a frightened parent - suddenly it's a valueless, threatening piece of cultural cancer that should be banned save for the fact it'll give these people just the kind of publicity on which they thrive.
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posted
I guess everyone has their own line where the sanctimony reflext is triggered. 'Misdirected hysteria' feels like a clinical enough term - 'screaching[sic] mother of a murdered boy' seems ostentatiously callous.
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posted
Yeah, it is. You'll notice that when I used that term it was as part of a question comparing both sides of the argument. You'll also notice I went on to largely agree that sometimes banning a game is ok.
While I do also believe that her hysterical campaigning against violent computer games is completely unjustified.
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quote:Originally posted by Nathan Bleak: What's depressing is that he takes this stance when faced with something that's as alien to him as gangsta rap is to the moral guardians who would have that silenced. It's just like, as soon as something's alien to him, something's equally different to him as a rap album to a frightened parent - suddenly it's a valueless, threatening piece of cultural cancer that should be banned save for the fact it'll give these people just the kind of publicity on which they thrive.
Well hush my mouth for not being one of the initiate and, therefore, not entitled to take part in your rather grand disquisition on censorship and rationality.
As a rule, I don't buy celebrity mags, watch talent shows or masturbate to granny porn - doesn't mean, surely, that I can't make sweeping statements about how they're each aimed at different segments of the lucrative fuckwit market?
Or must we be nice to fuckwits now? Or am I being terribly unfair to all these fine products and services?
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posted
Nobody's mentioned the fact that the Wii version involves putting yourself in the position of the killer in a much more realistic way than on the other consoles. Okay, so it's a plastic remote control in your hand, rather than the handle of a knife, baseball bat, etc, but the actions required to pull off a beating/killing are a much closer representation than pressing a button on a DualShock. I wonder if that's got anything to do with the ban.
I was interested in the game, mainly because it's such a departure from the majority of Wii games.
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posted
I don’t know if it’s something which should be so hastily dismissed though, the question of how a computer game can affect a person. I think it does deserve a certain amount of dedicated study and research by experts who actually have a good understanding of psychology, who are completely unbiased. As far as I can tell, no such study has ever been carried out. It might well turn out that banning a game like Manhunt 2 is very much the right thing to do, but it’s a decision which should be made based on factual evidence rather than opinion.
I think people like the mother of that lad who was murdered, do more to help publicise these types of games, than to actually further their cause. She’s campaigning from a purely emotive perspective, and while such an approach may gain a certain level of kneejerk support, the game itself becomes infamous. Look at the first Grand Theft Auto. It was a pretty shitty game by all accounts, but the media attention it received thanks to the efforts of people claiming it would lead to increased murder, car crime and general social decay, meant that practically every gamer in the world has a dusty copy of this game laying on their shelf in one format or another. It’s thanks to people like this lady, that GTA went on to spawn one of the most successful and critically acclaimed game franchises in history.
Manhunt 2 will most likely now go on to be a massively popular game. People who probably never even took an interest in the first game will now want to get their hands on a copy. Through their actions in attempting to prevent people from becoming corrupted or damaged by this game, if it were proven that they are actually correct and this game can cause massive amounts of harm, they have almost certainly created more harm than they have prevented.
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quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Nobody's mentioned the fact that the Wii version involves putting yourself in the position of the killer in a much more realistic way than on the other consoles. Okay, so it's a plastic remote control in your hand, rather than the handle of a knife, baseball bat, etc, but the actions required to pull off a beating/killing are a much closer representation than pressing a button on a DualShock. I wonder if that's got anything to do with the ban.
quote:
Bag, glass shard, 'heavy handgun', nightstick and double barrel shotgun return, and are joined by the syringe and a pen.
Like the first Manhunt, kills are executed in three deadly shades - Hasty, Violent and Gruesome.
Environmental kills have been introduced (push an enemy face-first into a live fuse box, use telephone cords to strangle an enemy or you can drown an enemy in a toilet).
Guns can be used for executions.
The Wii version will get 3 exclusive weapons, a Straight razor, Mace and a Broken Bottle.
Actually, scratch everything I've said on this thread up to now - I had no idea this game was so awesome.
quote:Originally posted by ben: Well hush my mouth for not being one of the initiate and, therefore, not entitled to take part in your rather grand disquisition on censorship and rationality.
As a rule, I don't buy celebrity mags, watch talent shows or masturbate to granny porn - doesn't mean, surely, that I can't make sweeping statements about how they're each aimed at different segments of the lucrative fuckwit market?
Or must we be nice to fuckwits now? Or am I being terribly unfair to all these fine products and services?
Well, I'm sure you're capable of knowing the difference between saying "I think heat magazine is shit", and saying "I think this should be removed from society save for the fact it might increase its desirability", so I'm not even sure why you put something so spurious up as a point of comparison.
It's all very well being sarcastic about the perceived quality of a computer game, but seriously... why do you see this as such a completely different situation to people calling for the banning of rap albums or films? I remember when 69 Comeback Elvis started a thread suggesting that maybe rap albums did have a coarsening effect, that perhaps reigning them in would have a positive effect and that was an idea you dismissed without equivocation.
Now, here you are disparaging an audience you don't really know for enjoying a product you don't really understand in precisely the same way people attack things that you like and that you defend.
See, to me it looks like the exact same argument that's been mounted against music and movies, and is now being wheeled out against games. It's an argument you've shouted down before - I'm curious as to what's changed your mind, why you think this argument is suddenly relevant and sound and why we should be thinking abotu ways to remove violent games, music and films from society, or why it is for games and games alone that 'Ban This Sick Filth' is almost a rational step to take to protect society.
posted
Also, if it was true that games create violence, mayhem etc, then computer gamers would be the most terrifying army in the UK today rather than a bunch of sickly social misfits who spend there initial life getting kicked around the playground, spend university getting ignored, and then go into jobs chosen due to their lack of face to face contact, and funnel their salaries into ridiculously overpriced toys ostensibly aimed at children.
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quote:Originally posted by Nathan Bleak: Well, I'm sure you're capable of knowing the difference between saying "I think heat magazine is shit", and saying "I think this should be removed from society save for the fact it might increase its desirability", so I'm not even sure why you put something so spurious up as a point of comparison.
Does it help at all that I haven't ever, anywhere even said the latter? It doesn't say much for any argument you're trying to peddle that you have to 'make' me adopt positions I've never advanced.
I don't think it's reactionary to observe that censorship only stimulates demand (actually the point has been made by just about everyone here). Disapproval - even strongly expressed disapproval - isn't going to lessen your enjoyment of the game when you finally get your copy, so why do you feel the need to pump this up into some sort of free-speech-versus-forces-of-hypocrisy clash of the titans when it's hardly less trivial the result of Briton's Got Talent's?Posts: 8657
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quote:A spokesman for Rockstar told MCV: "The transcript of the Leblanc court case makes it quite clear that the Judge, defence, prosecution and Leicester police all emphasized that Manhunt played no part in the case." It has also become clear that Warren Leblanc was not in possession of the game and ironically, Stefan Pakeerah, aged 14, owned a copy, despite it being legally restricted to 18+ in the UK.
posted
Man, this made me angry. Maybe I'm overestimating the implications of this decision. Other forums seem to think so. 'I don't really agree with banning anything, but it was a pretty nasty game' seems to be the general consensus. Or 'Oh well, just buy it from the French Amazon site instead!' as if the only point of concern is the inconvenience of having to acquire the game elsewhere.
I emailed the BBFC (in a somewhat ranting, hysterical fashion, admittedly) -
quote: This morning you confirmed a national ban on Rockstar's forthcoming video game Manhunt 2, stating that the game, if released, would pose 'unjustifiable harm risks' to the British public. You believe the game is so gratuitously, relentlessly, pointlessly violent that it could potentially encourage impressionable gamers - children and mentally unstable adults - to recreate in real life the violence they act out within the game.
Your decision to ban this game is reprehensible.
Restrictions already exist to prevent violent games from reaching vulnerable gamers. To prevent children from playing Manhunt 2, an 18 certificate would have sufficed. Perhaps you were concerned that children would acquire the game regardless of these restrictions. That's not your responsibility. That's the responsibility of retailers and parents.
The truth is that you banned this game on moral grounds. This game is sick. This game dismays you. This game is unfit for any sane, moral, law-abiding citizen of this country. This game appeals only to the sort of people likely to be corrupted by it. Right? Tough. It's not for the BBFC to decide whether or not a game is morally acceptable. Manhunt 2 is a work of fiction. It is fantasy. It is imaginary. It is not for the BBFC to pass judgement on its moral substance or lack thereof.
Despite this, you judge the game to be 'bleak', 'callous', 'brutal', and cite these judgements as reasons for the ban. You criticize its 'casual sadism', unwittingly referring to a certain author whose work some centuries ago was subjected to similarly idiotic censorship. Thankfully we now realise it was foolish to prevent whole populations from reading the literary works of the Marquis de Sade, regardless of what some still regard as unsavoury, inappropriate content. Perhaps in centuries to come it will be widely acknowledged that the banning of video games is just as intolerable as literary censorship, though I hope it won't take quite that long.
The censorship of any form of creative output - paintings, books, films, games, whatever - is infinitely more objectionable than any potentially offensive content contained within it. There are no exceptions. None. There is no line. None. The role of the BBFC - as outlined on its own website - is to provide guidance. Your role is not to make decisions for us. Your role is not to control our imaginations or any works of art or entertainment our imaginations produce. You are not the police. You are not the social service.
Your decision to ban Manhunt 2 is contemptible. It cannot be condoned.
So yeah, like I said, bit histrionic there. But really. The whole thing's outrageous.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: Does it help at all that I haven't ever, anywhere even said the latter? It doesn't say much for any argument you're trying to peddle that you have to 'make' me adopt positions I've never advanced.
You haven't used those precise words, no, but it's a reasonable inference given that when you gave your opinion on the ban you sympathised with the BBFC but said it'll probably be counter-productive because it'll drive people toward other Rockstar games. That does suggest that you think removing the game from society would be productive, and I was taking your absence of comments along the lines that the ban was a bad thing in its own right to mean... well that you didn't believe it's just plain wrong for the BBFC to ban it.
quote:Disapproval - even strongly expressed disapproval - isn't going to lessen your enjoyment of the game when you finally get your copy, so why do you feel the need to pump this up into some sort of free-speech-versus-forces-of-hypocrisy clash of the titans when it's hardly less trivial the result of Briton's Got Talent's?
It took me a while to decide whether or not you were making a joke here - complaining that I was trying to make you say things you hadn't actually posted and then doing exactly the same thing. I haven't tried to turn this into a free speech vs forces of hypocrisy thing, although I suppose I can see how you inferred that from my comparisons to gansta rap. But I wasn't really talking abotu the forces of hypocrisy, I was just talking about you, and it's a shame you immediately identified yourself with reactionary conservatives and hypocrites. I am still genuinely suprised at your stance here, and I am genuinely curious as to why you think the depictions of violence in Manhunter 2 are coarsening and worthy of your disapproval, whereas the depictions of violence on the D12's Devil's Night album are an essential way of winding down at the end of the day.
Finally, it's all very well saying "Oh well, this is too trivial for you to be talking about," but... well... we have arguments abotu whether or not comic book movies are worth looking forward to. It's a small discussion board in the corner of the internet - it's not like I'm rallying troops to march on the houses of parliament. If we can't chat about stuff like this, what's even the point of TMO?
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quote:Originally posted by ben: One question: do I get to attack women?
No - you'll have to wait for Womanhunt, which is scheduled for a second quarter 2008 release.
Personally I'm looking forward to Rockstar's next game, BabyFight: UK. The game opens with your character's birth in first person view - a dark red screen, a crack of HDR light, and before you know it you're out on your own in the world. In this case, that world is a decrepit room filled with gigantic adults watching Deal or No Deal. You might expect some attention, but you're left rolling around on the floor until your sister approaches and smacks you in the face with her baby fist.
You're barely five minutes old, and screaming like you've literally never screamed before. You hear a booming voice - that of your mother as she calls you a 'fucking pussy' and tells you to 'get up and fight'. This scene acts as a tutorial and explains how to use the Wii remote to control your flailing baby limbs. As the game progresses, you'll find yourself pitted against increasingly stronger opponents - including other babies, toddlers, cats, dogs and the final boss - mummy herself.
Weapons include a hair brush, a rolled up copy of Heat magazine, a bottle of Stella and a soiled nappy. If you get a certain number of hits in and fill the Baby Rage meter, you'll unlock Tantrum Mode - in which your vision is diminished by photo-realistic tears, but you have double the strength for 30 seconds.
You're not just fighting to win. You're fighting to escape the nightmarish future that's laid out before you.
BabyFight: UK is avaiable exclusively for Wii.
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posted
R* have issued a statement saying they plan to respect the ban, although they disagree with it. I wonder if the decision not to appeal it is anything to do with not wanting to scrap with the BBFC as GTAIV approaches the release date?
Ho-hum. Anyone got any good ideas as to how to get hold of a copy? Reckon I'll probably give Amazon France a go, and brush up on my French skills. I pretty much resent learning a foreign language in my gaming time though. I'm still bitter about the horrid maths problem in Resident Evil Zero which made me think REALLY HARD about maths in MY OWN TIME. That's the sort of thing they should ban from games.
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posted
Buy it from Sweden or Portugal as I don't believe they translate the games there. They might translate the manual but nobody reads manuals anyway.
Also, I don't think you can get it from France as they use SECAM rather than PAL.
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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