Time For a Gaming Rant
This week, I have been researching and writing about Take Two's newest game, Manhunt 2, and I must admit just reading about it is starting to get into my psyche. You can read my most recent post on the game at Gamertell if you haven't been keeping up.
Those of you who know me well know that overly gruesome games turn me off. The grossest video game in my personal collection is Eternal Darkness, a very recent purchase. The second most gory game I own is StarCraft, and after that, *goes to check* Perfect Dark. Pretty wimpy, isn't it? I had nightmares about Mortal Kombat as a child. Stephie owns Take Two's Grand Theft Auto, but I haven't played it yet. While I admire its sandbox gameplay, it's pretty low on my list of games to try out. That said, my personal position on Manhunt 2 is pretty murky.
Manhunt 2 is a psychological horror game. It's also a game about brutally murdering people before they murder the player. Psychological horror fascinates me even though I have a low tolerance for it--that's why I purchased Eternal Darkness. However, ED involves zombies and aliens, and ultimately the player is trying to prevent death. Also, it's broken up into sections so that there's not the CONSTANT threat of death and killing. Manhunt, on the other hand, actively encourages the player to kill, kill, kill--to gruesomely kill. In ED, you can regain sanity by "finishing off" monsters--but they are monsters. The enemies in Manhunt are "monsters", but they are people.
Should Manhunt 2 be banned? It's an open question how violence in interactive media affects people. There is no question that it does--when you play a game, you feel different afterward, just like you feel different after playing a sport or finishing work or taking a test or doing the dishes. The question is whether it adversly affects players in ways they don't understand, whether the effect is temporary, chronic, weak, or strong, who has the authority to curtail it and by how much and why? Governments, of course, believe they have the authority to ban potentially harmful things by purview of being governments, and they've been doing it since they've been able to write down laws.
Edgy entertainment tends to be banned prematurely, then eventually put on a pedestal. For some examples, see Ulysses (ugh!), Huckleberry Finn, or Elvis Presley. Is Manhunt art? Take Two certainly thinks so.
Of course, Manhunt 2 isn't banned in America or even effectively banned. It is simply that nobody wants the stigma associated with selling something that cannot be viewed by children. The M rating, like the movies' R rating, is the wiggle room, the rating that markets can comfortably sell because they can point to NC-17 and AO and say, "See, we don't sell that. We're family friendly!" And thus, NC-17 films and AO games basically do not exist, mostly because developers and producers push and prod their productions into the very high end of M and R ratings, diluting the meaning of the ratings and (some would say) restricting artistic vision.
In fact, there are a handful of NC-17 rated films, but they are very rare and most of them are unheard of or known by their edited versions. Similarly, there are currently 24 AO-rated games, most of which are patently sexual and only two of which were console games (and one was an accident!).
The censoring of video games has become much less severe since the golden days since Nintendo of America ruled with an iron fist, deleting references to alcohol and religious symbols and sanitizing Mortal Kombat. Is there a limit to what we should, as general consumers, consume? How about a movie featuring child abuse? *looks it up on Google* There are movies that depict child abuse but decry it. What about a movie where the protagonist is a child abuser?
The mechanics of censorship are very, very murky. Ideally, everyone would be hard to offend and people wouldn't make entertainment media that was designed to cross the line. But many people are much easier to offend than others. To a large extent, you can wave that away, saying "vote with your purchasing power." I'm not sure if there should be a limit to that. I would lean no, provided adequate steps have been taken to protect the innocent (children), the unwary (sadly, many parents), and the discretionary (moral conservatives). And should those steps be coded into law? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it is certainly common courtesy. And when are companies most likely to be more courteous? Sadly, it's usually when they are threatened with lawsuits. And thus, we have the incentive for Jack Thompson to keep harassing gamers everywhere.
It takes courage to tackle sensitive subjects, in the name of art or otherwise. On the other hand, sometimes courage is the mask for doing something disgusting for the sake of shock. Take Two is well known for their love of shock.
Those of you who know me well know that overly gruesome games turn me off. The grossest video game in my personal collection is Eternal Darkness, a very recent purchase. The second most gory game I own is StarCraft, and after that, *goes to check* Perfect Dark. Pretty wimpy, isn't it? I had nightmares about Mortal Kombat as a child. Stephie owns Take Two's Grand Theft Auto, but I haven't played it yet. While I admire its sandbox gameplay, it's pretty low on my list of games to try out. That said, my personal position on Manhunt 2 is pretty murky.
Manhunt 2 is a psychological horror game. It's also a game about brutally murdering people before they murder the player. Psychological horror fascinates me even though I have a low tolerance for it--that's why I purchased Eternal Darkness. However, ED involves zombies and aliens, and ultimately the player is trying to prevent death. Also, it's broken up into sections so that there's not the CONSTANT threat of death and killing. Manhunt, on the other hand, actively encourages the player to kill, kill, kill--to gruesomely kill. In ED, you can regain sanity by "finishing off" monsters--but they are monsters. The enemies in Manhunt are "monsters", but they are people.
Should Manhunt 2 be banned? It's an open question how violence in interactive media affects people. There is no question that it does--when you play a game, you feel different afterward, just like you feel different after playing a sport or finishing work or taking a test or doing the dishes. The question is whether it adversly affects players in ways they don't understand, whether the effect is temporary, chronic, weak, or strong, who has the authority to curtail it and by how much and why? Governments, of course, believe they have the authority to ban potentially harmful things by purview of being governments, and they've been doing it since they've been able to write down laws.
Edgy entertainment tends to be banned prematurely, then eventually put on a pedestal. For some examples, see Ulysses (ugh!), Huckleberry Finn, or Elvis Presley. Is Manhunt art? Take Two certainly thinks so.
Of course, Manhunt 2 isn't banned in America or even effectively banned. It is simply that nobody wants the stigma associated with selling something that cannot be viewed by children. The M rating, like the movies' R rating, is the wiggle room, the rating that markets can comfortably sell because they can point to NC-17 and AO and say, "See, we don't sell that. We're family friendly!" And thus, NC-17 films and AO games basically do not exist, mostly because developers and producers push and prod their productions into the very high end of M and R ratings, diluting the meaning of the ratings and (some would say) restricting artistic vision.
In fact, there are a handful of NC-17 rated films, but they are very rare and most of them are unheard of or known by their edited versions. Similarly, there are currently 24 AO-rated games, most of which are patently sexual and only two of which were console games (and one was an accident!).
The censoring of video games has become much less severe since the golden days since Nintendo of America ruled with an iron fist, deleting references to alcohol and religious symbols and sanitizing Mortal Kombat. Is there a limit to what we should, as general consumers, consume? How about a movie featuring child abuse? *looks it up on Google* There are movies that depict child abuse but decry it. What about a movie where the protagonist is a child abuser?
The mechanics of censorship are very, very murky. Ideally, everyone would be hard to offend and people wouldn't make entertainment media that was designed to cross the line. But many people are much easier to offend than others. To a large extent, you can wave that away, saying "vote with your purchasing power." I'm not sure if there should be a limit to that. I would lean no, provided adequate steps have been taken to protect the innocent (children), the unwary (sadly, many parents), and the discretionary (moral conservatives). And should those steps be coded into law? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it is certainly common courtesy. And when are companies most likely to be more courteous? Sadly, it's usually when they are threatened with lawsuits. And thus, we have the incentive for Jack Thompson to keep harassing gamers everywhere.
It takes courage to tackle sensitive subjects, in the name of art or otherwise. On the other hand, sometimes courage is the mask for doing something disgusting for the sake of shock. Take Two is well known for their love of shock.