Manhunt 2 Banned In Britain

westlake writes "Rockstar's Manhunt 2 has been banned in the U.K. for what the British Board of Film Classification calls its 'unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying.' 'There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.' The company has six weeks to submit an appeal. The last game to be refused classification was Carmageddon in 1997. That decision was later overturned via the appeals process."

Comments

Great advertising..

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Manhunt 2, available soon in the US on the Wii...
GamePro gives it 8/10.
IGN rated 9.5/10.
British Board of Film Classification calls its 'unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying.' 'There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.'

Re:Its not going to work

[Pojut]

Or has your country decided that drug laws are pointless, too?

It isn't called the war on some drugs for nothing, you know...

Re:What is the point?

[FreeKill]

You confusing the poor graphics of those systems with a lack of violence, there were plenty of violent games on those old machines. River City Ransom, Double Dragon, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem. The difference is that now the systems are actually capable of creating realistic environments, but the games are just recreating the same game play you had fun with back on the old systems. I think people should have the right to decide if they want to play manhunt or not.

Carmageddon

[Glacial Wanderer]

Best physics
Best scoring system
Best audio
Best gameplay

Very possibly the best game ever! I think my entire floor in the dorms got addicted to this game (yes, it was an all male floor at an engineering school). I never would have guessed that senseless exaggerated violence with a buggy rubber band physics system could have been so much fun.

Re:Will it help?

[Awful Truth]

Devil's advocate here:

Suppose

1) you really believe exposure to violent games leads to a more casual attitude towards violence. I think there's evidence both for and against that theory right now, so it's not an unreasonable belief, if still unproven. And

2) You don't consider video games to be a protected form of expression -- that they're just toys, rather than artistic vehicles. Hey, they're called "games" for a reason. Maybe this is not a popular perspective on Slashdot, but again, not totally unreasonable.

Sure, the kiddies are going to download this via torrents, but Rockstar won't make any revenue from these downloads. If Rockstar doesn't profit from this game, they won't produce violent ones in the future. If you believe these things to be true, then a ban is a very effective way of influencing the future content of games.

They already do.

[Kadin2048]

What's next....banning books that have too much violent, sadistic content? Sure its not as flashy as the video game, but, it still promotes the same messages....

They already do. Even in the U.S., it's possible to produce "child porn" using a word processor and your imagination, at least according to the Justice Department. The way the obscenity statutes are written, if something isn't artistic enough, it can be banned as obscene, on its content and regardless of medium alone.

I thought arresting people just for text was something we'd left in the past, but a few years ago there was a case about some woman (I think it was a woman) who was arrested for operating a website that had stories, of a sexual nature, featuring 'underage' participants (meaning the fictitious characters in the stories were underage). They were judged to be obscene, and thus illegal, even though no minors were ever involved in their production.

The argument for banning actual underage pornography is pretty clear -- you have to eliminate the market for the stuff, to prevent children from being sucked in and abused in order to produce it. No argument for me (or pretty much anyone else) there.

However, the evidence for banning 'simulated' pornography, either computer-generated rasters, or text descriptions, seems very spurious. Okay, so there may be some evidence that the availability of even certain kinds of simulated pornography encourages violent behavior. But to begin with, the evidence seems thin and mostly driven by emotion and rhetoric, not rational argument. Second, that entire line of thinking is a terrible idea, because it undermines the concept of absolute individual responsibility.

Once you start letting people escape absolute responsibility for their actions, by blaming it on pornography, or violent video games, or movies, or just "society" in general, you've lost. Even if you can demonstrate that the availability of porn/games/movies/whatever motivates certain already-sick people to action, that's still not a justification for banning them from everyone. (If anything, it suggests that we need to do a better job ferreting these people out before they can act, and dealing with them.) If a small uptick in crime and violence are the price we have to pay for individualism, then we need to suck it up, because that's the basis for our entire civilization.

Re:No such thing as natural rights

[RexRhino]

No, people have no natural rights. The concept of rights wouldn't exist without society. There would only be power: And the power of free speech and expression exists until someone takes it away, because all people have the ability to express themselves, inherently. If you were trapped alone, on a desert island, with no society whatsoever, you would be able to freely express yourself.

We both give up the right to hit each other in the face in exchange for not getting hit in the face. We *DO* have the right to hit each other in the face... so long as it is done with the consent of both individuals. You can't punch someone in the face involuntarily, because you are infringing his natural right not to get punched. If someone was alone, on a desert island, with no society whatsoever, they would have no fear whatsoever of being punched.

I mean, if I say I have the right to free speech, but no one will uphold my right, do I have it or don't I? Sure, you do have that right. The laws of physics aren't standing in your way, and presumably no physical or mental handicap is keeping you from expressing yourself. The only thing keeping you from using free speech is the artificial restriction on speech placed by other people.

The whole concept of natural rights is a kind of dodge or con. It is simply an appeal to authority designed to shut down debate around rights. "Oh, sorry. That's a natural right, end of discussion." The thing is, if there were such a thing as natural rights, they would be clear and self evident to all. Therefore the discussion of natural rights would never need to take place because we would all know them by instinct. Yet we do need to discuss them, and there is no clear consensus on what rights should be included in the hallowed list of 'natural' rights. We do know natural rights, by instinct. The rule of "do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else" is pretty much universal in humans, until you start organizing them into opposing tribes or religions or political groups. Individuals then exploit those conflicts to control other members of the group. It takes years of "education" and social conditioning to get us to feel good about punishing and restricting other people.

The only people who want to "debate" human rights are the people who are interested in taking them away. The people who support free speech aren't interested in debating what free-speech means, because free speech is the natural human state by default. I have free speech until someone threatens to take it away. People want to initiate debate about rights because they want to find some convoluted reasoning for taking away the basic freedoms and abilities that people have by their very nature.

Re:No such thing as natural rights

[RexRhino]

For instance, I think that fencing off land violates my natural right to walk around wherever I choose. In your trite little desert isle scenario, I can go wherever I want without hindrance. What gives you the right to keep me off your land? Ah, I see, natural right. Ownership and property are legal concepts... created by governments as an abstraction of people's natural right to preserve the fruits of their own labor. For the most part, you have the natural right to walk around wherever you want. However, if you want to do donuts on your neighbors corn crops in your monster truch, then you would probably be pushing the line of reasonable behavior.

Exactly. You want to take away everyone's right to use your private property (not personal property, like a house or clothes, or anything made by human labor: private property. Land.) And you have some convoluted reasoning involving some supposed arbitrary "nature," and the concept of "retaliatory force." When did I ever say I believe in a natural right to own land? I believe in people's right to the products of their own labor, and sometimes with the restrictions of gravity and the nature of natural resources such as soil, that might overlap with land.

Most advocates of the concept of natural rights would disagree. They would say that because property rights are natural, land owners owe nothing to the landless. The kind of situation that you are fearing... where a handful of barons (or whatever you want to call them) own the land and most people are serfs without land, existed in history only because barons origionally took the land from others by force, and exercised rigid social, religious, and economic control through violence. These great disparities in wealth only exist with the sort of rigidly enforced heirarchies that are in conflict with the basic rule of "do whatever you want, so long as you don't harm others".

And none of your arguements have any bearing over freedom of speech, which is information and not bound by any real scarcity. Speech can't infringe on anyone elses rights.