Slashdot Mirror
Manhunt 2 Ban Fallout, Game Rated AO By ESRB
In the wake of yesterday's announcement of a UK ban on Manhunt 2 , Rockstar has registered its disappointment at the BBFC's decision. The company simply stated that they 'respect those who have different opinions about the horror genre and videogames as a whole, but we hope they will also consider the opinions of the adult gamers for whom this product is intended.' Meanwhile, here in the US, the ESRB has given the game the dreaded AO rating, for adults only. If you're unfamiliar with this seldom-seen designation, it's essentially the 'kiss of death' for a title at retail; a number of popular videogame outlets refuse to carry titles with that rating. MTV's Stephen Totilo has a lengthy and considered discussion of these proceedings. "For 'Manhunt 2,' signs pointed to the title being both less and more extreme than the first. Gone from press previews were mentions of snuff films and Directors. Instead, a more traditionally violent video game premise: one man's struggle to stay alive in an insane asylum gone mad."
Seriously, a game like Manhunt 2 gets an AO rating, while true horror games like "Play with the Teletubbies" get rated EC (Early Childhood)! Where is the justice in that?
I'm definitely going to buy it. Can I order direct from Rockstar?
Is there any reason why Rockstar can't just distribute the game via Steam or something like this?
Rather than selling it at a retail level, utilize the free PR to mention that the game will still be sold but is only available for online download.
They put in a disclaimer, you must be 18 to download this game, jada jada jada, and then sell it.
Can someone post the MTV article here? Gotta love super duper work filters.
and have an essay contest entitled "Why Microsoft Word is more likely than video games to incite people to commit violent acts"
Having played violent video games and used Word, one has caused me to become violent, and it wasn't video games....
Secondly as the article pointed out, from everyone I know who has seen it, the game is much more toned down from the original in many ways, which got the M rating here despite being a interactive snuff film.
And third the ratings coming in when they did leads a lot of suspicion as to why, when filed at two different times, the game ended up getting its decisions handed down at almost the exact same time, with the British banning it despite it being submitted to them AFTER the US board got it.
Lastly, its a known fact that a special interest group was putting major pressure on both ratings boards to get it a AO ratings.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Didn't they say that that the Brits are ignoring the Adult Gamers in their decision? So, since they made it for Adult Gamers, shouldn't they be welcoming the Adults Only mark? Oh it wasn't just made for a niche market then, eh?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
So pretending to graphically murder someone is more suitable for younger people than watching people have sex?
;)
You must be from the US
Is there any compelling reason why kids SHOULD be allowed to buy this game?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Wait, you actually get to mimic the motions? That just gave the game about three times as much mileage for me. Imagine drinking games involving Manhunt 2 - a drunk serial strangler has untold comic potential.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
I LIVE in the US and I've never understood this perspective either. I would rather kids see sex than see violence every single day, let alone realistically murder people. While it is true that 99% of people who play video games WONT go psycho, there is always the remainder who are already rather disturbed or whatever reason, who definately don't need help.
And this is different than selling kids cap guns, super soakers, plastic swords, paintball guns, water grenades, cork guns, slingshots, bb guns, rubber nunchuks, tonka tanks, GI Joe with Kung-Fu action grip to hold that tiny sub machine gun, plastic light sabers that go Wha-Wha when waved and TCSHK when they collide with something (presumably a limb), bow-n-arrow sets with those rubber plunger tips, lawn darts, chess boards, bibles, those keychains that make exploding noises when you press a button, or those race car tracks that cross in the middle specifically to cause the cars to crash?
The AO rating for games is basically the same thing as R for movies. The problem is that people think that AO = X, and that's a stigma that needs to be changed. If more games were rated AO for their violent content, then retailers would be forced to carry AO games. This would result in more accurate rating for games. Today, any game with even a minor level of violence is rated M, so you can't tell the difference between Halo (which is just a shooter that has almost no foul language) and Gears of War (wear people curse a lot of slaughter aliens with chainsaws). My 12-year-old nephew plays Halo 2, but he's not allowed to play GoW, yet both are rated M.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Rockstar, if you're listening, please do us a favor. Keep the game just the way it is. Release it with the AO rating.
You have the capital to take a risk like this (especially with GTA 4 coming soon, and the tidal wave of cash it is sure to generate). Someone has to be the first to put out high quality AO content. The Atari 2600 came out in 1977. There are lots of adults that have been playing games for their entire lives, and want game content that falls in the same noire category as 300, Reservoir Dogs, and Sin City.
Until there is a proven market for this material, the vendors won't take a risk on it. But you have the ability to establish that market, and the cashflow to take the risk.
I don't even think it's that much of a risk; the first game to thumb its nose at the family-values whining minority. Everyone who would have bought the game will want it, 90% of them are old enough to legally buy it, and most of those will be willing and able to make the effort necessary to do so.
So please, give it a shot. You can always rerelease it with duckies and bunnies, and a gun that shoots hearts to make the furry animals love you, later.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Movie theatres aren't supposed to sell tickets to "R" rated movies to minors, just as video game vendors aren't supposed to sell "AO" rated games to minors. I don't see the inconsistency you imply.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Was going to post this in the "UK BAN"-thread, but post it here instead.
I have always been a firm believer in films/games not making people more violent. Something happened to me, though, to sort of make me doubt my strong belief.
I bought Manhunt and played it. It was really fun, a great little sneak-and-kill game. But it was very violent and I did not really like being that violent but it was part of the game and making the gruesome kills was fun in a strange way. It was axhilarating to see how long you could sneak behind someone before you had to do the kill.
When I finished the game I played for a particularly long day and that night I had the most bizarre and gruesome dreams. I dreamt that I cleft people with chainsaws and ran over them with my car. Everything felt OK and I didn't have any moral complaints in my dream, which, if you ask anyone in my surrounding, is totally different from my personality. I am not a psychopath as far as I can tell. :)
I haven't had any such dreams since and I hope I won't again (though they weren't nightmares in the true sense since I wasn't scared in them, only by my reaction to them). What I'm saying is that I do believe we are affected by what we see/experience. At least if its done frequently enough.
In cases like very violent films or games, however, having a 18-year restriction on buying the game is enough. Grown up people can decide for themselves what they want to see/play. I felt desturbed by my experience and probably won't buy Manhunt 2 for that reason, but I certainly don't believe in denying the experience from anyone else who is old enough to make a grown up decision about this.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
Next up, Rockstar announces Leisure Suit Larry : San Andreas and the ultra-realistic Wii edition. You figure out what the Wiimote will be used for ;)
While both Europe and the U.S. have a pretty retarded policies when it comes to censorship (neither violence nor sex are appropriate things for the government to censor), the idea that sex in media is worse than violence does make sense. It is very, very, very unlikely that someone is going to commit murder. It is very, very, very likely that someone is going to have sex.
How many people do you know who have killed other people (aside from soldiers or police officers or something like that)? How many people do you know have had sex? The risk of a teenager having risky sex is astronomicly greater than the risk of the teenager commiting murder.
You really shouldn't brag "our censorship is better than your censorship" though. It is like bragging that your diarrhea is better. The truly civilized countries are the ones that trust parents to decide what they want their children to see and don't get involved.
Quite frankly, I personally think games like Manhunt 2 are decadent garbage. That said, if someone wants to purchase and play these games they should be free to do so.
This sort of excessive regulation, to me, reflects the general decline and weakness of the West. We've got these nanny states run by people who increasingly believe it's their responsibility to control every aspect of our lives. More troubling is how citizens are themselves abdicating all responsibility, expecting their governments to do everything for them. What these people apparently fail to realize is that inevitable the system will eventually come around and start trampling on their freedoms; it's a very slippery slope.
Ultimately, it's the parents who should be responsible for what their children are doing. If a child who plays these ultra-violent games has violent tendencies I'll guarantee those issues stem from poor parenting and not the game. From personal experience this has always been the case. The fact that the child has access to such games is merely a symptom of that problem.
As long as humans have been around there has been violence. I'm not making excuses for that violence, but humanity has in general gotten along fine. Look at the level of violence depicted in a lot of anime that officials in the US feel the need to censor. Yet Japan maintains extremely low crime rates.
Sometimes I think trying to shield children by depicting an unrealistic, utopian fantasy is a big mistake. It renders them poorly equipped to deal with the harshness of the real world. I'm not advocating they participate in violent blood sports, but as always everything in moderation is best.
"I LIVE in the US and I've never understood this perspective either."
It's actually very easy to understand. Just ask a couple of questions:
How many high school seniors have fathered or mothered a child?
How many high school seniors have killed a person?
The thinking is along the lines of: "I remember what it was like when I was in school, and I don't want my child getting/causing pregnancy and ruining their life." The idea that they're going to go Columbine at a school is a distant thought.
It's not about the act, it's about the probability of it becoming a problem in the household. I don't personally subscribe to that line of thought, but it's not like half the country took a crazy pill or something.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense. The summary made it perfectly clear why they don't want the AO mark: a number of cowardly stores refuse to stock AO games. Fewer stores means less visibility and fewer sales, even if they really only want adults purchasing the game. For a game that was expensive to produce, an AO rating can destroy the producers chance of making a profit. A Mature mark would get them into most stores with almost identical effectiveness (AO is 18+, while M is 17+).
Exactly as many people predicted, the ratings system, even a voluntary one, has stifled creativity. The ratings system resulted in incentives for stores to refuse to stock the highest rated games to appease the whiners. Not being carried in stores reduces sales, frequently to the point of ensuring the game will be a commercial failure. Developers and publishers to restrict what they do to avoid the top rating mark. End result: you get almost nothing specifically intended for the adult market. What you do get tends to be low quality and pandering, because shameless crap is the only thing likely to make money. The end result is that the highest rating becomes associated with pandering garbage, which just reenforces the entire cycle. You're pretty much guaranteed that some topics and some styles of gameplay that serious game developers might want to turn into a top quality title will either be watered down or simply never produced.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Kids play violent games WITH EACH OTHER from early childhood. Cowboys and Indians? Cops and robbers? People aren't naturally pacifist, nor are tendencies towards violence somehow developed after puberty. For children to be interested in violence is FAR more natural than for them to be interested in watching people have sex.
So, yeah, it IS more suitable.
I like basketball!!1!
To buy a rated M game you need to be 17. To buy an AO game you need to be 18. Is that one year gap really that killer that it would ruin the sales of the whole game? I can see why retailers wouldn't want to stock AO games that are basically porn, but games much less violent than something like Hostel or Saw III which they are selling should be able to share the space.
The best way to explain this is the film Midnight Cowboy which got an X rating, won an Oscar anyway, and was later re-rated by the MPAA to be an R.
Ok, this was an embarrassment for the MPAA, especially considering nowadays no one thinks an X rating is going to be for a movie with much actual content. So the NC-17 rating was created to cover cases like this. If you've ever seen an NC-17 rated film, you've probably been disappointed if you were looking for porn. (I've seen a few, like Requiem for a Dream one of my girlfriends favorite movies.)
However, the distribution still treats NC-17 movies as things that it doesn't want to deal with, you won't see them in Blockbuster or many retail stores. The rating has failed to achieve broad distribution for controversial films, and films that are intended to be commercial will either be edited to be R or if the director has enough clout the MPAA will rate them R and turn a blind eye to content that would earn an unknown director an NC-17.
It's far simpler for video games. AO is the rating for porn games, period. There's no such thing as an NC-17 rating for video games, because they are currently considered to be entertainment only with no artistic value by the Establishment. Since no game will be considered art at the present time, there is no reason for an "art" rating. (Note: The views of the Establishment do not reflect the views of the author of this comment.) If your game gets an AO rating, it better fit into that niche (although... in movies porn is pretty huge for a niche, and makes a huge amount of money to show it). If it doesn't, you are basically screwed, you've probably spent to much on development to justify a niche game that will only sell on the Web (even the porn store guys that sell porn games will likely go, "you're kidding, right?" if you try to distribute it through them).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There is undoubtedly a sizeable audience for this kind of game, but it's understandable that RockStar would not want to release the game with an AO rating, as certain large resellers (Wal-Mart?) will be unwilling to carry the title. Perhaps the solution is to release two different versions of the game. I, for one, would like to play the AO version, but in order to placate overly-protective parents around the globe, RockStar could release a watered-down version for the teenage set. That's not to say that I think that video games are responsible for violence in society any more than movies are, but if the only way to preserve the integrity of the game is to cater to the alarmists then so be it.
The real issue here, above and beyond the "do games make people violent?" question, is why are adult gamers demanding such violence? "Please consider the opinion of the adult gamer," sort of disturbs me, somehow. Why is the opinion of the adult gamer, consistantly, "we want more violence!"? 30 years ago, this level of violence was unthinkable. It's not the violence itself that I mind, it's the fascination with violence that really disgusts me.
When the topic first came up, and that pretty much started in the mainstream with Mortal Kombat, the defense was that it added realism and immersion. But to be honest, I never bought it. And that's becoming apparant now that we're going above and beyond realistic violence to DEMANDING that violence be much more prevolent than just an innocent desire to uphold "realism".
I think there's really two reasons for this:
1) We're not talking about adults here, we're talking 13-18 year olds. It's basically the job of teenagers to try to disgust their parents as much as possible, as a form of rebellion.
2) Culturally, males are being taught that they're basically immoral and unintelligent, and that the only way to prove your masculinity is to be the ultimate in those areas. "I want a beer, and I want to see something naked... that's all." When better way of establishing that identity by sitting and playing ultra-violent video games with no emotional tie-in? I've seen it, 15 year olds saying, "check this out, I can cut off his head" and then go up to some guy, and chop off his head while he's screaming in pain. It basically says, "I can do this, and I won't even feel remorseful about it, it doesn't bother me, because I'm a man."
So my theory is that violence is largely used as a means of establishing independance and gender identity. It's not the fault of video games, it's the fault of our culture for not having any possitive rolemodels to look up to. As a friend of mine likes to quote, "where have all the cowboys gone?"
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
"X" is no longer an official MPAA rating. It was abandoned when NC-17 was introduced mainly because it WAS associated with porn. Of course, thanks to the "masterpiece" which was the first widely released NC-17 movie, Showgirls, and the accompanied protests by religious groups, NC-17 movies are closely associated with "pornographic" content and the end result is pretty much the same as before.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I bought the first one at EB Games, having heard nothing about it. I guess the box art grabbed me, so I picked it off the shelf and though I'd give it a whirl.
Well I was absolutely horrified. The set up of the game was so vile and disturbing to me that I could not bring myself to play it.
I brought it back to EB, told them that they shouldn't even be selling a game like this and that I wanted my money back. The manager quickly agreed and gave me a full refund.
Head office must have sent advance warning that any open-box refund requests should be quickly granted on this game. Curious to know if they're going to take a position this go-around and not stock the sequel.
I, too, would rather kids watch sex than violence, but I wonder whether the problem many American parents have with pornography that is not that it teaches kids to have (unprotected?) sex, but that it teaches them to objectify women. I don't have any kids, but I imagine that's a more complicated lesson to teach kids than "killing is wrong".
Most high school kids these days will have sex one way or the other, but most will not try to kill someone. I don't think violent video games will have an impact one way or another on that statement, but if we're going to encourage something, I'd like to encourage them to make love, not war. Only a small number of kids who want to have sex get pregnant, but an unacceptable percentage (any % >0) of those who try to kill someone succeed.
OK, why does this game get "AO" rating (and completely banned from sale in multiple countries) while extremely disturbing games like Silent Hill cause no uproar? Seriously, I've never played games more psychologically disturbing and scary than the Silent Hill series. Along the same lines, movies like Saw are totally popular (and not banned) despite their excessively disturbing scenes (which all involve bloody violence and, again, psychologically disturbing situations). So, what's the deal?
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
"...an insane asylum gone mad."
An insane asylum gone mad?
"Dude. Have you SEEN who our President is? Do you remember the election results?"
Yeah. I also remember the shitty list of candidates we had. I wouldn't be so quick to judge. That election just plain sucked.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
While both Europe and the U.S. have a pretty retarded policies when it comes to censorship (neither violence nor sex are appropriate things for the government to censor), the idea that sex in media is worse than violence does make sense. It is very, very, very unlikely that someone is going to commit murder. It is very, very, very likely that someone is going to have sex.
And why does it matter? It's very, very, very likely that someone is going to eat sometime, so we should censure all references to food in movies? Sex is a natural behavior, everybody will engage in it sooner or later (there's still some hope left for you slashdotters!), and educating children about sex is a much better way to go about things than making it a forbidden and hidden dirty secret. Procreation is part of the normal functioning of human race and society. Murder isn't. What's the message you send kids when you're ok showing them somebody's head blown off, but have a conniption at the accidental sight of a nipple?
The whole thing still smacks of irrational fear. No different than the Osamas in Pajamas hiding under the stairs. God forbid people actually, you know...pay attention to their kids?
However, I think its not so much about the probability of sex vs probability of violence. Lets look at US history for just a brief moment. Who came here first? Oh thats right the uber puritans...you know...scarlet letter and all. The folks that believed it was perfectly natural to burn whiches, stone whores, drown the nonbelievers, cut out tongues, and any other number of horrifically violent things...and these horrific and violent responses were frequently in response to that horribly impure and immoral SEX!. So this stuff has been ingrained into American thought from day 1. Sex is horrible and impure and an affront to God, violence on the other hand is frequently used to glorify God, so the choice of violence vs sex seems pretty easy, how else could you possibly justify stoning the whore?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Even if portrayed in a game.
The trivialization and glamorization of violence is something that we expect only fully developed adults to manage appropriately, young people lack the necessary life experience to know better, specially children, that learn by mimicking.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.