Manhunt Reaches Grisly End

Britain in the 21st Century. Paedophile witch-hunts, a citizenry slavishly following Big Brother and, of course, game-banning. Hello!

Or so you'd expect this blog post to run. After all, we're gamers here, and in the aftermath of first the effective banning of Manhunt 2, and then Take Two's decision to shelve the game entirely, you'd think that the Transmogrifier would become a veritable hive of righteous indignation. Normally, I would explode in rage at something so archaic as a videogame being banned, but this case is somewhat different to most, for the following reasons:

1.) This wasn't the work of some attention-grabbing sensationalist knob like Keith Vaz or Jack Thompson. Had they or their like been the cause of Manhunt 2's demise, I'd be furious. You can't sell out entertainment to the puritan extreme, otherwise one offending article gets banned, and then another, until we're nannying ourselves to death and watching endless reruns of Eastenders. After that, it's only a matter of time until our brains leap out of our ears to escape the horror.

2.) This was a decision made independently by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification). Although the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) is the usual ratings medium of the videogame industry in the UK, companies producing more violent or sexualised content (such as Rockstar themselves) often put their games forward to the BBFC because a) they're normally to be less squeamish about explicit content and b) their ratings look cooler on game boxes.

Wha? 'M'? What the hell's that pansy-ass shit?

Ooh YEAH! 18-rated, bitches! FUCK you!

3.) Manhunt 2 probably had it coming. Controversial, I know, but so's the game. It's designed to be, in fact. Its predecessor, Manhunt (duh) was developed to be shocking, grotesque, and horribly close to the realism bone. You could slice open throats with shards of glass and suffocate people with shopping bags, and were compelled to do so by your unseen malefactor, urging you to go for the vicious kill-shot. It was gruesome, truly, but by design. Its sequel follows the same basic remit, but with a greater focus on plot, and, at least on one of its planned systems, the extra-grim touch of Wii remote interactivity. What does that mean?

SHBZZZZZSKLORRTCH plip plip

Players (or, as they're known to all government officials, 'small children') will be directing the lathe, the shiv or the Asda carrier bag with the movement of their own hands. This is the PR equivalent of painting a big comedy target on your arse, particularly for a company so often hounded by simpletons convinced that their games are designed to teach kids to shoot policemen. This game was almost predestined to be banned.

In the final analysis, this is a game that went through all the normal channels for a videogame, and was determined unsuitable for public consumption by an independent body designed to make that decision. Fair's fair, that's the system we're working with. Of course, it's never really a victory for a liberal society (which is, of course, the ideal) when expressive entertainment is stifled. It's also never pleasant for gamers whenever their pastime of choice becomes the scapegoat of the week for a flailing media hell-bent on terrifying their public on a daily basis.

This happens a great deal. Websites like Gamepolitics are updated daily with new tales of supposedly game-inspired murders and crime sprees, legal action taken by bereaved parents against publishers, and professional fuddy-duddy Jack Thompson comparing the release of the Playstation 2 to Pearl Harbor.

"You fucking Japaneses!"

It's JT who really offends here: he's the guy gamers love to hate. But the crux of his argument (or at least, what he falls back on when his racist babblings get out of hand) is perfectly solid: children shouldn't be exposed to images of extreme violence or sex. He's saying it should be illegal to sell 18/M-rated games to kids. And of course, on this side of the pond, it already is. Such a system in the US would undoubtedly be admirable. Games are a medium containing a great deal of explicit content, and it is essential that parents be aware of the kind of material that their kids are taking in.

However, ambulance-chasers like Thompson stagger their own causes by showing absolutely no regard for the people whose entertainment they're trying to moderate, and making unfair, misinformed assumptions about them. Jack Thompson's abundant, gorgeously misinformed tirades paint gamers singularly as either wide-eyed pre-teen innocents, or reclusive 30-year-old rapists that spend their afternoons humming dementedly to themselves and polishing their rifle collections.

"Ah done learnt it from Tapper."

It's this attitude which so often poisons adult discussions of videogame content. The fact is, the material available in games is no worse than in films or on TV. It just depends what you decide to watch, or play. Just like films, videogames are a varied tapestry, in no way limited by the form their stories take, only by their content. Games have their Manhunts and their Gears of Wars, and films have their video nasties. However, it must be noted that the industry is somewhat at fault here - looking at the charts, it almost seems like gaming is a medium made up, almost exclusively, of video nasties.

Almost all large publishers seem to be leading with first-person shooters or extra-gory beat-'em-ups at the moment. Rockstar is the company that finds itself accused of this most often, and it contains some of the greatest development talent working today. Violence sells, for sure, but the extent of its abundance seems inexcusable. The popularity of more relaxed games, like real-time strategies or point-and-click adventures is undoubtedly on the wane, with the latter being almost entirely extinct.

HE'S NEVER COMING BACK

People want action, and the simplest form to deliver this in is the Bruckheimer/Woo/Carpenter thrill-fest. The fact is that as a consumer base, we pay far too much money and attention to the lazy action cash-ins. The games which deserve our applause and our hard-earned cash are those which deliver action and visceral excitement to the gamer without resorting to extreme violence, and without sacrificing their intelligence. And which don't rely on media shitstorms for publicity.

Grand Theft Auto, Half-Life 2 and Crackdown all feature violent content, but within a context, and should be accepted as valid narratives, as such. The Manhunt games have made a point, even in their advertising, of portraying the notion of violence as pornography (in a manner that could be argued as satirical, but still), and featuring this as the central point of the game, so it is perhaps here that they fall down. These games have their place in the medium, certainly, but not as the most widely-advertised and talked-about offerings thereof.

The thing that burns the most about the whole situation, though, is that the people outside the industry really couldn't give the slightest shit about the games that get it right, with very few exceptions. Dreamfall got a grant from the Norwegian Ministry of the Arts, and... well, that's about it. To anyone with the power to give such boosts to developers, it's all just stupid trash, so why pay it any attention except to stamp it down where provoked?

George Bush doesn't care about exotically polychromatic people!

Tim Schafer's utterly beautiful Psychonauts languished in mainstream obscurity, with poor sales figures and an anaemic ad campaign, despite being the best kid-friendly game (arguably just the best game) released in the last... ever. Probably. The few companies who try to put out story-based titles, eschewing extreme interactive violence as far as possible, do so understanding that it means they're killing their chances of success in exchange for their art.

So there you have it. The industry state of play. We've screwed it up a bit, and it's our fault, but not exclusively. Manhunt 2 probably shouldn't have been banned in this day and age, but I for one won't mourn its loss particularly. I suppose the only real unified message of this post is: buy better games, and don't read the tabloids. There. Profound, no?

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'Beat' Nick likes it when the solution is this easy.