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."

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...

Better than Clockwork Orange?

[pembo13]

Is Manhunt 2 better than Clockwork Orange? Because I liked that movie. Hope Manhunt 2 comes out for Wii.

Re:What is the point?

[Pojut]

I can give you a valid reason. Many people (myself included) are angry people, yet we understand and acknowledge that just because we WANT to do something doesn't mean that we SHOULD. If you ever read JTHM from Jhonnen Vasquez, he has said in an interview that JTHM represents things he has wanted to do to people, but he KNOWS that he shouldn't do them. So, as a way of venting his frustration and anger with society, he draws an overly violent comic which, at the same time, has some of the most important and insightful social commentary I have ever read.

Games like Manhunt/Manhunt 2 provide an outlet for those feelings. Yes, I could lift weights (which I do) or play sports (which I don't), but my outlets of choice are music and videogames.

People always talk about how videogames push people over the edge and make them murderers. They never stop to think that maybe the videogames help keep people in check by providing a harmless outlet for their anger.

Re:Its not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, if the RIAA can claim that lost potential sales represent stolen income, perhaps Rockstar can use the same reasoning and invoice the BBFC for lost sales. It's not like Rockstar is some criminal enterprise asking to be paid to not commit crimes - the BBFC stops them selling their legitimately developed product, the BBFC should be on the hook for replacing lost profits.

They should at least be able to give the BBFC some pretty nasty PR about how its damaging their business for a few weeks.

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.

Yep

[darjen]

I wonder how the British government justifies banning games of murder while they sanction the mass slaughtering that is going on in Iraq.

The Killing Urge

[spiralpath]

I have a theory that violence in the media, and games especially, may actually be beneficial to society (completely untested, so I guess it's a hypothesis). With the increased sophistication of our society, individuals are getting further and further from the need to kill their own food or participate in tribal warfare, or even to defend themselves physically from the wild and the elements. As humans, however, we're equipped with the survival instinct. It's foolish to think that we wouldn't want to express that urge, especially after millenia of social conditioning to do just that.

I think that violence in games allows us to act out what we're hardwired to do in a society that doesn't approve of it. Maybe we should force our murderers and rapists to play violent sims, so they don't act out their fantasies.

Re:What is the point?

[justinlindh]

This is an interesting point that I'd like to consider taking one step further. As you point out, we've gone from killing poorly rendered characters to high definition graphics and audio with realistic scenarios/story and environment. Effectively, the gap between realism and gaming was somewhat shortened.

Is there a realism line where it actually IS reasonable to ban interactive media? What if the future gives us even more realism, further shortening the gap between realism and virtual realism? Do we ban a video game once it's able to replicate the smell of death for the player? The tactile feedback of a knife cutting flesh? Is there a line, and if so, where is it?

I agree that the ban on this video game is uncalled for, but I think the above is an interesting question to ponder and am curious as to what others think about the subject.

Re:The Nanny State Strikes Again ...

[Anonymous Coward]

By your statements, I'd expect that if someone suggested handing guns out to all students it would be OK.

In much of your post, you are putting words in the GP poster's mouth. He didn't say this, or many of the other things you accused.

By the way, some high schools have had gun classes, and the students of the high school did not go on shooting rampages. In some rural areas, students would drive the family car/truck to school without bothering to remove the rifle/shotgun from the gun rack, and no one used to care. Maybe in some rural areas even today this still happens. (Maybe not, with Federal education regulations coming from DC...)

Maybe we should do the same with drugs, make them freely available to all, throw the abusers in jail or let them wither away in the streets, they made a choice and get their just deserts.

I infer that you believe that some people would destroy their lives with drugs if the drugs were legal, but do not do so now because drugs are not legal. I suppose that is possible. But right now, it's not that hard to get drugs, and people who really want them, get them.

What I wonder, and I have no hard data to answer this: would the number of people who destroy their lives with drugs be less, or more, than the number of people who die from lousy drug quality control? If drugs were legal, and regulated as to dosage and purity, would fewer people die on balance? Combine that with the fact that banning something makes it harder to get the mild form; drug smugglers would rather smuggle crack cocaine than marijuana. IIRC crack was INVENTED to be a compact, easily smugglable drug.

It is not my purpose to argue that drugs are good, but only to make you question the utility of banning them outright.

Gun control is not inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, unrestricted access to firearms is definitely a problem.

First, GP never said anything like "gun control is inherently ab ad thing." Second, even in states that have a reputation for being favorable to gun owners, there are a giant mass of gun laws. Different people mean different things wehn they say "gun control"... do you mean DC style no-guns-are-legal or do you just mean laws to try to keep guns out of criminal use? I have a big problem with DC style bans but I agree with laws forbidding convicted violent offenders from being allowed to have guns.

So, where are you thinking of when you say "unrestricted access to firearms"? Cause if you are thinking "Texas" or anywhere else in the USA think again. Lots of gun laws. Lots.

And we can't ban guns cause it doesn't work. Liquor was banned during the 1920s and that didn't work. Drugs are banned now and that isn't working.

How many people have died in bar fights because a gun was pulled when what SHOULD have happened if anything were for the parties to drag their beaten asses home and live to learn from their mistakes.

I don't know, how many?

I'll ask you one. How many people are beaten to death each year with hands and feet? How many killed with "blunt instruments" or thrown out of windows? Google for "FBI Uniform Crime Report" and you can answer this. IIRC, more people are beaten to death with hands and feet in the USA than are killed by any means in England.

There's a book, The Samurai, the Cowboy, and the Mountie. It basically compares gun laws and culture in several countries. It tells the story of England: not many people got shot in England, then England banned guns, then not many people got shot in England. It's more a culture thing than a law thing. Banning the guns is not why England has fewer gun deaths than the USA.

But if your motives are purely such, how can you possibly argue against doing so with proper legal controls in place? Why must you insist on being able to buy a concealable handgun with no other merits other than to kill?

Straw man attack. GP never said anything remotely like this.

Also, a concealable

Re:Its not going to work

[SausageOfDoom]

I'm in the UK and I was quite looking forward to this game coming out on the Wii. So, when I first heard the news of the banning, I thought that I could pick just one up when I'm in the US next month, but of course there's the NTSC - PAL issue.

Perhaps I could go over to France and pick up a PAL copy there, but would everything in the game be in French? Perhaps you're right - if the UK market is illegal, will they even produce a PAL version in English? Or is Australia PAL rather than NTSC?

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.

Re:Its not going to work

[midnighttoadstool]

The bible doesn't encourage rape and unjust violence despite non-religious assertions to the contrary. Why does shooting dogs have to be animal cruelty? 'To Kill a Mockingbird' doesn't compare to violent video games and has more reason to exist than pure 'recreation'. I think perhaps you are frothing at the mouth, like a mad dog. And thanks for the presumption that I haven't done anything about the thugs in my locality. It's easy for you to just jump on trains and beat up anyone that looks nasty with a baseball bat: must be your huge physique. I suspect, however, that you are sickly, skinny computer nerd who likes to sound tough : "fucking pussy" indeed. How old are you : 15? Do you have any idea what it is like to live in the real world? We might have been able to expel unsavoury elements from out communities a long time ago, but now they have 'rights', and the existence of police forces allowed for the removal of that power from us.

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.

Okay, I was wrong (told you so)

[Dogtanian]

The PAL variants vary only in sound encoding and this ONLY affects transmitted material- and only with actual analogue PAL.

Okay; my mistake, that's not strictly true (see, I warned you I wasn't an expert). Some variants of PAL also place the colour subcarrier at a different frequency (*).

PAL-N [wikipedia.org] (Paraguy/Uruguay) has the "standard" 50Hz/625-line spec, but has the colour subcarrier at 3.58 MHz- like NTSC- instead of 4.43 MHz.

PAL-M [wikipedia.org] (Brazil) uses PAL colour-encoding, but with NTSC's 60Hz/525 line spec *and* the colour subcarrier at (again) 3.58Mhz instead of 4.43MHz. In other words, same as NTSC video, but with PAL colour encoding.

I can sort of understand the Brazilian PAL-M; it avoids resolution/frame-rate conversion issues with North American-sourced material, but avoids the colour transmission problems associated with NTSC. Not so sure about PAL-N though; I guess it was for bandwidth reasons.

(*) Pedantically speaking, I don't think the PAL spec even defines the subcarrier frequency, only the colour encoding method. Leading to the strange situation where (e.g.) digitally-encoded video at 50Hz/625 lines is colloquially referred to as "PAL", even though it doesn't actually have PAL-encoded colour.

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.