Whether you’ve picked up a joypad in your life or not, you must have noticed that this week is a big one for videogame aficionados. Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), the sequel to an ultra-realistic military game that sold 15 million copies worldwide, has been greeted with midnight launch events, massive queues and rapturous critical response.
But not everyone is happy. Voices have been raised in protest — the familiar voices that have, over the years, condemned as scandalous and repulsive everything from novels to comic books, from horror films to rock music. It is a baptism of fire that, it seems, every new medium must suffer as it rises from niche pastime to mass entertainment.
The inclusion in MW2 of a scene that re-creates a horrific terrorist attack on a crowded airport has led to outraged headlines. The Labour MP Keith Vaz attacked the game for its “brutality”: his was a textbook piece of grandstanding, complete with the claim that he merely wished that we would think of the children.
But plenty of thought has been given to the children. MW2 carries a BBFC 18 rating. Its box sports the 18 symbol in three places, the one on the front being twice the normal size. “Contains strong, bloody violence”, the text warns, and the rating is more than a guideline: retailers cannot sell it to children.
And they certainly should not. The airport scene is unquestionably unpleasant. It puts the player in the shoes of an unwilling participant in the slaughter of innocents. It’s stomach-churning and nasty, a bleak and incongruous sidestep in a game that otherwise progresses with the pace and bombast of a Hollywood action movie.
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But it is no more graphic than countless other scenes in movies and TV shows such as 24. Adults are expected to understand that not everything labelled “entertainment” must necessarily be “fun”. Creative works can, with equal validity, be harrowing, upsetting and depressing.
Decades of research, often funded by groups with a vested interest in proving the “evil” of video games, have failed to prove a link between game violence and real-life violence. Is the issue, then, that we still consider video games to be for children, regardless of that huge, red 18 rating sticker?
The average age of a game player in the UK is about 28. MW2 will probably be played by more than two million adults here — and both government and game publishers have taken measures to protect children from its content. But responsibility must lie with parents, and little can be done if a parent decides to buy an 18-rated game for their ten-year-old.
Bad parenting should not be an excuse to throw the shroud of censorship over compelling, intelligent experiences created for adults.
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Background
The early days of video in the 1980s brought with it a panic over “video nasties”. Mary Whitehouse, of the National Viewers and Listeners Association — who is credited with dubbing the phrase “video nasty” — led a high-profile campaign, with the backing of the tabloid press, against certain video releases in 1982 and 1983.
In retrospect, it is apparent that most videos banned by the Video Recording Act (1984) were low-budget imported films that were really quite tame and often downright ridiculous.
Melodramatic advertising for films such as Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust were arguably more to blame for their “video nasty” status than anything that they actually contained.
As with so many panics, in reality most of those who proclaimed themselves to be outraged by video nasties had never watched one. Today only a tiny handful of the films that were banned remain unavailable: most have been released uncut in the past ten years, and, to the disappointment of pro-censorship campaigners, have failed to cause the breakdown of society.
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In the 1950s comic books were accused of corrupting the nation’s youth, when a new wave of horror comics arrived in Britain from the United States.
With titles such as Tales from the Crypt and Haunt of Fear, they carried on the flame of the Victorian penny dreadful. To modern eyes, they are the product of a more innocent age — more remarkable for their casual racism and misogyny (to which critics did not object) than for their violent content or horror themes.
Concern snowballed. In response Parliament passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, 1955, which banned the publication or sale of any comic book that contained “the commission of crimes, or acts of violence or cruelty, or incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”.