06.22.07

Canned-Hunt, Too

Posted in Gaming, Rants at 7:23 pm

Over the past few days, in case you’re a gamer who has been too engrossed in Pong to check the news, Take Two’s latest offering from Rockstar, Manhunt 2, was given the rating AO (for Adults Only) by the ESRB. As a result of this, major retailers such as Wal-Mart announced that they would not be carrying the game per their pre-existing policies to not stock AO games, and Nintendo and Sony also announced that the game would not be licensed by either company for their respective systems, again per pre-existing policies. Almost immediately the cry of censorship came up.

Those cries are, to be completely honest, total bullshit.

I’ll preface my explanation by saying the following: I was, believe it or not, looking forward to playing Manhunt 2. I certainly was turned off by Rockstar’s latest paean to gloriously excessive violence and depravity, but dammit, it was going to use the Wiimote in an interesting way, and I’ll try just about anything once (with respect to gaming– I’m looking at you, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). It was going to get at the very least a rental from me. There, I said it. I was interested in what could adequately and possibly objectively be called a “murder simulator”. To say I am a little disappointed that I likely won’t get the chance to is pretty much accurate.

Now, that said, let’s take a look at what we know. By and large there are virtually no titles listed as AO in the gaming world– somewhere on the order of 23, out of how many tens of thousands of titles already rated and released? Not even a fraction of a percentage point. Put bluntly, we’re not missing much. Nintendo and Sony are well within their rights to control what gets released on their systems. After all, that’s the whole point of the licensing system anyway– quality control. The publicity surrounding being the one console that has Manhunt 2 would be quickly drowned out by the very real cries of glorification of violence that would be the death knell for that console. I don’t like it either, but the fact that there is a significant portion of the population who will be very upset that a game as violent and unapologetic as this one gets released means that publishers have to be wary of pissing off those people. At this point, to protect themselves and their shareholders, Take Two’s choices are either change the public (not gonna happen– at least, not overnight) or change the game.

Getting back to N and S. Both companies have the “no AO” policy in place for one very simple reason, completely unrelated to violence: porn games. Japan is a seriously messed up place at times, and porn games are a not-overlookable chunk of the market. And let’s face it, puritanism is not a strictly American trait; other countries are just as capable of being as morally uptight as we are. Nintendo’s early runaway success in the US came from their original plan of being the Disney of video games– family-friendly and beyond almost all moral reproach. As time wears on, however, moral stances shift and change– look at Disney itself, whose animated features are gravitating out of the G-rated range after decades! Nintendo, and by association Sony, need to keep AO games off their consoles to avoid scuttling their “games aren’t all bad” platform. In this day and age where even one innocent mistake can seriously annihilate all the good you’ve done (right, Howard Dean?), the companies need to have a zero-tolerance policy towards anything that could jeopardize that position. After all, if Nintendo and Sony make an exception for the violence-oriented Manhunt 2, what’s stopping, say, Hustler’s new media division from pressuring the companies into licensing a sex-oriented game? (And before anyone gets up in my grill over that, I have no problems with a sexually-explicit game that’s marketed and labeled properly. My position wouldn’t change if it were, in fact, a sex game under fire, but neither would I be harsher on it.) Allow one AO game, and the floodgates open. Microsoft is in a similar position, but they have never explicitly said “no AO”.

In his column on Joystiq, Dennis McCauley laid the accusation that Nintendo and Sony were “two-faced” for sticking to their “no AO” policy, adding that the decision was malicious, “as if the system makers had no clue until Tuesday as to what Manhunt 2 was all about”. This is patently false and pure FUD. Nintendo and Sony, and to a lesser extent Microsoft and the ESRB, knew full well what Take Two and Rockstar were birthing with the Manhunt 2 project. You would have to be a monumental idiot to hear the hype and see the preview shots and think that the game was not going to be violent. What killed the deal was that nobody save T2 and R* could have predicted just how far over the line the game went. When the extent of the game’s vault over said line was revealed, the reactions were exactly as warranted.

Comments on that column varied from a tacit acceptance of McCauley’s valid points to flamewars regarding a perceived crackdown by the “Jesus freaks” who want to “tell us what we can and can’t play”. I’m actually extremely disappointed in the gaming community’s complete and total refusal to accept that this is not an act of censorship by the government. Sony and Nintendo are not saying, “Take Two, stop making Manhunt 2″. They are saying, “We will not license this game for our systems because it will hurt our image more than it will help.” It’s not about protecting you from what ‘they’ don’t want you to play. It’s about protecting themselves from the “Jesus freaks and old grannies” who would love nothing more than to see all video gaming ended.

I’m not saying that Manhunt 2 should not be made. As a society we need to push the envelope; we need to explore our boundaries and to question our morals once in a while. I’m very, very disappointed that Take Two has opted to shelve the game for the time being.

The refusal of classification by the Australian OFLC, the German USK, the Irish IFCO, and the British BBFC, along with the AO rating granted by the American ESRB, may have been completely warranted. I would lay a good chunk of my Rabbit down-payment savings on the fact that Take Two’s prior history made each and every one of those organizations go through every frame of the game with a fine-toothed comb. However, there is one possibility that has to be mentioned. What if Take Two and Rockstar deliberately sent an ultraviolent version of the game to these agencies with the intent of producing just such a sequence of results? Undoubtedly awareness of the game within the gamer community has gone through the roof, and I certainly would not put it past T2 to pull such a stunt. It would be free publicity, especially if the game was still lagging in development. Create a fake “controversy” that required the game to be “retooled”, which buys you more time to actually finish the game according to its relatively tamer original plan. Bonus: drooling Rockstar fanboys line up in droves to pre-order the game “to show support”. You might as well just go ahead and buy that money printer.

Yeah, it’s a conspiracy theory. Sue me; I’m a fiction writer, I (ostensibly) get paid to think up crazy stuff like this. The fact remains that it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. More importantly, it allows for the potentiality that the ESRB et al are finally doing their jobs.

Let me restate that. The ESRB is working as designed in this case. You and I haven’t seen the cut of the game delivered to the ratings boards. One Joystiq commenter said, “Maybe Manhunt 2 really does deserve the rating.” Even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gave the ESRB the thumbs up in this instance– probably the first, last, and only time I will ever agree with ol’ Flash Thompson. Did JT “win”, as some overzealous gamers have lamented? No, he did not, unless standing on the sidelines and having no effect whatsoever on the process could put him in the purported ‘game’ enough to “win”. He didn’t “win” any more than I “won”, because neither of us had any role to play in the process. Neither did the ESRB ‘force’ the game to be banned or dropped from retail; admittedly they knew that an AO rating would be undesirable but that must bear no importance in the consideration of the content nor the actual issuance of the rating. Of course, the only way that we can be certain is for transparency in the ESRB process; we need to see the materials that were provided to the ESRB and the full report on their findings. If we’re going to give the ESRB the same respect that we give the MPAA (with regards to ratings, at least), then we should hold it to the same level of transparency in its activities.

What will happen to the title now? Take Two would be insane to scrap the project completely at this point; they would be laying all their eggs in the GTA4 basket, and as powerful as that franchise is, I know they won’t be keen on doing that. Most likely the game will be edited down to a “barely under AO” M and released, probably in early 2008. One way or another we’re not going to see it until after Grand Theft Auto 4.

My point– and I do have one– is simple. This is nothing more than complete and total business as usual. No policies have changed, no reversals of past decisions, no magical Offensiveness Fairy or Puritanism Goblin to blame here. Every system and organization that has reacted to Manhunt 2’s arrival has done so completely within their charters and their expected parameters. This is as much news as Paris Hilton belching a little too loudly in her prison cell. In other words, there’s nothing to see here– yet.

Still, it is going to be interesting seeing what gets left in to take the game down to M level. I can just imagine the conniptions some folks will have when the game is finally released.

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