It’s just that nothing makes a game hit the headlines quite like a good scandal and several of the most recent moral panics have all been generated by the same company.
But there are thousands of video games, of which most aren’t violent. The outrage that brews up whenever one of these stories hits the press can give the impression that all video games are violent in a depraved, Clockwork Orange-ish way. (MSNBC headline: ‘Were video games to blame for massacre?’) It turned out that Cho didn’t own any video games, and according to his roommate never played them (nor did he own a TV), which must have put him in a tiny minority of 23-year-old American men. When Seung-Hui Cho committed his murders at Virginia Tech, there was an immediate fuss about the contributing part that might have been played by video games. Not to worry: questions were anyway asked in Parliament by the local MP, Keith Vaz. The police disagreed: they said that the game had not played any part in the murder, which had been a robbery motivated by the need for drug money, and pointed out that it was the victim, not the killer, who owned a copy of Manhunt.
The first Manhunt game was denounced by the parents of Stefan Pakeerah, a 14-year-old who was murdered in Leicester in 2004, as a factor that contributed to his death. The decision by the BBFC probably headed off a moral panic.
#Video game manhunt 2 full#
An appropriate fate, one could argue, since Manhunt 2 is a horror game full of killing it exhibits, according to the BBFC, ‘a sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged’. The decision by the British Board of Film Classification singled out the game’s ‘unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone’, and made it illegal to sell the game along with a comparable ruling in the USA, this effectively kills Manhunt 2. ‘Manhunt 2’ has just become the first video game to be banned in the UK in a decade.
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