Bothering me like a plastic bag around my head.

Still have a lot of thoughts about Manhunt 2 that are bouncing around in my head and won’t leave me alone until they bounce out. It seems that, while is the issue is muddled, there are at least two camps of reactions: the people who are dismissive of the violence and argue for it’s release, and the camp that says we make games that are too violent so maybe that’s not such a bad thing it was banned. Because I really don’t want to align myself with the first camp, the likes of which hold up Gears of War as the pinnacle of modern game design (No, I’m not being sarcastic, these people really do exist. Depressing, isn’t it?). But I’m conflicted about the second as well…

While it’s pretty transparent that the ESRB and the BBFC are singling out Rockstar for past misdeeds, and Rockstar certainly deserves some karmic justice, I just wish it wasn’t via this method. By now most of us have accepted that games are going to be judged differently than films, so Hostel 2 is rated R and Manhunt 2 is rated AO. Fine. But by all accounts Manhunt 2 did not seem to be any more violent than the first one (and the story context would seem to support that, you being forced to take part in a snuff film in the first one, vs. escape an insane asylum in the second). So why isn’t the second game M rated like the first? It seems the like the ESRB should go back and either re-rate Manhunt or explain their original rating (but they don’t want to admit they were wrong). I know game ratings are a horribly political affair, just like movie ratings, I just hate that it’s so blatant and they don’t even take the effort to appear like an unbiased review board. Yes, I want to be comforted by the illusion of impartiality.

Rockstar certainly deserves a kick in the crotch for not being vocal in supporting its ability to create its own games, and a second kick for not helping to ensure their (with their level of violence) can easily get into the hands of younger gamers (by playing nice with the ESRB and working with legislators to define reasonable legislation). But I just wish they didn’t do it by banning the sequel to the one of their most well crafted games.

The level of commentary also doesn’t seriously delve into why there are differences in the emotional affects of violent games vs. violent films. Even Stephen Totilo and N’Gai Croal fail me. Although I loved their God of War story discussion, and found it to be one of the more insightful pieces of criticism I’ve read recently, they keep dancing around the meat of the matter in their discussion of Manhunt 2 (and it looks like they got sucked into trying to figure out if games are narrative. Good luck with that one, guys).

There’s the standard tropes of why game violence should be higher age rated, since the player can choose to perform it, but why does movie horror actual bother you more? Why does Manhunt’s violence, gruesome and player controlable, still pale in emotional affect to the movies it was clearly inspired by?

In one aspect, it’s purely visual. The close up and the reaction shot have more to do with our emotional response to violence than any amount of button pressing. Clearly seeing what is at stake/being risked, and more importantly, seeing and hearing someone’s reaction to violence or danger far closer than a game’s third person perspective, has a profound effect.

The best illustration of this I know of is on the Fight Club DVD. Arguably the most violent scene of the movie, where Ed Norton beats up Jared Leto, they actually removed an earlier cut of the scene that focused too much on the fight itself for fear that it would just be taken as too violent. So instead they focused on the crowd’s reactions during the scene, and the sound of the fight. You can watch the original in the deleted scenes on the DVD – without question the second scene is inherently a more daunting prospect to watch. You know what the impact of the violence is by seeing the crowds reactions, and you mirror their emotional response. It’s uncomfortable. This is not an emotion that should be restricted to film.

While a game can certainly utilize this same principle, the actual approach taken to do so must be different. Well, forced camera control can certainly be used sparingly to good effect, but I’d argue we can come up with more ways of capitalizing on this that don’t rely on that. That, however, is a better topic for a game than a blog post, so I will leave it to your imagination. Manhunt 2, with its Wii control, would at least have showed us something new about how violence in a game affects the player through use of control (and to their credit, Croal & Totilo do bring up a number of questions on that topic, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Plus our project gets mentioned, it’s always nice to get a shout-out).

Lastly, I am bothered by the scope of media mentioned in the general debate online and off. It manages to avoid some of the most horrifying and gruesome cinema of the past several years, which is predominantly Asian. Like, uh Takashe Miike, anybody? Ichi the Killer? Chan-wook Park? Oldboy? J-Horror? Bueller?

It belies the larger problem of developers having limited media awareness. We like what we like and stick to that. So part of the (warning, oversimplification ahead) violence-bad side of the debate just seems to be staffed with people who don’t want to understand what the part of debate is about, how this violence affects people. Many of those films deemed too violent have also been on the cutting edge of cinema for their time (well, to be fair, there’s a lot of crap horror too, but that’s pretty easy to spot).

If, as creators, we wanted to elevate the themes found in today’s games, we should at least attempt to understand the games where the existing themes of violence are portrayed at their most complex. Even if you argue the violence in Manhunt is gratuitous, there’s enough depth in the story, characters, and situations to make you think about the violence you enact, at least in part. Yes, they could have done more to do so, as Croal points out in his last letter, but if you walked away from the playing the game going through elements of this larger discussion yourself, wouldn’t that be a worthwhile and meaningful game to have played?