Gaming censorship in your country

[Acecombat 0]

Was reading Gamespots 'Burning questions' article which is sort of a weekly segment i believe of questions you can ask and they are put forward and answered by their staff and sometimes by gamers in general that roam there.

I came across this article recently:

Gemspot link

Not all of it is relevant , only the part about how germans view the WW2 game and hows it usually digested by the public there , reading on those replies the germans sent i came across another issue i never really knew about atleast not in such a way before. Gaming censorship!

For example see this:

Quote ]I can sort of give you an answer to this, since I'm Austrian and all. Fact is, Germans are to violence like Americans are to sex. Doom 3 could only be purchased as a cut version, but only for so long. As of the release of its expansion, it's been banned. In C&C, you only fight "robots", censored and all, and the voices are gone through some sort of filter, to give them that "robotic" voice. Yuk! I just explained this to you, so you can understand how Germany stands to violence, and how censorship is hailed (only violence). So in, for example, MoH, all Swastikas have been cut out, and since everyone speaks in German, no one notices that the soldiers are German (of course, though, it's obvious). Oh yeah, don\'t EVER buy a German F.E.A.R. copy. No blood, no corpses, no limbs...

[/b]

What the hells that about , i mean i can understand those ESLA or whatever the gaming ratings standard is called which states the age limit for the game but THIS is stupid .... no corpse? in F.E.A.R.? Dude if you kill something the body needs to go down on the floor (a corpse ) and not simply vanish in thin air , nor is that in anyway negating the fact that you 'killed' someone in the game if thats what this measure of censorship is trying to pull a veil over.

More over can any german folks here tell me whats with that DOOM3 comment? Is doom 3 available there or not if so in what form?

Second thing i wanna discuss is whats with the 'remove' swastikas and totally keep the german public isolated from all forms of nazi influence? Is this like supposed to keep the german public from turning nazi themselves? Surely they ALL know about what happened in WW2 censoring of such stupid stature isnt serving ANY purpose , except detracting the games immersions and level of historic detail.

This is the first time i've heard of games being censored this bad , i mean if it was nudity or something as in the GTA series i'd understand but this is moronic. So are there any other countries out there with such laws on gaming or not?

I agree with navarro when he says:

Quote[/b] ]Anyway, the point is that we're not out to decry the notion that the video game violence platform has any legitimacy whatsoever. But the fact is, the game industry is being picked on because it's an easy target. It's a lot harder to get to things like the film industry, the music industry, or the TV industry at this point in time, because so many of the people involved in those industries have political pull. Not an awful lot of the video game industry has that same level of pull. Thus when it comes time to "think of the children," it's open season on video games. And because of that, it's hard to take a lot of these claims terribly seriously.

Maybe this is the reason why games are censored this bad? I mean do they go after tv programs or cartoons with such zealousness?

P.S: Most of this post was based on what that austrian guys email to navarro said about the gaming censorship in germany , he could have been a nutball writing up unsubstaniated crap so forgive me for that as this whole issue/post of mine revolve around his statement which i do not know to be true/false as of yet , until someone german here confirms it for us.

[Sniperwolf572 758]

No game censorship in my country, piracy, yes, censorship, no, 4 year olds are given to play DooM/F.E.A.R./GTA, go figure.

About swastika issue, I wonder if they learn WW2 in history lessons? Maybe they should censor the teachers and books too.

[Shadow NX 1]

Was reading Gamespots 'Burning questions' article which is sort of a weekly segment i believe of questions you can ask and they are put forward and answered by their staff and sometimes by gamers in general that roam there.

I came across this article recently:

Gemspot link

Not all of it is relevant , only the part about how germans view the WW2 game and hows it usually digested by the public there , reading on those replies the germans sent i came across another issue i never really knew about atleast not in such a way before. Gaming censorship!

For example see this:

Quote ]I can sort of give you an answer to this, since I'm Austrian and all. Fact is, Germans are to violence like Americans are to sex. Doom 3 could only be purchased as a cut version, but only for so long. As of the release of its expansion, it's been banned. In C&C, you only fight "robots", censored and all, and the voices are gone through some sort of filter, to give them that "robotic" voice. Yuk! I just explained this to you, so you can understand how Germany stands to violence, and how censorship is hailed (only violence). So in, for example, MoH, all Swastikas have been cut out, and since everyone speaks in German, no one notices that the soldiers are German (of course, though, it's obvious). Oh yeah, don\'t EVER buy a German F.E.A.R. copy. No blood, no corpses, no limbs...

</b>

What the hells that about , i mean i can understand those ESLA or whatever the gaming ratings standard is called which states the age limit for the game but THIS is stupid .... no corpse? in F.E.A.R.? Dude if you kill something the body needs to go down on the floor (a corpse ) and not simply vanish in thin air , nor is that in anyway negating the fact that you 'killed' someone in the game if thats what this measure of censorship is trying to pull a veil over.

More over can any german folks here tell me whats with that DOOM3 comment? Is doom 3 available there or not if so in what form?

Second thing i wanna discuss is whats with the 'remove' swastikas and totally keep the german public isolated from all forms of nazi influence? Is this like supposed to keep the german public from turning nazi themselves? Surely they ALL know about what happened in WW2 censoring of such stupid stature isnt serving ANY purpose , except detracting the games immersions and level of historic detail.

This is the first time i've heard of games being censored this bad , i mean if it was nudity or something as in the GTA series i'd understand but this is moronic. So are there any other countries out there with such laws on gaming or not?

I agree with navarro when he says:

Quote[/b] ]Anyway, the point is that we're not out to decry the notion that the video game violence platform has any legitimacy whatsoever. But the fact is, the game industry is being picked on because it's an easy target. It's a lot harder to get to things like the film industry, the music industry, or the TV industry at this point in time, because so many of the people involved in those industries have political pull. Not an awful lot of the video game industry has that same level of pull. Thus when it comes time to "think of the children," it's open season on video games. And because of that, it's hard to take a lot of these claims terribly seriously.

Maybe this is the reason why games are censored this bad? I mean do they go after tv programs or cartoons with such zealousness?

P.S: Most of this post was based on what that austrian guys email to navarro said about the gaming censorship in germany , he could have been a nutball writing up unsubstaniated crap so forgive me for that as this whole issue/post of mine revolve around his statement which i do not know to be true/false as of yet , until someone german here confirms it for us.

Doom3 is still availeable afaik, only the addon is forbidden no clue why... didnt found Doom3 very amusing anyway

And the Swastikas... well the usual explanation you hear is in movies its ok cause they are considered as some art form while games in germany still have the status of being child stuff mostly and when you say hey im a gamer you may get soem strange looks from certain people, hehe...

But there are still ways to import stuff, did so when RTCW came out, later also got a German version and by replacing a .pk3 file in the game directory you also could get swastikas and hitler pics in the german version...

Or take FEAR as a example as far as i know its no prob get the uncut version at most game stores.

However i agree the german censorship rules are really freaky sometimes... best example is we even had the oooold game "river raid" on the forbidden games list for years

On the other hand could be worse, here noone gives a fuck about things like the "Hot coffee" mod for GTA:SA whiel in the US you get big scandals about this and old grandmas want to sue Rockstar games over such bullshit...

Or Japan... you can buy any game no matter how old you are... may it be Doom3 or one of the endless schoolgirl rape simulations , the industry only suggests ages for titles on the package in japan and then its up to the store if he sells it to people under 18 or not...

The weird thing is they really banned the GTA series in some parts of the country.

You see every land has some freaky rules noone really gets...

[Colossus 2]

There were plans of banning GTA here too but that quickly got cancelled.

I haven't heard about any other game censorships other then this GTA incident.

I don't know if Norway has a ban on swastikas, but since many of the european versions of games is released in Germany too it's usually deleted. (Silent Hunter III for example)

[D.murphy man 0]

Well here (the UK) ive never had any proplems with game ratings. Its all pretty reasonble here, games with extream violence get an 18, and that dosent really stop any one from buying them in the shops. Hell you can even buy alchol when your under 18 with out any proplem at all even though its illigal. Most shops (at least round me) rarely ask for ID for things like alchol let alone computer games and films.

So yea ive never had a proplem in the past when i was younger getting games with age ratings.

As for actully cencoring things that, as far as i know, has never happend here in games. Even with the hot coffe modifaction to GTA it didnt change the 18+ rating for it, since 18+ can also contain sexual secens and such. and here in eroupe in generall we done seem to be that touchy on the subject of sex as it seems in the US.

[ozanzac 0]

He, he, he…

The Hot Coffee content of GTA:SA, once discovered, went largely unnoticed by the Australian media, despite the fact the game was banned for sale & hire in Australia after the contents discovery.

I didn’t even know it was banned until a month after it was banned! I haven’t bothered to check if it’s still purchasable in nearby gaming stores, but I’m dead certain I could purchase another copy under the counter in a matter of minutes.

It is, however, quite concerning that such a change of face could happen after the game had already been released, and is quite symptomatic of the nanny state that Australia has become.

What irks me is that MTV would have an equal, if not greater social impact (and that’s if there is any to begin with! than a violent or disturbing game, by turning a great percentage of teenage girls into mimicking the next nasty little slag to have a hit, and teenage boys into emulating jackasses, but does anyone really care about that?

To be quite honest, the day the Nintendo generation penetrates politics in Australia will be the day that such quibbling over stupid matters such as the content within a game will end… A day that many of my generation would breathe a sigh of relief.

Anywho, Maddox seemed to sum it up well here:

Quote[/b] ] So I was sitting around the other day, playing "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," when suddenly I received an email with an attachment called "hot coffee mod." So I did what I always do when I get programs from strangers in my email: I ran it.

Then I went back to playing the game and didn't notice anything different, except for when I took my in-game girlfriend back home, she now asks "how about a little coffee?" Naturally I got excited, because I was expecting to see a scene with the protagonist, Carl, and his girlfriend, Denise, sipping a tall cup of joe and discussing the finer points of globalization and how cultural distinction will shape future generations. Instead, I was shocked to learn that Denise wasn't talking about a delicious beverage made from roasted beans, but what she was really talking about was SEXUAL INTERCOURSE.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought there was some mistake, this couldn't be the family-friendly carjacking game I thought I knew. Maybe Denise changed into an outfit that just happened to look like the bust of a naked woman. I watched the scene over and over again, carefully analyzing every pixel, but the conclusion was inescapable: Denise was in fact nude. Or at least had a skin colored texture applied to the surface area primitive of her character's model. To prove it, I took a screen capture of the right nipple texture, and enlarged it to show that the game does in fact contain nudity:

You are gazing into the pixels of moral decay.

The creator of the game, Rockstar Games, has stated that it will offer a downloadable patch to fix the sex issue in the PC versions, and is working on a new version of the game that will prevent this content from being unlocked in the future.

Thank God. I'll be the first person to download and patch my PC version of "Grand Theft Auto." I want to shoot people in the face, bang prostitutes, traffic drugs, steal cars, and terrorize police officers without this filthy smut in my game. Frankly, I'm appalled that Rockstar would allow such wholesale corruption of our youth. Years from now when America has become a withered husk of the morality it once stood for, historians will look back at what triggered it all and point to one event: a boolean variable that unlocked a simulated sex scene in a video game.

The game is now being taken off the shelves all over the country and re-labeled with an "AO" rating. This is much stricter than the "M" rating the game originally received.

What pisses me off more than anything is that I paid for a game rated for 17 year olds, or possibly 17 and 1/2 year olds, tops. What I got was a game rated for 18 year olds instead. I must warn you that if you're easily offended, please shield your eyes from what I'm about to unveil to you:

A woman clearly in a heightened state of arousal.

I think it's only fitting for Rockstar Games to go out of business, and all the programmers lose their jobs over this. God bless Hillary Clinton for allocating tax money to have federal regulators investigate "the source of this content," because if she hadn't, consumers might have to go through the trouble of reading the label on the cover of the box.

1,620,218 children have been irreparably corrupted by the wanton sexuality Rockstar has forced into our homes with the aid of custom software modifications and a handful of access codes that could potentially be used with the purchase of a third party accessory.

[Jinef 2]

I don't play most computer games.

I find OFP and several flight simulations sufficient fun enough.

I find the whole issue about censorship tedious. You want to maintain children's innocence? Do it on the full spectrum, MTV, News, Computer games, Music. Etc.

However it won't work, people will get around it to sell products to the child market.

So just think carefully about it when you raise your children (if you do so). You can isolate them from it or you can teach em to deal with the fucked up world we live in.

Anyway. I have little to say about this.

[EiZei 0]

There is a law forbidding selling unappropriate games to minors, but nothing else. Swastikas, violence and titties all the way baby.

Then again, our beloved culture minister mrs. brownfinger has 2 years tenure left so who knows..

[Acecombat 0]

Quote[/b] ]I find the whole issue about censorship tedious. You want to maintain children's innocence? Do it on the full spectrum, MTV, News, Computer games, Music. Etc.

Exactly Jinef. Its hypocritical to block out one media but leave others out and its al because as the gamespot guy said , the TV/film industry has more pull over the govt then the gaming guys.

Oh well atleast in SA i can say if some game gets banned for nudity and or such issues atleast they are following it up on other fronts as well even so if a bit too moronically and too paranoically .

[Supah 0]

To be quite honest, the day the Nintendo generation penetrates politics in Australia will be the day that such quibbling over stupid matters such as the content within a game will end… A day that many of my generation would breathe a sigh of relief.

Like the "hippy generation" of the sixties with their free sex did so much for lifting so many taboos and pulling sex from the shame sphere in the US? It's those people enforcing the US-prude-state. Once people get into power they tend to change their views on things very rapidly.

[Daddl 10]

In Germany a 'banned' game can still be bought legally. Only you have to be 18+ years old to buy it - and in some cases it's also prohibitet to advertise the game or to display it in the shop.

As I'm over 18 (quite a bit) I have to say this is ok the way it is. While it might seem silly to have games modified in a way that there's green 'blood' or disapearing bodies instead of the original gore, it definitely makes the game less real and thus more suited for the 'kids'. There's no need for a teen to know exactly how a splattered brain on a wall looks like. On the contrary - let's hope he never has to see such a thing! If a game depends on blood and gore alone it's shit anways.

Somehow I never missed the gore in OFP...

[DBR_ONIX 0]

..but, if your showed "a splattered brain on a wall", and it's nice and green and censored, will it have the same shocking effect, that would deter you from getting a gun and blowing someones brain against a wall?

If something is realistic, it distances you from it.. Watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan, do you want to be there? No

Watch some Hollywood action film where some guy runs about kills all the evil terroists, gets shot 97 times and still saves the world.. Who would you rather be, the Mr Inviciblehollywoodguy, or a soldier on D-Day?

- Ben

[gandalf the white 0]

If a game depends on blood and gore alone it's shit anways.

If a game denies the gore-ness of war it's less then shit: BF2 , MOH , almost all your war games fall under that.

I wonder if the germans know there's a mod that adds burning people to a war simulator. (ecp) , now that would be a laugh!

[Daddl 10]

Who would you rather be, the Mr Inviciblehollywoodguy, or a soldier on D-Day?

The point is, whether there's gore or not, in the kind of shitty shooters (Doom 3 et al) we're talking about you are always "Mr. Invinciblehollywoodguy". Now what do you think is better - being Mr. Invincible in an obviously non-realistic game or being Mr. Invincible in a realistic-looking game? After all we're only talking about the looks, not the game mechanics! OFP was rated 16 in germany and I think it offers a more realistic "war atmosphere" than any of those 'banned' shooters - even without the gore.

Anyways, even if they are banned you are still allowed to buy them - if you're old enough.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

The UK doesn't seem to censor games much nowadays apart from age ratings that are meant to prohibit youngsters from purchasing certain games, same as movies. If the shop gets caught doing it, they're in the shit.

So far as content goes, I don't think much gets banned anymore so long as it's not wildly indecent: allowing players to kill kids, comit acts of sexual indecency etc. The odd game used to get banned outright for its violent content and gore but that never happens now to my knoledge, they just get an automatic 18 certificate.

I'm not sure where the BBFC stands on displaying images of sexual intercourse in video games since there aren't many titles I know about that contain it but GTA: SA's rating hasn't been changed.

Shops can choose to remove titles fom their shelves is there's a public outcry over their content. Manhunt was "banned" by some stores after the mother of some lad who got beaten to death with a hammer by a lad at his school linked the killing to the game but it was never banned in an official capacity to my knowledge. Some stores also removed Hitman 2 from the shelves after the Sikh community complained about the levels where 47 goes around a golden temple (like the Sikh holy site in Amritzar) killing blokes wearing turbans (Sikh religious garments) and wielding Kalashnikovs. They thought the game was making direct attempts to represented Sikhs as terrorists despite the peacful pricipals of Sikhism and the fact that there is no connection between the religion and international terrorism.