As with comic books and rock and roll before it, games continue to suffer from a certain degree of foreignness to many adults over the age of 30. The second issue that plays a role here is that the older generation did not grow up with video games in their household. While this impression is understandable, it is also fallacious and easily dispensed with cursory research about the contemporary game market. First, many people who did not grow up playing video games often associate games with children, as children were the target market twenty years ago when the Nintendo Entertainment System was released. I think that there are several factors involved. What is it about video games that makes them a target for censorship when other media is not? What is it about games that causes them to attract the ire of would-be arbiters of morality? Films like Natural Born Killers and Saw came out in Italy (where a ban of Rule of Rose has been proposed), and are far more violent, disturbing, and mainstream than anything in this obscure Japanese horror title. One particular group’s perspective removed the opportunity to even choose to view Picasso’s work.īut censorship regarding video games bugs me even more. We thought the exhibit was wonderful, but due to objections of one group or another, Americans never even had the chance to see it in their own country. Picasso is universally considered one of the great artists of the 20th century, yet this particular collection of his work was never shown in America because it was about sex.
I think that you can take almost any work and find somebody somewhere who is offended by it, so such subjective classifications are not very useful when creating rules for an entire country.įor example, my wife and I once chanced upon an exhibit of Picasso’s sexually explicit paintings while visiting Montreal. Censorship aimed to suppress work that a particular group finds morally offensive forces one viewpoint upon all consumers, removing choice. I have a much harder time understanding censorship that is targeted at works deemed obscene or offensive, as those terms are neither objective nor universal. I can sort of understand how some information, especially information that pertains to national security, can’t be allowed to flow freely. It looks like the debate stems from the game’s use of children as antagonists, as well as some misinformation about scenes depicted in the game (one news agency erroneously reported that the game rewards players for burying a girl alive).
Kotaku has a story about the game causing controversy in Europe. Rule of Rose is a game with some pretty disturbing scenes.