14 DAY TRIAL // Games aren't treated as unfairly as the more popular media products as some of you might think. TIGA, the UK's game industry trade organization, plans to demolish this rebel stereotype that video games have made for themselves by pitting the number of banned video games against the one of banned movies. As it turns out, in the past five years, the British Board of Film Classification has refused to rate three times less games than it has movies. Before you jump in the air and proclaim gamers everywhere free, just think of this as movie censorship instead of freedom of speech for games.
The request for this statistic was made by a Parliament member in the House of Commons yesterday, and it revealed that only four games had been refused a BBFC rating classification. All the titles that were considered unsafe were to be released in 2007, so chances are pretty high that the games in question are Manhunt 2 for the PC, Manhunt 2 for the PlayStation 2, Manhunt 2 for the PSP and, of course, Manhunt 2 for the Wii, as the last forsaken. It was a bad year for Manhunt 2, considering that it was launched in North America in 2007 but had to wait another year to reach the shores of the UK.
For each of these four games that were banned, three films and a quarter were denied access to the public. The 13-movies-to-four-games ratio of banning was found to be very interesting by TIGA CEO Dr. Richard Wilson. "There have been hardly any instances of the BBFC refusing classification for video games," he said.
"In fact, during the past five years, there have only been four games deemed unfit or unsuitable for classification, as opposed to 13 films – more than three times the amount of games. It is important that these facts are placed in the public domain as they clearly counter some of the unfair stereotypes about video games." A nice addition to this report would have been the exact number of games that were approved by the BBFC, in relation to the number of movies, so we could have a bigger picture of the situation.