Tabloid Emotions: UK Games Censorship
The Soft Target
After almost a decade of watching with thinly-concealed smugness as
America's conservatives tore into the videogames industry, confident
that Britain's more liberal society would protect the medium on these
shores, the worm has finally turned. The alarm bells are ringing, and
an unpleasant awakening is upon us - Britain now faces exactly the same
kind of backlash against games that has blighted the United States for
years.
It is not, as yet, at the kind of fever pitch which anti-videogames
sentiments have reached on occasion in the USA. Britain fundamentally
lacks the sort of high profile youth crimes, such as school shootings,
which have focused attention in the United States - and when high
profile cases do come along, the UK seems more willing to condemn the
failures in society which have caused them, rather than trying to pin
everything on an easy scapegoat like videogames.
However, the atmosphere around games is shifting slowly and
unpleasantly, and nowhere is that to be seen more clearly than in
Westminster, the administrative heart of the United Kingdom. Here,
there's a certain measure of desperation in the air. Gordon Brown has
transpired to be a deeply unlikeable and unpopular Prime Minister, and
his Labour government faces the possibility of a humiliating defeat in
the next general election if a slide in popularity cannot be halted
promptly. Every straw in sight is being grasped at, and videogames, it
seems, are well within arms reach.
A "hard line" on videogames certainly seems to be one of the options
on the table for Brown's strategists, who know that the government
needs some kind of answer to questions of law and order, and especially
regarding youth crime.
The government's problem is that telling the truth - that Britain's
crime figures have been falling steadily for some time, and that we're
safer now than we've been for a long, long time - doesn't seem to work.
A vicious campaign of lies, half-truths and insinuations on the part of
the UK's vile tabloid newspapers (and, shamefully, some of our
broadsheets too) has convinced the population that UK society is in
meltdown. Faced with a population who believe that they're in danger of
being stabbed by a feral youth at any minute, the government can't
simply tell them to stop being so bloody stupid; it is forced into a
position of Being Seen To Do Something.
The something in question, I increasingly fear, will be the imposition
of restrictions, regulations and censures on the videogames industry.
This will come as part of a wider package of measures against the
creative industries. The BBFC, which has moved with the times and now
reflects Britain's largely liberal views on media, has also been
slammed in the right-wing press in recent weeks for allowing the
release of movies formerly classed as "video nasties" in the 1980s, and
it seems eminently likely that government will move to grant itself a
veto over the BBFC's decisions.
Admittedly, thus far much of the noise in Parliament on this front has
been made by Keith Vaz, an MP whose contributions to the videogames
debate are so frequent and so consistently ignorant and uninformed that
even his fellow parliamentarians have become sick of him. His shocking
and utterly false assertion this week that games are available in which
the player can rape women was challenged by Ed Vaizey MP, while his
ongoing promotion of the tragic Stefan Pakeerah murder case as an
example of videogame inspired violence (both the police and the court
system having ruled out any possible link) has been dismissed by the
minister responsible, Margaret Hodge.
Vaz' one-man quest against the videogames industry continues, however
- and indeed, it seems that it's not entirely a one-man quest any more.
While the headlines were stolen by Vaz' statements to the House, it
transpires today that Gordon Brown himself is to meet Stefan Pakeerah's
mother to discuss the question of violent videogames.
A triumph for Vaz, then, and a sad defeat for any modicum of common
sense. While Giselle Pakeerah's loss is truly tragic and saddening, her
claim that her son's murder was inspired by Rockstar's Manhunt is
patently and provably false. It was her son, not his killer, who owned
the game. The game doesn't even feature the type of murder weapon used
in the killing - and moreover, the killer was clearly inspired not by
playing a game, but by the debt he owed to a drug-related gang.
Giselle Pakeerah, in her grief, has been coldly and cruelly
manipulated, becoming a tragic champion in the battle against a medium
that had nothing whatsoever to do with her son's murder. Who, after
all, is going to argue with a grieving mother? What possible response
can Gordon Brown have to her statements - however ill-informed they may
be - than to nod sympathetically?
Moreover, I suspect that Brown - and those who have set up this
meeting, Keith Vaz himself undoubtedly among them - knows this
perfectly well. Gordon Brown doesn't want to be advised on his media
policy by Giselle Pakeerah. He wants to meet her so that when he
announces his already well-laid plans in this regard, he appears to
have consulted the grieving mother - which will play well for the
tabloid press who are hounding him to Do Something about the country's
allegedly rising crime levels.
It's a desperately worrying time for anyone with an interest in
freedom of expression, but more so for anyone involved in the creative
industries in the United Kingdom. One point of light at the end of the
tunnel may be the Byron Report, which is due out in the coming weeks. I
suspect that the report's author, Tanya Byron, is not likely to be a
willing patsy for the Labour government's preferred policies. This
report, with any luck, will actually set the facts straight. Whether
that will be enough to get videogames off the hook as Labour
desperately seeks to rebuild its public image, however, remains to be
seen.
(gamesindustry.biz)
Mstation Games Review
Mon, 24 Mar 2008
