Mousetrap weblog: Do violent games teach real-world violence?

A few clicks of a mouse was all it took to buy one of the most unpleasant, gruesome video games that has ever been released.

Manhunt 2 involves escaping from an asylum and pursuing the people responsible for your incarceration in order to execute them. It’s distasteful from the off: an inmate urinates on you as you creep past his cell.

The idea is to sneak up and kill people in increasingly brutal ways, using pliers, for example, or sawing through an enemy’s head. Your score depends on how grisly your “execution kills” become.

It is so grim that the title has been banned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), despite which it’s readily available to purchase on the internet. I found it on eBay for £32 including delivery, and Gamezland, which gave it a Manchester location, had no qualms about sending me a copy in a brown Jiffy bag.

For what it’s worth, the game is dreadful, with bad graphics, jittery camera work and simplistic gameplay.

However, the unrelenting, sadistic violence and the fact that it is so easy to buy (despite it currently being illegal to sell the game in the UK), raises disturbing questions about the process by which video games are classified.

Manhunt 2, made by the London studio of Rockstar Games, is one of only two games ever to be refused a certificate by the BBFC, which regulates the UK release of titles. The first was Carmageddon back in the late 1990s, but that was a walk in the park compared with Manhunt 2.

According to the BBFC, games are banned if they are deemed to cause “possible harm” to those who play them. The ambiguity of this phrase is at the root of a long, continuing legal wrangle between the BBFC and Rockstar Games.

In December Rockstar appealed against the ban to the Video Appeals Committee (VAC) – the appeals body of the BBFC – and won its case. The BBFC quickly sought judicial review of the VAC’s decision, fearing Manhunt 2 would be freely sold through high street outlets such as HMV and Game.

Last month a High Court judge ordered the VAC to rethink its verdict on the premise that the committee had misinterpreted the law. The VAC is due to begin reconsidering on March 11, but there’s no guarantee it will change its mind. If it sticks by its decision, you can expect to see Manhunt 2 on sale legally shortly afterwards.

Clearly much of this academic: is a ban effective if it is so easy to circumvent and so hard to enforce? When I approached Gamezland (which despite saying its products are shipped from Manchester, is itself based in America) the company appeared unaware that there were any legal issues about supplying Manhunt 2 in the UK. Rockstar Games claimed its game contains “content well within the bounds established by the BBFC’s 18-plus ratings certification”.

The government has already realised that it is time for a thorough overhaul of the vetting process. At the end of March Dr Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist, will release a report on the games industry. Her brief included “assessing the effectiveness of existing measures to protect children and helping parents manage access to inappropriate material”.

Even if Byron’s report does result in a shake-up of UK legislation, it may have trouble reconciling changes with the current pan-European system of age ratings for games, which largely relies on self-regulation by game makers. And nothing is likely to stop unscrupulous internet sellers from flogging their wares online, while the problem will only grow as games are increasingly sold as downloads from anywhere in the world, rather than being provided as a physical disc.

So if you have young children, we recommend you take a peek inside any Jiffy bag that drops on your mat.