Leaked “Modern Warfare 2″ Footage Causes Demand for Rating Re-Evaluation

The leaked footage from Activision’s upcoming title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has prompted an Australian watchdog organization to call for a review of the game’s current MA15+ rating, according to GamePolitics.

The Australian Council on Children and the Media, which refers to itself as a “national community organization” dedicated to the well-being of the country’s children, made the demand in response to the graphic nature of the footage recorded.  The videos, which GamePolitics have stated are being scoured from the web by the game’s publisher Activision, depict the player character and his four companions gunning down defenseless civilians in a crowded airport in an act of terrorism.

The only easily found site that still carries the footage is this page from Online Gaming Europe, and even then only the top video still works.  The gameplay shown has the player character open fire on a line of people with an assault rifle alongside four other men, all of whom are wearing body armor over civilian clothes.  The group then moves through the rest of the airport, with highlights including one of the AI companions coolly shooting through a window to his side and the player gunning down one man dragging another incapacitated man to safety.

What makes this particular story outstanding among Australia’s other anti-gaming reactions is the fact that the gaming community can see where they’re coming from this time.  A significant contributing factor to the footage’s disturbing aspect is the fact that it is made up of actual gameplay as opposed to a cutscene–all of the violence perpetrated by the viewpoint character was done by the player’s input.  Making the massacre part of the player’s interaction with the game undoubtedly provokes a greater (and much more deeply disturbing) emotional response to what’s playing out on screen, which has been tried before in other games.  At the finale the Cold War-set Metal Gear Solid 3, for instance–a series famous for having an extremely unbalanced gameplay-to-cutscene ratio–the player character defeats his mentor, who has defected from the USA to Russia for apparently ideological reasons and is ordered by her to kill her with her own gun.  Rather than have the protagonist shoot her during the course of the cutscene, the view pans out and the letterboxing recedes, at which point the player recognizes–to his extreme discomfort–that the game is going to make you pull the trigger yourself.

Of course, not all of Australia views the ACCM’s outcry in entirely black-or-white terms.  As noted in the first article, Electronic Frontiers Australia lobbyist Nicholas Suzor sees the controversy surrounding the game as even more evidence that the country needs to modify their ratings system, saying that, “We may make an argument that these sorts of topics are not suitable for children, but I don’t at all accept that it is unsuitable for adults.”

Valve Accepts OFLC’s Demands, For Now

 

 

An artist's depiction of what Australian gamers can expect from Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 has been approved for release in Australia by the OFLC after removing much of the gore present in the original submission, according to Edge.com.

 The OFLC let the game through with an MA 15+ rating after fairly significant editing, with the quote in Edge’s article saying that it has removed “depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail and piles of dead bodies lying about the environment.”  The items that cause such effects, which include chain saws and fire axes, remain in the game as usable weapons.

Non-Australian gamers who fear that the worldwide release will be similarly bowderlized don’t need to worry.  According to G4 (who themselves are cribbing from a variety of sources), only the Australian release will be censored in such a fashion, so everyone else can hack the rabid undead into bloody giblets to their heart’s content.  In fact, even this bit of censorship is technically up in the air at this point.  Valve’s appeal to have the gorier version of L4D2 will come under review on October 22, and if it goes through a free patch will be released to add the juicy parts back in (unless we’re talking about the XBox 360 version, maybe–see the G4 article).

The reasons behind Valve’s blasé  response to this whole mess–the one I unprofessionally used to say that Valve didn’t have a backbone in my last post on this issue–becomes more understandable considering that the company predicts that the title will be the “fastest-selling product in the company’s history,” based on pre-orders.

A Quickie Review of Australia’s R18+ Policy

How the Australian rating system manages to stay out of sync with the rest of the world, courtesy of EveryonePlays

This won’t come as news to Australian visitors, but the land down under has been mired in controversy over game censorship (and censorship in general) for quite a long time.  My post from Monday touched upon some of the far-reaching effects that came to block Left 4 Dead 2′s release, but its ban–that it to say, its status of “Refused Classification”–is merely a symptom of the affliction Australia is suffering under.

Left 4 Dead 2 was only one of several games refused classification by the OFLC this year.  As of the time of this writing, a search of the classification database reveals that three others had been effectively banned in the country–Risen, Sexy Poker, and Necrovision.  Sexy Poker has the dubious honor of being the only WiiWare game in the country to be denied a rating, considering the Nintendo Wii’s immense success with casual gamers and comparatively family-friendly image compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360.  The last big game to nearly end up on the list was Fallout 3 due to “in-game drug use,” which referred to the ability to take morphine in the game.  Bethesda managed to sidestep the issue by replacing the morphine with the significantly more fictional drug “Med-X,” which allowed the title to pass with an MA15+.  There are, of course, many others, as this Wikipedia list indicates.

What makes this doubly tragic is the fact that Australia has been teasing its citizens with the promise of an R18+ rating for months now, while taking no action on it.  The proposal was made on April 1 of this year (and the government had been gathering opinions about it for at least a year prior) but has since appeared to have gone nowhere.  In the meantime, the government has instead made plans to put an ISP filter in place to completely block internet access to any game that goes over the MA15+ rating, whether through download or by selling physical copies.

The last, and perhaps most annoying, impediment to getting games into the country uncensored is the process through which the proposal has to be passed.  As EveryonePlays explains it, every State Attorney-General has to agree to the amendment allowing the R18+ classification to come into effect.  Micheal Atkinson, the Attorney-General of South Australia, is the only individual standing in the way of it passing into effect.  Despite his claim that he has three other Attorneys backing him up, he has consistently been the only one to vote against the proposal.  If random internet commentators are anything to go by, the people of Australia appear to believe that this is a misapplication of the democratic process.

EA Stands Up For Valve

Screen courtesy of, but not at all exclusive to, MTV Multiplayer

If for some reason all you Valve fans out there haven’t heard the news, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has refused to give the upcoming title Left 4 Dead 2 an actual rating, effectively banning its sale in the country.  That’s not the news here, though—it’s that the game’s publisher, Electronics Arts, has stood up on its behalf and challenged the OFLC in an attempt to call the country on apparent hypocrisy.

The two sentences that have been repeated by several bloggers and news outlets around the internet were said by Tiffany Steckler, an EA spokesperson, during an interview on Gamespot Australia on September 23.  According to the article, Steckler said that “It’s funny that a place like Australia, which has come up with some pretty violent material in the past like Mad Max, can effectively ban video games for the same reason.  EA believes that adults should have the right to make their own choices when it comes to the content they consume.”

Steckler’s words were in sharp contrast to Valve’s rather muted response to the news.  Doug Lombardi, Valve’s vice president of marketing, spoke to Shacknews way back on September 18.  “We were surprised to hear of this news yesterday,” he said.  “Obviously, everybody at Valve is pretty bummed.  It would be a shame if folks in Australia, or anywhere else, are unable to purchase Left 4 Dead 2 because of a ratings issue.”

“Pretty bummed,” Mr. Lombardi?  If someone told me that they were censoring my work after accepting what I’d handed them before while letting a game like MadWorld through, the phrase I would be using would sound more like “immensely disappointed,” or “insulted,” or “pissed off.”  It has been noted that Valve has filed for an appeal, so at least it’s not taking this lying down.

(Warning: Profane language, references to deviant sexual behaviour, over-the-top violence)

To be fair, part of the problem may be the fact that Australia still considers video games a kiddie pastime and has no “adult” rating—the highest their rating goes is MA15+, which means everything over it (like MadWorld) has to have its representatives convince people like the OFLC that it’s suitable for a fifteen-year-old or be banned.  This is according to EveryonePlays, a site that is currently pushing for the very simple solution of creating an R18+ rating.  I can’t tell you if that would technically make games falling under that rating “pornography,” but I’m sure Australia’s video game market wouldn’t mind if they got to enjoy the mature fare everyone else gets to play without having it yanked out of their hands.

For those interested (who should be everyone who actually bothered reading this post) Kotaku.com published a fine article detailing the reasons why Left 4 Dead 2 got passed over, as well as mentioning that lenience was shown by some of the board members voting on the issue.  As EveryonePlays points out, though, just because some politicians were willing to bend the rules for the sake of sanity doesn’t mean the system isn’t still broken… or is it?  Please provide feedback on exactly what you think of this issue.