Whatever happened to cRaZy?

“Everybody is wanting to know what music were the kids listening to, or what movies were they watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching! Whatever happened to crazy? What, you can’t be crazy no more? Should we eliminate crazy from the dictionary?”

Chris Rock has a point. People are intelligent enough to be crazy on their own. You know what I mean. Are games, movies and of course rap music enough to turn someone into a raving lunatic or a murdering, stealing junkie?

I was listening to a podcast the other day and the host started talking about censorship within games so I decided to start browsing the internet looking for LoLs when I struck gold in the form a wiki about which games have been banned across the world and for what reason. Some of this stuff is pure genius.

In the UK we are pretty lucky. It appears that gratuitous and extreme violence is not good but not to worry, we can work with sex and nudity as it “isn’t a concern”. In the UK, games can be refused classification by the BBFC and it would then be illegal to sell those titles. Of course with the good ol’ British laws it’s still ok to download and play the games that can’t be sold because it only applies to physical media.

The other extreme is Greece. In the year 2002, being the kind and gentle hearted citizen that I am, I would have been playing GTA: Vice City and watching a bedtime movie of The Gangs of New York. The poor people staying in Greece had a law laid down stating that all electronic games were banned. This was done to try and clamp down on illegal gambling. I know the feeling, every time I land a headshot I feel like nipping over to William Hills and putting some cash on the football. Never let it be said that the Greek laws don’t move with the times: in the 1970s people could be arrested for playing cards. Just in case you’re wondering, the law has moved into limbo now where only people who flaunt playing games in public will be arrested.

The wiki page covers a whole load of countries with examples of games that have been banned. There are two cases in particular that I liked. The first one was in Singapore where they banned Mass Effect for the supposed lesbian encounter between an alien and a human, which is interesting as the alien was neither female nor male and was in fact a unisex being. Oh, and if you missed that part of the game you’ll have to play it again! Not to worry though, because the ban was later lifted and a story was published in the Strait Times, no joke.

The second story was the case in Ireland. In June 2007, Manhunt 2 was banned because there were acts of gross violence or cruelty including mutilation and torture. Ah well not to worry, they can always play the original Manhunt because that’s ok – apparently!

Get yourself over to Wikipedia’s List of banned video games and have a read. It just makes me think how lucky I was that there was no violence in games back when we were kids, right?

GAME OVER