Monthly Archive

I thought I’d toss up my two takes on the recent rerating of Rockstar’s Manhunt 2. For those who don’t read GamePolitics Rockstar’s Manhunt 2 rating was recently dropped to a Mature rating (17+) from an Adults Only rating (18+). For those of you that read this blog, and who know me for real, I’ve never quite understood why these two rating exist when they are separated by exactly one year of age difference. True, games that get the ESRB’s Adult rating do (usually) have a lot more violent and sexually explicit content than a Mature game. However, to have them separated by such a short expanse of time is more confusing to the consumer than to the developer. Not to mention the fact that AO is a huge stigma, for the simple fact that WalMart won’t sell the game and, as Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games - which I am currently reading through and highly recommend - states, “First-party licensing in videogames creates another layer of censorship that makes it impossible to release Manhunt 2 on consoles, since the manufacturers refuse to license (and therefore manufacture) games at the AO rating.” Basically what this means is that because console games make up the majority of the market, and publishers of said console games refuse to manufacture games with an AO rating, there just, well… aren’t many. If any. The problem is that the kind of censorship it takes to lower a game’s rating from AO to M is so minimal that you’d hardly ever notice a significant difference. According to the ESRB, a game rated Mature, “may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.” A game rated Adults Only, “may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.” So what does it take for a developer to get the rating dropped? Make one or two choice edits. The same has been done with plenty of games, and even movies, in the past. It’s not hard to do at all. Why is it done? Money. Movie makers often make only a couple cuts to get a PG-13 instead of an R so they’ll sell more tickets. Just fade to black during the sex scene, anger the audience at the horribly yet perfectly timed fade, and get your PG-13. The difference with movies is that there is a 5 year gap between ratings, not 1. Movies aren’t threatened with an NC-17 rating nearly as often as games are threatened with AO, which therefore makes NC-17 less significant than AO. Yet games, especially those from certain developers, continue to get hit with the threat of an AO rating, so they do what movie-makers do to R-rated films to get a PG-13 just so they can get an M. Yet, for a movie, that means you get to see it at 13 instead of 18. For games, you’re still recommended to not play it until you’re 17 instead of… um, well, 18. Has anybody else scratched their heads yet?

So back to the topic on hand, that being Manhunt 2. There have been many theories thrown out as to how Rockstar got away with lowering Manhunt 2’s rating in such a short amount of time. Let me just say this: You can get a lot done in 2 months, especially when it comes to making insignificant changes to your game to get you a lower rating with indiscernable differences than the higher rating. As a game developer, I would say it came down to putting a blanket over a bloody, naked body. AO very rarely coms from the violence. The rating is more often given to games that have nudity than extreme violence. And it doesn’t take much to convince the ESRB that someone isn’t naked. Look at Shahdee from “Prince of Persia: Warrior Within” to see what I’m talking about. There is far too much bickering going on about Manhunt 2’s rerating, and some people are going so far as to espouse half baked conspiracy theories involving the ESRB and Rockstar, saying that nothing has been changed and Rockstar just payed them off. Rockstar changed the game. However, for a game like Manhunt 2, not enough has changed to appease the anti-game lobbyists. Rockstar has only done enough to get the M rating. Why? Money. Everything comes down to how, and even if, a game will be marketed. If the publisher refuses to market a game with an AO rating, the developer will only do just enough to get an M rating without ruining the overall vision of the game. If they decided they wanted to drop the game from an AO to a Teen rating on the hand, they’d end up with a completely different game. Thus, a developer barely has to do anything to get the M rating. One year of maturity is a lot less than five.

So I realized that I wanted to flesh out the plot of Chapter 1 a bit more, so I cut a couple scenes out and am planning on replacing them with new ones to help develop - and hopefully finish - the Mexico City story. It was never quite finished before. Sort of left it hanging to somehow get finished in Chapter 2, and then I thought, “… Why?” All it means for you is that you get more gameplay time. Think of it as beneficial. So I’ll keep you all up to date on the progress of these new scenes.