When a game with content that may be a talking point for controversy appears you can guarantee two things will happen.  The Daily Mail will write about it in a negative way and Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester will get on his high horse and take it to parliament in a flash to try and regain a reputation that has diminished after proving himself wrong time and time again.

Today, we can safely write that these two facts appear to be the case yet again.  The game in question is, of course, Modern Warfare 2 and the scene is the now infamous airport scene where you play the game from the terrorists point of view and execute innocent men, women and children.  This scene has already blown up a storm in Australia as a protest lobby speaks out to get the game banned due to the scene being reminiscent of the Mumbai massacre.

I have played the game and the scene today and although can testify that it leaves you feeling a bit un-nerved I can also say that the scene fits well with the bleak storyline and that many worse things have appeared in film and also books.  Activision naturally responded and have also put into place a checkpoint system that twice asks players if they want to skip some scenes due to it being offensive.

These screens cannot be turned off and are asked for twice.  The game also comes with an 18 certificate due to its violent content so we have to ask ourselves why these people need to trouble themselves with a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  The media, sometimes can be its own worst enemy and a case in point would be an article I read in the Sun a couple of weeks back on the way up to a Codemasters preview.  The headline was that a teenager stabbed his grandmother to death in a violent streak that in the second paragraph read that he had been playing GTA IV!  Fair enough I thought but a videogame is not enough to warrant this kind of action on its own.  The last paragraph read that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia!!  You could imagine my disgust at such poor reporting where a videogame held a better headline of the reason for the violence rather than the real cause which was he was that he had mental health problems and this was only brought up at the end in one small sentence.

So with that article I and many others would doubt the credibility of any argument that a paper had to make.  The next was the comment from Keith Vaz himself, self proclaimed messiah to the nanny state type of Government that we all hate.  “I am absolutely shocked by the level of violence in this game and am particularly concerned about how realistic the game itself looks,” he said, vowing to raise his concerns in Parliament today.  Well that’s all well and good but as the game is rated 18 and rightly so, this means that Keith Vaz is now condemning the very rating system that is run and legislated by the Government.  If that is the case then it just goes to show how much Parliament and also Government get wrong in this country!

I would have thought that the Government have done a lot worse than put a scene into a game that has credence to it being there in the first place.  I would have also thought that Mr Vaz may want to take a step back from this sort of thing as he is part of the well oiled machine that has helped create worldwide attrocities in real life and not some piece of narrative from a videogame.  These guys do it for real and get away with it.  Perhaps the Daily Mail should write about that and a few more things of importance than to get stuck into a game that has tried to protect its customers in every way, shape and form.

I think we all agree that the gaming industry is quite young in terms of media convention but it cannot be forgotten and also needs to be understood a lot better.  Film has over 100 years to play to its audience and has firm form in place that guides a viewer.  It is embedded into us and the way we perceive things but that doesn’t stop film from being controversial too which never gets the publicity that games do now.  The scenes in Modern Warfare 2 can be harrowing but I felt worse and more perplexed with Black Hawk Down and the private bleeding out in front of his comrades. Is this written about? No! When will the general media wake up to the industry we have loved for more than 30 years now.

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