A quick background: I consider myself an avid video game enthusiast, and an avid supporter of both the arts and entertainment as a whole. Being all of the aforementioned things, I've got to admit that the idea of a little snip-snip here and there (a.k.a. censorship) peeves me just the slightest bit. Look, I won't say that there aren't some video games that could have benefited from being shorter in some respects, but what I’ll be referring to is the actual censorship of information; be it art, entertainment, or some amalgamation of both.

There happens to be one thing above all else that really gets to me; on that same level that a bug bite starts off small but eventually leaves you with an itch that unconsciously makes you scratch until the skin looks like its been through a cheese grater. I’m of course referring to incidents where blood is changed to be any color but red. Now I'll be honest here, this is probably the least of what "censorship" actually could be. It still annoys me. The example that stands out most in my mind is the one I still joke about on a normal basis— Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time letting Gannon's blood be red during the deathblow in the original version, but green in (most of) the ones thereafter. I happen to find the idea that the color of an obviously storybook-style monster's blood being changed would have any effect on anything or anyone at all just a little absurd. But then I'm neither an obsessive, overcompensating parent, nor am I employed by a video game distributor.

That would be far from the first time Nintendo in particular changed the color of blood. Back in 1992, there was a little game called Mortal Kombat. There were more than just knock-outs to the fighting title—there were “fatalities”. Bloody, gory, decapitating, spine-rippin’ fatalities. Whereas the blood fest continued in the arcade, when the game was ported to the SNES home console parents got a little nervous; enough so that the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) appeared later that same year^[1]. You know the ESRB guys, right? They rate games from E to M^[2]. Justin Holmes of AllRPG.com writes on the subject: “The SNES version had the blood toned down and made clear, as to look like sweat. Also, in Japanese releases of the Mortal Kombat series, the blood's colour was changed to green.” There’s that green blood again.

As a side note: while Nintendo freely neutered their version of the original Mortal Kombat, Sega Genesis left all of the blood and gore in, ultimately outselling “that other” version. Some parents even went so far as to criticize Nintendo’s position of censoring themselves. Pleasing fans, Mortal Kombat II was left in-tact from arcade to SNES^[3].

And so we see that everything from the slightly more “realistic” to the more storybook and “cartoony” can get parents’ (real and imagined) panties in a bunch. But what about the games that are all about the violence in a more tongue-in-cheek sense? Let's take a favorite of mine, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Is the fact that you are clearly let in on the joke make it somehow different from "more serious" games? Well... yes, frankly. Vice City is completely, absolutely made for entertainment value, not to be taken either literally or seriously. More than that, you are let in on said joke from the very second you start up the game. Who can't let out a giggle when you see that Commodore screen? It’s a big chunk of 80’s nostalgia, in a game that’s both incredibly realistic and yet not at all.

There are an unmentionable number more games in the past years that have suffered either minutely or greatly due to anything from blood color changes to relatively extreme censorship when being ported to home consoles. There were and are even a good deal of games that weren’t imported to the United States market for reasons other than violence, ranging from religious imagery to perceived (or a little more than simply “perceived”) misogyny. When in doubt, if it appears, it’s better to pretend it doesn’t exist.

However, there is more to content control in video games than concerned parents. There are also retailers to think about—retailers that are, granted, making money off of concerned parents, but taking the moral responsibility upon themselves. Take Wal-Mart, for instance. It’s not just movies and CDs they will or will not carry, but games as well. An estimated 25% of video game purchases in the United States are made through the enormous retailer^[4]. Clearly, this means game companies regard Wal-Mart as one of their top sellers; that is, if the games can pass strict standards. Some of the larger game manufacturers can easily get away with ignoring the chain completely, but there is a good deal of smaller ones that unfortunately cannot. For this reason, they feel that they are forced to censor the content of their games or go out of business. And since it is cheaper for a company small enough to give in to the retailer’s demands to have one version of a game rather than two separate ones (consider it like a PG-13 movie as opposed to its NC-17 director’s cut counterpart), censoring to meet demands is a way of life.

Although, let it be noted here that Wal-Mart does actually sell some of the more risqué titles, like Grand Theft Auto III, when the sales are such that it would be utterly stupid not to sell it. Going along with the hypocrisy of a “very family institution” still managing to sell games with hookers and violence so long as they make enough money off of it, there were some pretty violent games that slipped by quite easily before 1992. As Wolfe of the AllRPG forums points out: “The NES game NARC had players blow up gun toting hobos into bloody chunks. But I guess it was released during the Nancy Regan war on drugs so anything like blowing up drug addict hobos was patriotic.” NARC was a very cartoony video game that came out in 1989, having a decidedly mixed message. From the manual itself^[5]: “NARC takes gamers through the supreme, larger-than-life war on drugs with exciting, colorful characters such as Max Force, who wages ‘justice’ against a number of sordid enemies.” No, the quotes around “justice” weren’t mine. Apparently, it is okay to kill people (and their pit bulls!), as long as they’re drug dealers.

It may come as a surprise, but I see no problem in all retailers having a say in what they are able to sell to a certain group, be the factors age or location. What I do have massive issues with is completely omitting or editing portions of video game play or dialog in all localizations of a game, when they could offer alternative versions or an alternative merchant. All that does is force some people to negotiate in a place called Ebay, eventually buying a whole other system and game from another country. Not only is this practice costly, but a buyer rarely purchases from a “legitimate” company—simply put, a shady dealer gets the money rather than the game company that could have made even more if they’d simply imported the game and left it alone in the first place. That’s not even taking into account the amazing amount of bootlegs of games out there, as well.

You see, for as many retailers as there might be that choose not to sell mature titles, there are at least an equal number that are perfectly willing to sell them. I'd prefer to see the player, rather than the retailer (or anyone else for that matter), decide exactly how much censorship they'd like to endure, rather than have a game manufacturer or a nightmarishly large cult-like retailer decide for us. There are already some games that allow a player or parent to control the amount of blood or language experienced, therefore eliminating the need to cater specifically to some retailers. With proper encouragement to the game creators, things of this nature will continue.

You see, it's not the game ratings that bother me. Rate away--it only helps parents figure out what their children may or may not be able to handle for Christmas, or gives kids a sense of “danger” when they get hold of an older sibling’s M-rated shooter. Just don't take away a person's right to choose what's appropriate for themselves. I’d really like to think that youth aren’t quite as stupid and easily influenced as they seem to be represented in the media. I will go so far as to say the parents should play more of a hand in developing their children’s sense of “realism” and morality than what kind of video games their kids can play.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I can’t say I find there to be any kind of a “correct” violence that can be considered in any way righteous. But, I am a believer that video games represent (in part) a safe, harmless way to take out a bit of aggression you might be suffering from because of the mundane world. It’s even better than a movie or a book sometimes, in that you become a part of it on so many sensory levels; you are a character in another realm of existence, taken away from the office, the stress of family, the 3-square-foot apartment and the leaking roof. If it winds up giving you a laugh or immerses you in a realm you prefer to spend a little bit of time in, all the better.

In the end, things have certainly changed from pinball and Pong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still an avid pinball hog when I can find a dark corner where today’s obnoxious mall culture doesn’t travel. And Pong… well, that’s Pong. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s simply Pong. However kid-friendly the games used to be, the technology grew. With new technology comes a better ability not merely to tell stories, but to translate a vast tale in the heads of others with a very special medium; it’s full of music and is more visual, inter-active, and addictive than mere movies, and more of a sensory overload that a book. As David Cox expressed in his article, Videogames and Censorship ^[6], “As most would agree, few media ever actually benefited from prohibition.” I couldn’t have said it better if I’d tried.

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Footnotes

1)Information regarding the formation of the ESRB was obtained from GameSpy.com Return

2) All current and previous ESRB ratings, plus “content descriptors“, can be found at The Idiot’s Guide to ESRB Ratings Return

3) Information specific to the Mortal Kombat ports from GameSpy.com Return

5) A typed manual of NARC was found at NES Instruction Manuals Return

6)Videogames and Censorship, by David Cox Return