The limits are tested again!
When it comes to entertainment censorship you'll usually expect to go about and see your usual suspects on the list. You'll see your China, your Russia and probably soon England is going to start working it's way up that list with the way things are going over here; the 'video nasty' trend will be picking itself right back up where it left of, I betcha! But one whom I absolutely did not expect to see, was Japan. I mean sure; Japan has some pretty antiquated rules on censorship that means even in the modern age sexual organs cannot be shown, which is why the famous pixelated blur on nudity, even in pornographic products, is a stable of Japanese produced entertainment. I believe it's a potential felony under some moral decency laws that cannot rightly be challenged in the courts through a Catch-22 where any politician who does will be opening themselves up to career suicide when the opposition paints their entire reputation with that campaign. A silly law, no doubt. But how does Callisto Protocol tie in?
Turns out it doesn't. I truly expected to find out that Callisto Protocol had some overly graphic nudity based violence scene in the game but, unless that's being kept heavily under wraps, it would appear that the censorship laws being broken here are based purely on the traditional violence the game is priding itself on. And... I can kind of understand that. Callisto Protocol is the spiritual successor to Dead Space, a game that splattered itself in gore and viscera with wanton glee, and with Callisto coming out all these years later it only makes sense that these developers would up the shock and awe factor. But I wonder if it's really enough to start dolling out bans. Okay, this isn't an explicit ban, I guess. It's more a straight-up refusal to rate the game by the entertainment standards which makes it impossible to profitably sell the thing in Japan because no reputable storefront will list a game with no rating. But the result is the same; no Callisto Protocol for Japan.
For the moment, I endeavour to add, because I think it would be utterly insane of the team working on Callisto Protocol to not even consider work arounds. This move has demonstrated their utter staunch unwillingness to compromise on the level of carnage their game is going to present, which I respect, but that doesn't mean there aren't other solutions. Perhaps they'll go around and start adding that mosaic censoring for the Japanese version, and then Japanese players will go around wondering why there was so much graphic sex happening on screen in otherwise scary parts of the main campaign? Okay, I'm not exactly a font of ready-made great work-arounds over here but there surely has to be a way! I, for one, would not be willing to back down over such stupidness as violence regulations in a adults-only horror game!
I do wonder to what degrees the violence could have gone this time, or if perhaps the objection part is that the violence is set up in such a way to be a grisly reward for playing; given such a spotlight in the carnage that it feels like a key purpose of playing. Just like how Twitch will target anyone who plays a video game in which nudity is present if that nudity is the sole focus of the game or stream itself. And considering how wishy washy Twitch has notoriously been with those rules, perhaps that is the most apt comparison to make. Treading tip-toes around a ban hammer that strikes without warning is certainly the way of the future in these tech giant ruled times, it would seem. And Callisto is taking quite a stance, with it's reach, by refusing to shift.
But why is it that the CERO organisation has ground it's heels into the ground whilst everyone else has let this go by? It can't be because the game presents sexual violence like I implied, because then it would have absolutely run into trouble with the American and British ratings boards: that's the line they drawn in the sand. In fact, the answer is because the CERO organisation is actually renowned for being strict in a lot of manners related to violence. We can probably except a similar rating over in Australia, I can only assume their board hasn't been given the product yet. (They're probably kicking themselves over the fact they didn't get a chance to refuse to rate first, the tyrants over there...) But in some light research I've actually come up with something of an inciting incident which may explain things. But I have to warn you, it's going to get grisly in the real world.
The Kobe Child Murders in 1997 were, as they sound like, an incident involving the murder of children by another child; having experienced something similar England, us over here are very well aware what sort of landmark cases these situations can be. The perpetrator was a special needs pupil who, judging from his own notes, felt he had been left to slip through the cracks of society and become an "Invisible person", perhaps leading to these brutal acts of violence to cry out for attention. I'm no criminal psychologist, I couldn't say. But, I do know that a certain Japanese Politician with an abnormally square face called Shizuka Kamei used this as fuel in his campaign against violence in media. Which is interesting, because I can't seem to find any overt links between the crime and movies or videogames. But this is coming from a politician who apparently received funding from Yakuza affiliates according to a Wikipedia tidbit that I'm having trouble double-checking; so take from that what you will.
You can see how the primal outrage of such an event could be weaponised into a crusade against violence for some vague rule such as 'damaging moral decency', but one must also take into account how these are products designed to be viewed by adults, and not children. I know that seems like something of a moot point to bring up now in the face of industry regulations that are buried in concrete at this point, but if we can't trust adults to be responsible with the information that consume then we enter a state of doubting the mental maturity of our public at large. And at that point you probably have a larger and much more systemic issue on your hands than what video games get the go ahead in your ratings board! What the heck has gone so wrong in your society that adults aren't mature enough to recognise fiction? Did the Anime do this to them? I'm betting it's the anime.
As you can likely pick up in my slightly snarky tone, I'm staunchly against censorship in mostly every way when it comes to entertainment, I think restrictions are important, particularly on age, but there's a point at which the nannying and content policing has to calm down before it becomes the grass routes of some seriously bad precedents. Not only measures that the government will go in order to uphold the ever shifting borders of 'moral decency', but the extent to which the public and private sector will go to circumvent such overreaches. Without going into the grisly specifics, there are a great many number of sad situations in the Japanese adult entertainment industry that wouldn't have been allowed to happen if that sector was mainstream. Sometimes protecting people can start by trusting them enough to work alongside them. Let's start there, Japan.
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