Digital Boomerang Singapore 

Get down to the real issue instead of dishing out a ban

I must confess that when I read in the Straits Times that the Board of Censorship had banned Half-Life and the expansion packs, I burst out laughing.

It’s just hilarious.

First, Half-Life was voted by CNet Gamecenter’s Game of the Year in 1998 i.e. two long years ago (especially so in the computer gaming reality). More than 60% of the gamers in Singapore must have already played this game. A bit late, don’t you think?

Second, the piecemeal way of banning Half-Life shows a lack of understanding of the games available in the market.

The violence in Half-Life is, at best, barely comparable to that found in the latest and hottest 3D shooter Unreal Tournament (UT). In UT, blood spurts all over the walls, heads are decapitated with sniper rifles, limbs and torsos fill the air when a rocket launcher fires, taunts contain words like “bitch” and a voice bellows “Multi-kill”, “Rampage” or “Godlike” when the gamer destroys a certain number of enemy bots in succession.

Moreover, unlike UT, the violence in Half-Life isn’t even one of the primary reasons why the game is popular. Half-Life is popular and much “raved” about because of the artificial intelligence of both the non-player and player characters and how it combines action with story telling and puzzle-solving.

Third, banning Half-Life is a sure way of encouraging piracy. If you can’t get the game in legitimate shops, your only alternative is fly-by-night pirates. The ban only makes the game more worth purchasing and trying.

Fourth, it just seems a little too severe considering Gun City, a commercial gun range with guns that look, feel and weigh the same as real guns, just opened its doors with the government’s “blessing” which takes the form of a licence.

Banning Half-Life is not the solution, addressing the reason for the ban is.

The reason behind banning violent games is that nobody can say for certain that violent games do not translate to violent people. Last year’s tragic school shootings in America brought violent video and computer games under the public microscope. Parents in America were as eager as local parents, who initiated the ban on Half-Life, to protect their children from violent games.

The microscopic scrutiny, however, showed no tangible correlation between violent games and the tendency of gamers to exhibit violence. The American solution came in the form of a compromise.

Games such as UT and Half-Life are rated “M” - a notation that the games are restricted to “mature” audiences i.e. to those above 17. Most of these games now come with a built-in violence configuration tool, which parents can use to turn down or off the violence.

A rating system can also be deployed locally and an age requirement can be adopted. The tender minds of our primary school children, who are denied access to these games, will remain, hopefully, untainted. The older kids, gamers like me, can have our minds invaded by violence based on the assumption that we will not run amok gunning people down because we can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Will such a rating system solve all our woes? Definitely not.

Those under the required age will undoubtedly be able to scour the universe for a copy. Moreover, the “mature” rating might only make the game more attractive - yet another forbidden fruit in Singapore ripe for the picking.

Parents may end up not using the rating system. Does that sound incredulous? That is exactly what happened in the US. Many parents actually ignored the ratings when making purchases.

It’s a sticky situation with no easy solution.

To make the rating system more effective, a nation-wide campaign which encourages parents to be more involved in their children’s activities can be launched. This campaign can discuss the value of computer games, teach parents how to activate the violence configuration tools, explain the rating system and recommend non-violent yet fun alternatives such as Grim Fandango, The Curse of Monkey Island and Age of Empires II.

Such a campaign will shift some of the responsibility back to the parents. Perhaps in the future, they will be able to handle their children’s fixation with a particular game on their own instead of going to the authorities and initiating a ban.

Until the authorities take a more consolidated and coherent approach to dealing with games with objectionable content, I am going on a shopping rampage to grab games off the shelf before they are banned.

- First published on IT AsiaOne, This is IT

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