The murder of a Thai cab driver at the hands of an idiot teenager in Thailand has stirred up a controversy that is to GTA4 what Hot Coffee was to San Andreas. With global response to the incident, Rockstar seems to have riled up a bunch of video game violence critics.
In the latest chapter of this story, we have Somchai Jaroen-amnuaysuk, deputy director of Thailand’s Welfare Promotion, Protection and Empowerment of Vulnerable Groups Office going against poor old Rockstar, developers of GTA4.
He says that when a player “copycats a crime he or she sees in the game”, the makers of the game should be prosecuted. Prosecutions will force the game makers to act more responsibly, the director says. This is a pretty much WTF kind of idea, because till now, I’ve only heard these critics go against publishers, distributors and the like.
The fact that Rockstar is in good ol’ America is consoling, seeing as if it were a Thai company, it would probably have been “prosecuted” already. And speaking of Thailand’s legal system, let me remind you that the 19-year-old kid who killed the cab driver may be sentenced to execution by lethal injection. Not good news for the game makers.
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After being banned from Thailand, Rockstar’s infamous Grand Theft Auto 4 may also see a boot from another country: Spain. According to GamePolitics, the Catalan Taxi Federation’s secretary general Josep Maria Goñi has asked the government to ban the game.
Goñi states that the move has been triggered by the Thailand murder case where a loser kid wanted to know “if it’s as easy to hijack a taxi as it is in the game” and did just that. Kid will soon face execution by a lethal injection.
And GTA isn’t the only one on Goñi’s hitlist. He wants a ban on all games with “a high level of violence or which “celebrate” drug trafficking or prostitution”. Well, that isn’t something new, because there must be about a million people or more on this planet who want a ban on those.
Regardless, it should be noted that Goñi didn’t say anything about movies. Apparently, movies with a high level of violence and which celebrate drug trafficking or prostitution must be perfectly fine. But video games? Think of the kids!
While we don’t know how the Spanish Government has responded to this, we’ll just hope that they won’t. There must be more important matters in Spain that banning video games, dammit!
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Bethesda’s take on the glorious Fallout series, Fallout 3 has been refused classification in Australia! The news has been confirmed by the guys at Internode, the consequences of which are that the game is effectively banned in the land of kangaroos.
Why the banning has taken place is currently unknown, although a pretty good guess will be violence. Screenshots of the game released over the months have pointed to some pretty messy violence (much like the first two games). The game is pretty violent and bloody as it is, but the famed “Bloody Mess” perk in the game makes it bloodier and messier. Bethesda had confirmed recently that it will be returning. Perhaps that is reason for refusing classification?
Sex is definitely played down in the game, as Bethesda had mentioned. The game will have mature themes, but not so much about sex as in Fallout 2. That pretty much leaves violence in…
The game will most probably be sent in for a re-evaluation after some modifications. Fallout 3 is just too big a property to not be released in Australia. Besides, we want Zero Punctuation to be review it!
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