Virtual bullying game condemned by charities
A computer game in which players are encourage to punch, Chinese burn and wedgie their way to schoolyard success has been condemned by anti-bullying campaigners as "gravely irresponsible".
Bully, to be released for Playstation and Xbox consoles from the end of October, follows the progress of a 15-year-old boy sent to a fictional American boarding school who must terrorise his way through life, wielding baseball bats, slingshots and stink bombs to gain his peers' respect.
Anti-bullying charities have attacked the game. After being given a viewing of the game by its developers Rockstar, Beatbullying development director John Quin condemned the violence involved.
"To progress through the game, the player has no option but to engage in very violent exchanges, some including weapons," he said.
"The fact that all this violence takes place in a school makes it utterly contemptible. Ultimately this is a video game that will be played by children which glorifies violence at school. Child-on-child violence is a subject not to be taken lightly."
Makers Rockstar are no strangers to controversy. They pioneered the Grand Theft Auto series, which attracted criticism for a plot in which players must fight their way to the top of a fictional criminal underworld.
There were calls in the US for new restrictions on video games after it was revealed last year that an edition of the game contained hidden scenes in which the characters had graphic sex.
The company also came under fire for its Manhunt game when the parents of Leicester schoolboy Stefan Pakeerah blamed it for his death in a beating attack in 2004. Police said there was no link between the game and the attack, but several shops removed copies from their shelves and the game was banned in New Zealand and Canada's Ontario province.
Looking through the censors' eyes
In a typical working week, Nicola McCuly might watch a couple of dozen people having sex. Sometimes they might be doing this in twos or threes; other times, there'll be a roomful, going at it like rabbits. Sometimes they might be going at it with rabbits. And if it's not sex, it's violence. McCuly looks on as people are murdered, tortured and maimed. Soft human bodies are set on fire, exploded by bombs, cut up and eaten. McCuly might crunch her way through a tangy apple as a young man is slowly and gleefully decapitated. Other times a cup of tea might wet the whistle during a gruelling group rape scene. A gingernut with that? Sure, why not? It's all in a day's work for McCuly, as New Zealand's deputy chief censor.
For the last 10 years or so, she has spent her working week viewing all manner of distressing and depraved things to decide whether we can watch them as well.
Censorship. It's a dirty job, and somebody has to do it. But who? What could possibly drive someone to be a censor? Not the money, that's for sure. The salary for an experienced classification officer is less than $60,000. So why would someone voluntarily sit in a darkened room for days, months, years of their life, watching acts of extreme cruelty, harrowing sexual violence and the more repulsive ends of the porn spectrum?
McCuly began her censorship career in 1994. After working in special education in Christchurch, she applied for a job at the Video Recordings Authority, an organisation that was amalgamated into the Classification Office that same year. A compact, quick-witted woman with a habit of getting straight to the point, McCuly's career choice means she has seen things no-one should have to see. She acknowledges that some aspects of her job have taken their toll emotionally. Certainly, her ready laugh is at odds with her sad eyes.
"Some days this work really is the pits. You see some incredibly horrible things. If there's a court case concerning the sexual exploitation of young children, we spend weeks dealing with images that are genuinely grotesque. We've had computer hard drives submitted to us containing entire libraries of child pornography, with thousands of images and movie files that have been indexed and arranged like photo albums."
Fortunately, cases as grim as this are relatively rare. McCully estimates that about 80% of her team's work is classifying the kind of sexually explicit DVDs that will end up in sex shops and the "adult" sections of video stores from North Cape to Bluff.
"Those tapes really are tedious," she sighs. "You might have six hours of sex DVDs to classify, and you have to watch them from beginning to end. There's no fast-forwarding, in case you miss a section where things are verbally or physically rough. The misogyny in these sex tapes is very depressing. There's the underlying idea that women are only on this earth to satisfy men in whatever way those men want to be satisfied, no matter how painful or humiliating."
The New Zealand Classification Office employs about 30 staff. In addition to deputy chief censor McCuly and chief censor Bill Hasting, there are 15 classification officers who assist in classifying incoming publications.
"Our central role is to determine whether incoming publications such as films, DVDs, magazines or computer games are `objectionable', which means that they deal with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty or violence in a way that is likely to be injurious to the public good."
Some publications are specifically prohibited by the Classification Act, says McCuly, including those that promote or support sexual violence, torture, bestiality, necrophilia, or the sexual exploitation of children. Publications deemed to be "objectionable" may be cut, or banned outright, and other publications may be passed with various age or audience restrictions. Most films and DVDs released in New Zealand with G, PG or M ratings are classified in Australia, which means local classifications officers wade through the more extreme stuff.
"We're dealing with the rougher end of the spectrum, but we try to make sure everyone working here gets a mix of more mainstream movies and explicit sex tapes, so it's not just sex and violence all week." She laughs a rather dry little laugh. "Sometimes it will be sex, violence, and horror as well." WWW"It happens, of course," says McCuly. "I'd be lying if I said we hadn't all found something we'd seen arousing at some stage. We're all human. But that doesn't happen very often. Most of what we see in sex tapes ranges from tedious to sickening, so the work is more gruelling than titillating. An officer's job is to watch closely and write down what's in each tape, and if they find things of particular concern, they might call in Bill or I for comment." |
