The most famous one being Manhunt which was blamed on the Stefan Pakeerah murder. Giselle Pakeerah, the victim's mother, claimed that Leblanc had been "obsessed" with the game after he pleaded guilty in court. During the subsequent media exposure the game was removed from sale by some vendors including international branches of GAME and Dixons. The police denied any such link between the game and the murder citing drug-related robbery as the motive. The presiding judge also placed sole responsibility with Leblanc in his summing up after sentencing him to life. This case has been the only one I can think of where the media hasn't added a certain videogame to a major story but from the people who have suffered from the crime.
But lets put it in another perspective which disagrees with the evidence from the police and the Judge about the game Manhunt wasn't to blame.
Lets say for just very briefly in this article to make a point, that Manhunt did cause the death of Stefan. The game is rated 18 as shown in the below picture.
Warren Leblanc was 17 so how did he get a copy of the game? Poor parenting to me and it's unfair to blame Rockstar North in this horrible attack. They submitted a copy of the game to the BBFC, they played it and felt it was ok to be released with an 18 certificate. They are the very same BBFC who decide the certificates of films as well.
But lets go further back in time to the murder of John Lennon and look at his murder Mark David Chapman. Chapman went to New York in October 1980 planning to kill Lennon. He left the city for a short while in order to obtain ammunition from his unwitting friend Dana Reeves in Atlanta. He returned to New York in November, but after going to the cinema and being inspired by the film Ordinary People, he returned to Hawaii, telling his wife he had been obsessed with killing Lennon but had snapped out of it. He made an appointment to see a clinical psychologist but instead, on December 6, flew back to New York. He offered cocaine to a taxi driver. He reports having re-enacted scenes from The Catcher in the Rye.
So two sources of influence to Chapman's motives already and to some people that means Catcher in the Rye and Ordinary People killed Lennon, just like Manhunt did to Stefan?
Look out for some bad French from me...Fucking bullshit, Chapman killed Lennon and he's a selfish individual who wanted Lennon's fame and by killing him, he felt he would have that. I also feel this way about Leblanc as if he didn't play Manhunt, I'm sure he would have still persuaded Stefan to go to Stoke Woods Park known locally as The Dumps to meet two girls that would never come, and he would have still armed himself with a knife and a claw hammer. I also believe that knives's and claw hammer's have been used in fiction for a long time before Manhunt.
But having said that I do feel that sometimes videogames makers can sometimes push boundaries with their tastes a little too much. There was a game called JFK: Reloaded
via Wikipedida
JFK: Reloaded puts the player in the role of Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The player is then scored on how closely one's version of the assassination matches the report of the Warren Commission. According to the company, the primary aim of the game was "to establish the most likely facts of what happened on 1963-11-22 by running the world’s first mass-participation forensic construction", the theory being that a player could help prove that Lee Harvey Oswald had the "means and the opportunity to commit the crime", and thus help prove the Warren Commission's findings.[3]
Players were able to submit scores, rating how close their version of events were to the Warren Commission's, for a competition that ended on February 22, 2005.[4] The competition promised winnings of "up to" $100,000, but the final prize was just $10,712.[5] Afterwards, the competition option was disabled and the cost of the simulator was reduced to $4.99. It was later offered for free download before the official website closed in August 2005.
Now that to me is in bad taste as even though the makers of the game state it's "to establish the most likely facts" and is for educational purposes, it's clearly more like "Hey I bet you fiver that it was Oswald" and to do that when the victims family is alive is disgusting.
The late Senator Ted Kennedy, President Kennedy's brother called the game "despicable" and I really felt embarrassed to call myself a gamer when I first read his quote, which also unfortunately is also how I first heard about the game which gave the game more exposure.
Last but not least and the most famous one which I think for once I was on the media's side was the No Russian level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Now it wasn't the most violence I had seen in a game or the most foul in it's language from what I remember but in my gaming history, it was very bad taste.
It was a level where you were Russians storming an airport with no one able to fight back at you with women and children screaming and trying to run away from you (there is a brief part at the end where security and swat fight you back at the end which is a cheap way in my view to give the level some kind of merit and reason) and isn't required in the story of the game. If that is acceptable in gaming then we may as well give high five's to terrorists as all that level was made for was to create controvsy towards the game, a cheap marketing plan by Infinity Ward/Activision to wind people and that annoyed me as the game would have sold millions anyway.
Now perhaps you are thinking reading this and wanna shout back at me "But we play as bad guy's all the times in games...GTA, Command & Conquer...even Manhunt which you mentioned in your article earlier and you thought that was alight???"
Which is more than fair and I honestly have no beef on people who went out and bought Modern Warfare 2, it's just to me that level was solely designed to create a bad atmosphere to the public about videogames and it makes gamer's look like they enjoy killing defenceless civilians who are trying to run away from being killed.
There is no challenge in the level and it isn't required to move the story of the game, heck if the whole game was like that then it wouldn't have been a good game if you could just stroll through.
I just think that we should consider stepping back from what we are building or designing sometimes and try looking at the situation from a third person perspective. Is this right?
