Murdering free speech in Manchester?

A new Playstation 3 game called Resistance: Fall of Man features Manchester Cathedral… as the site of a spectacular gun battle. Predictably, this has prompted an outcry from the bishop, and demands for an apology and compensation.

Interestingly, the objections don’t focus so much on the ‘sacrilegious’ aspects of this supposed affront, as on encouraging a perception of victimhood. The clergy have called on the support of families of gun crime victims to lend moral weight to their campaign. Whilst one can have every sympathy with them, to suggest a link between Sony’s sci-fi shoot-‘em-up and the real-world violence found in the reality of poverty in parts of Manchester, is laughable; using these families’ grief could even be seen as exploitative on the part of the church! Their self-victimisation is taken to its logical conclusion by one unnamed ‘church source’, with his aspiration that his ‘offence’ to be taken as seriously as those perennial victims, Muslim community leaders.

The CofE needs to develop a thicker skin – although this is hardly a fashionable trait nowadays. If having your territory as the setting for a violent video game were sufficient to get in a hissy-fit over, there’d be a new complaint from the Russian or Colombian government practically every week.

Like rap music, computer games are seen by many as not really a free speech issue. But whilst what they have to ‘say’ is in general not particularly profound, restrictions on what a programmer can put in his game make him not answerable to gamers, his peers, or the market, but to self-appointed censors, ignorant of the fact that a computer game is just a bit of fun.

Robin Walsh