Wired's Chris Kohler - of Game|Life, and one of the best gaming writers on the blogosphere today posted an interesting story on the trials and tribulations of Manhunt 2's ratings debacle. Tucked away in the second last paragraph of the piece is the disturbing sentence "But it was the company itself that went public with the AO rating, before announcing that it would retool the game to win an M rating." Seeing as there are no referenced sources and that a quick google search revealed no such announcement of a retooling, there's a very real chance it was some manner of miscommunication. After all it would be the first time an executive let slip something that turned out to be false.

What's troubling though is that the article mentions that a dozen or so other games over the past five years were given preliminary AO ratings. In all of those cases, the companies simply kept it quiet, and reworked the game to qualify for an M rating. Perhaps Take Two(the money making entity that controls Rockstar) would rather spend the legal fees required to attempt to overturn the rating on the expensive process of altering the game to make it more palatable to public perceptions. Hopefully this was just a misquote, or something of the sort, but the reality is that making commercial games is business, and big business too. Even if the statement was premature, perhaps it's just a matter of time anyway. At this point, an as intended release of Manhunt 2 is unlikely.

It's a damn shame that gamers are considered unworthy of making up their own minds as to what they want to buy. But what are we to do about it? Boycotting the game would only be punishing the developers, and they haven't really done anything wrong. Boycotting the consoles would only mean preventing yourself from being able to play the games you want to play. Internet petitions are laughably ineffective. So what, then? The problem lies with the rating system. They seem to be out of touch with gaming as a medium. They seem to be ignoring the idea of games being art, with entitlement to the same levels of expression as other media. In the long term, we need more real gamers(who also respect moderation) deciding things in the ESRB and similar game rating boards. Hopefully there will be some such civil minded sorts among us who will heed that call. In the short term though, I can think of no better ideas than spamming the ESRB's mail box with death threats and accusations of homosexuality.