The video game medium has faced many challenges in its short life but none has come near to the magnitude of video game violence. Violence in any media has always been an issue for the mainstream public and video games are no exception. In 1994 the ESRB was formed as a inter regulation system for video games which would measure and display the violence (and other actions) and give these games a rating. The major push for the ESRB stemmed from Joseph Lieberman and other politicians stating that video games such as Mortal Combat and Doom were too violent and the system of the ESRB was set up to essentially keep these games out of the hands of kids. Since then a new growth in video game violence regulation has stemmed with controversial games such as Grand Theft Auto have renewed the issue. Recently the game Manhunt 2 was released and we are now seeing a new trend in regulation which is shifting away from keeping violent games away from children but how to control what levels of violence the people 17 years old plus should be able to consume. The controversy stems from the Mature (17 or older) and Adults Only (18 or older) ratings as Manhunt 2 was not allowed to be released without having some of it’s gore and violence removed, levels lower then what the industry accepted when the original. While this might seem like a political issues it still falls on the idea that the media and maybe even the general public has negative views on Video game violence. People have been repeatedly told by the media that video games are violent and link these ideas to physiological studies but Jeffrey Goldstein shows in his chapter in the Handbook of Computer Game Studies that most of these studies are faulty and do not support a proper scientific basis. Violence as an issue in the video game industry has evolved from the protection of children to the regulation of violence in a medium that only adults would be able to access. The idea that violence should be regulated from the children is logical and forming of the ESRB in 1994 was a vital step for the industry but the censorship of violence for adults is one that makes no real sense.
EDIT: changed picture and added video 11-06-2007
Here is a clip showing the differences between the M rated and AO rated versions of Manhunt 2
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