Last but not least: Manhunting prohibited

 
The globally controversial computer game "Manhunt 2" will not be released on the Swiss market. Following bans in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy, the Swiss industry association SIEA has also come to the conclusion that the game exceeds a tolerable level of violence. But what exactly does that mean? What distinguishes "Manhunt 2" from games such as the no less brutal "FarCry"? Why does this game, of all games, suddenly make the otherwise so diffuse line between artistic freedom and what is publicly acceptable so clear? Manhunt" brings together three factors on which the censorship authorities were able to agree:
 
Virtual violence against people has not only been frowned upon since "Manhunt". As early as 1997, it led to a total ban in England in the car racing game "Carmageddon", in the first version of which you could run over pedestrians. This was only lifted when the producers replaced the humans with zombies and aliens and colored the spurting blood green. Of course, there are many games in which you kill people that are still not banned. But unlike "Manhunt", where you sneak up on your victims as a psychopath and strangle them with a plastic bag, in the vast majority of these games there is a kind of moral justification: You kill the bad guy, in "Call Of Duty", for example, Nazis. If it were the other way around, the game would probably be banned. What's more, "Manhunt" lacks any ironic twist. While in "Mortal Combat", for example, violence is depicted through comic exaggeration, at the end of the fight you are transformed into a snarling dragon that bites off the upper half of your opponent's body. In "Manhunt", on the other hand, the assassinations are as realistic as possible.