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NZ Chief Censor on videogames – part 1

Monday 20 Dec 2010 12:04 p.m.

A screenshot from Manhunt 2, one of few games to be banned in New Zealand

A screenshot from Manhunt 2, one of few games to be banned in New Zealand

By Conrad Reyners

NZGamer.com recently got the chance to sit down with Deputy Chief Censor Nic McCully for an in-depth discussion on the classification of videogames in New Zealand.

Nic is far from an ultra-conservative old man who has never touched a console in his life. She owns a Nintendo, has attended E3 and reads NZGamer.com.

Taking over from her predecessor, Bill Hastings (who just got a new job as a District Court judge), Nic is now the Acting Chief Censor and is in charge of the classification of all books, games, videos, movies and published material that is shown and sold in New Zealand.

In the following article, Nic, along with her policy sidekick Kate Ward, answer a broad range of questions. Both offer their views on videogame classification, videogame violence and the high standards that games need to breach in order to be banned in New Zealand.

What kind of qualifications do you need to have to be working in this field and to be doing the job you do?
Nic: It could be a combination of things. Bill had a legal background, I have a social science background. I have a psychology and education major, Kate here has a background in Policy. In terms of the staff we hire - the classification officers who do the day to day examinations - we have a range of people from people with degrees to bus drivers! We’ve had an incredible range of people from all ages. But they all need to be able to write. They need to have reasonably good literary skills – but we go for diversity basically.

Is the reason for that diversity so you have a very broad range of opinions and views?
Nic: Yup! It’s so that we are representative of the New Zealand public and we get a wide sense of having that mixed range of people.

Could you briefly run us through the process of how you would rate a game, as opposed to a movie?

Nic: There is a bit of a difference. Ratings are generally done by the labelling body – what we do is we classify. So, games that are unrestricted overseas (games that are G’s PG’s or M’s) don’t go to the labelling body. You don’t need a label in New Zealand for those games, its only the restricted games that have been restricted overseas. But the labelling body rates product, and they rate the product by saying “so, this game got an M in Australia, lets give it an M here”. What we do is we classify – so a game will be sent to us as being MA15+ or whatever, but we will get it – then I schedule it to a classification officer and I also have an expert games player who comes in and sits beside my classification officer and he will play the game for however long we need to, to see what we need to see. So once examination takes place, the Classification Officer would apply the criteria of the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act. But the criteria to be applied are the same ones we use for films or books – there is no difference, it’s the same set of criteria.

Tell us a bit more about this seasoned gamer that you bring in...
Nic: We hire a seasoned games expert who comes in once or twice a week depending on how many games we have.

What kind of special perspective are they providing? Obviously they know how to be playing games – but what are they bringing to the table that your normal classifiers don’t have?
Nic: The technical skill of playing across multiple platforms and to the degree those games need. I mean, he’s pretty skilled. He would beat most people!

How far does a game need to be played through in order to come to a conclusion about that title?
Nic: It depends on the game. We quite often get beta versions of games. So they are [a] pre-marketed game, so we can jump through the levels, we can get behind it; we are sometimes given codes that allow us to access all areas of the game so we can check everything out. The distributors want to be upfront with us as well. They will quite often provide us with demo footage on DVDs of gameplay – of contentious gameplay – so really, we do the research online about the game, we play the game, look at the demo footage, and read up. That combination determines how much we need to see of this game. [If] it’s a repetitive first person shooter, you pretty much know what you’re dealing with after three hours.

So it is a whole package approach where you are looking at everything throughout the game?
Nic: I mean the reality is that we can’t afford to sit there for twenty five hours. We have to jump around and sample it.

And of course, some free-roam games could take days to properly explore, like Grand Theft Auto.
Nic: Absolutely, oh absolutely.

Some games seem to get classified long before they are released – you mentioned that you got beta games to preview; is there a requirement as to how finished the game needs to be before it can be classified?
Nic: There’s nothing set in stone, but we would expect to be looking at a 90 to 99 percent finished game. The gameplay is finished, it’s just that sometimes the cut scenes haven’t been pulled together or they’re finishing graphics at the front end. We’d just expect that the majority of the gameplay is completed for us to play.

And obviously you’d expect the developers to fill you in on the bits they haven’t provided?
Nic: Yup that’s correct. There’s lots of things here that are commercial sensitive, we are very careful with it. But we get background information if we need it. Another thing that we do is that distributors will sometimes bring the game from Australia to us, and hang around – just because the security around the game is so tight – Take 2 was just over recently – and they will be there to answer any questions while we play the games.

I’d imagine that you would get games even before reviewers do?
Nic: Yeah at times we do. Although we have pretty strict guidelines about [ensuring] confidentiality and security. Sometimes some of the big developers are so paranoid about security that they request to stay on site the entire time. But that’s fine with us.

Is it necessary to classify everything? You mentioned that you don’t need to classify games that have already been classified in other jurisdictions.
Nic: We only classify things that have been restricted in other jurisdictions.

Who makes that decision? Who makes the call about when to classify something and when not to? For example if there is a game that hasn’t been given a restricted classification overseas, but it’s on the borderline – would you ever look at that overseas decision?
Nic: The labelling body are required to review it, and they have a reviewing panel who will send it to us if there is anything in it that might need to be classified.
Kate: But it would be the distributors responsibility - if they had a question mark about whether or not it would be restricted in New Zealand even if it wasn’t restricted elsewhere, then its their call essentially to say well, we are going to submit it to the body in the first instance – because if there is a complaint about it from a member of the public about it needing a restricted classification, then it could go through an enforcement process.
Nic: Distributors want to have product that parents can have confidence in, that has a label and that is preferably a New Zealand label. It’s like a brand – it gives parents confidence that they can buy that for their children.

Say, for example, there was a game made by a New Zealand developer and they wanted to get it classified, how expensive is that process?
Nic: It’s $1400.

Do you think that’s too restrictive?
Kate: It’s about on par with everywhere else in the world, it may be seen to be restrictive but that’s something they would need to work into their costing.
Nic: If they were a small time developer and they were only selling a few copies – then they could apply for a fee waiver. I can waive up to 75% of that base fee. But they need to be only producing around five hundred copies. But you wouldn’t expect the GTA distributors to want a fee waiver would you? We would need some evidence of hardship or why they would deserve a fee waiver.

What makes videogames different from any other visual medium – what is about videogames that makes it harder, or easier to classify them?
Nic: It’s not so much harder or easier – it’s just different. There is a whole interactive medium that you are engaging with. You sit and watch a DVD. It’s a passive experience, it will create some emotion, but it’s potentially more passive. But the interactive, participatory nature of the gaming world is quite different.
Kate: But that’s all taken into account when we classify – one of the criteria we look at is the impact of the medium.

With games there are so many different types of genres and experiences that differ from books or movies – are these approached differently?
Nic: I’m not sure I agree about there being that many different genres as opposed to books and movies – but I suppose you don’t get driving movies – so I take your point.

What about the way that violence is presented and treated differently across genres – for example why is the violence in Mortal Kombat different from that found in a top down real time strategy game like Company of Heroes?
Nic: Fantasy violence of a more monster-based fantasy world, I’m thinking of God of War - that does have a lesser effect when you are killing monsters than a game that has violence against humans or human-like people. We would certainly factor that in, and if it’s top down – and the bodies disappear very quickly afterwards and there is very limited blood - then that is likely to receive a lesser restriction.

What about violence that people might be more familiar with, say for example World War 2 games – where we have grown accustomed to a very high level of real violence.
Nic: But those are very contextualised and very rule-bound. As a player you are in a set of scenarios you can’t move outside of. You can’t shoot anyone except the enemy (usually); all of those things are contextualised. And that contextualisation is considered when we classify.

New Zealand has only banned a very small number of games, I think it’s four? Manhunt, Reservoir Dogs, Manhunt 2 and Postal. How high is the ban standard here? Especially as there seems to be quite a high standard in other countries.
Nic: Well everything is a bit different, take Australia – it bans things because they don’t have an R18 rating. In New Zealand we are banning games because we say they are injurious to the public good. In Australia they are banning games because its above the MA15 guidelines and once they are above that there is nowhere to go.

“Injurious to the Public Good” - what does that mean?
Nic: It means that we have deemed the level of violence or cruelty in those games to be at such a high extent or strong degree and in such a manner that it would be injurious. The Act itself works in a number of tiers. The first one when a publication tends to promote or support various things it’s automatically out – we have very little say over that. So, things in section 3(2) – the exploitation of children, the use of violence to compel a person into sexual conduct, the use of excrement or urine – which is what Postal 2 had problems with – acts of torture or the infliction of extreme violence or extreme cruelty – Manhunt fell into this category. Once we decided it promoted and supported that, the Act says that’s it, it’s banned.
Kate: It’s the promotion and support of these activities that is problematic. So if you can say, well OK, it’s got these activities but its saying they are bad, then it’s OK.
Nic: You could argue that a lot of games have extreme violence in them, but they don’t necessarily support it. Manhunt was different because not only were the clips videoed, like little snuff films, but there was an escalation – it was getting you to perpetrate those acts.

Manhunt as a game received pretty poor reviews, regardless of its shock value.
Nic: Oh, it was a crap game.

Take for example Call of Duty Black Ops – I reviewed that game, it’s a pretty vicious game, there are quite a lot of extremely violent moments. If you took snapshots of that violence, it would be on par with some of the things in Manhunt, so would it be correct to say that it’s all about the context of your violence that determines when a ban would be applied?
Nic: You said it yourself; Call of Duty Black Ops is completely contextualised. I mean, the earlier Call of Duty the one with the airport scene, our game player and a censor that day came in and said to me – we can’t believe what we’ve just seen in this game, because we’ve done all those games before, they are usually pretty standard and have a repetitive nature; to go through an airport and just start blasting civilians, completely lifted that game to a level [of violence] that those games just hadn’t done before.

But there is a tension here that needs to be addressed. There are developers, who want to push the envelope, not for shock value, but in order to create games that are more real, more sophisticated and are more nuanced. They want to get into that sort of gritty narrative territory – but they also need to sell and market their game, and not have it banned. How flexible are these criteria, are you more likely to come down harder on games because due to their interactive nature it is physically easier to “promote and support” something offensive?
Nic: No, its not that simple. There is a tension; there is a tension in everything we do here. I mean we have just done a Japanese game, it’s very old now. It’s probably not even available here. The whole point of this game is to rape women. The game is explicit, it’s gratuitous, there was no point to this again except raping women. That was it, that was the storyline there was nothing else. That was the point of the story. So in that circumstance you definitely have to go the Act and look at the criteria, especially in 3(2) the use of violence or coercion. Because you were raping these women – it wasn’t a great game, it was gross, and it was really gross to have to make my games guy go and do it – he felt really uncomfortable, and we were all appalled. Luckily, the graphics were really low level. But it was a really unsettling game. Some people want to push boundaries, but some boundaries just don’t need to be pushed.
Kate: And if you had a film where that was the story line, you would need to look at exactly the same criteria.
Nic: And some films have been banned for exactly that reason. The difference is that we can cut bits out of a film, we can’t cut things out of a game.

Why is that? Is it because developers don’t want to?
Nic: Yea, its just too hard. Well, it’s possible we could offer excisions, we just haven’t had a situation to date. I think if we had a beta game though, and they said, look we are thinking of including this massacre what do you think? We could come back to them.

Take for example the Hot Coffee incident in GTA, that was originally in the first cut but was removed for American censors.
Nic: [Laughs] Hah, yea that wasn’t particularly graphic, it was pretty silly.

Part two of the interview will be posted next Monday. In it, the future and the issues that surround the classification process are discussed.

NZGamer.com

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