Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Should Apple censor games differently to music and books?



Should Apple censor games differently to music and books?
At launch, Papers, Please had no nude body scans on iPad.
At launch, Papers, Please had no nude body scans on iPad.
An iPad game called 'Papers, Please' has been raising questions, as it is a game where you play as a border-control guard who checks people's papers as they pass through a state. During the game it shows full body scans, but the scans of the people are never fully nude. However it is being questioned that if this game was in another art form, such as a book or a piece of artwork, it wouldn't have the same restrictions in depicting a nude body scan. So should Apple rethink it's attitude towards censorship in games?

  • The original game by Lucas Pope did contain nudity, but Apple forced Pope to remove it, no matter how pixelated it was. 
  • After much controversy surrounding the nudity censorship, Pope has spoken about how the matter was simply a 'misunderstanding' with Apple, as Apple had accidentally labelled the game as having 'pornographic content' with the nude body scans.
  •  In a new update, 'Papers, Please' has changed its rating to 17+ and adding the option to enable nudity in the game’s settings.
I think that Apple should censor games differently to different art forms such as books and music to some degree. For example, I don't think that extreme content such as rape and murder should be as graphically shown in games, because of the fact that games are so much more realistic than if you read the same scene in a book, or if there was a depiction of the scene through an art piece. However, it is acceptable in my opinion to show nudity and other non extreme content to a wide audience, and so I don't agree with Apple's 17+ rating, as preventing younger audiences from seeing nudity (especially in this game) will not harm them, and will instead cause desensitisation of audiences to nudity, perhaps causing there to be a reduction in the opinion of the naked female form always being seen as a sexual object (as long as the nudity shown is not sexualised or overly modified). Therefore, a relaxation in censorship may be beneficial. 

Photo: Papers Please