Rots your brain. I chose the domain name for this blog because consumers of pop-culture have, for decades, been told that such culture is bad, unhealthy, and rots your brain. From rock ‘n’ roll to video nasties and more recently to videogames, pop-culture has been an easy scapegoat for the ills of society.

It’s not been a good week for pushers of violent videogames, with the news that Britain’s BBFC, Ireland’s IFCO and America’s ESRB board have all effectively banned Manhunt 2from sale, and Nintendo and Sony won’t license it to run on their systems.

The initial instinct is to lambast the censorship boards for being out of touch with the consumers of society, or to insist that the responsibility lies with parents. However, in my view, these arguments have little or no merit.

Lets take the first point, that the censors are over-strict or out of touch with reality. As a regular film goer, I have a lot of time for John Kelleher. Generally, he and his his office conduct their duties with the goal of classification rather than censorship, and as such operates one of the most progressive, consistent, open and lenient censorship offices in the world - certainly more so than American, British, Australian or German counterparts.

Do you know how many violent videogames were banned in Ireland prior to Manhunt 2? Zero. Bearing this in mind, and assuming that the staff of the IFCO haven’t had moral lobotomies over the last few weeks, we can assume that the content in Manhunt 2 is simply too graphic and too violent. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s the case, but track record would indicate it is.

But hey, so what if it’s violent? Why can’t the parents monitor and decide what their children play? I used to a proponent of this school of thought. Then, I had occasion to work in a games retailer. The policies in place by my employer were faultless - as well as enforcing legal age restrictions on titles rated by the IFCO, the voluntary PEGI guidelines ratings were also enforced, even to the detriment of sales, and even on harshly rated titles like Timesplitters 3 (18+).

Did it make a difference? Not really. In theory, parents should be responsible enough to monitor their child’s videogaming habits. Those theories are probably based on one’s views of one’s own parents, who are probably genuinely nice people. They’re probably not based on the kind of parent I’d often be confronted with - the kind of parent who, after hearing the laundry list of horrors of Grand Theft Auto, shrugs it off and buys it anyway for their darling, because it’s just a videogame. The kind of parent who shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

Until parents educate themselves about the content of videogames and their affects on young children, they cannot be expected to act as censors.

And what of Manhunt 2? I won’t shed any tears if I never play the game. The franchise was dead and buried until the Daily Mail brigade whipped up a ridiculous frenzy long after the original was released, and sales spiked hugely. The sequel’s existence is a cynical cash-in on this hype - it was created to revel in gore and graphic violence and the media hysteria bound to greet it, and its banning is frankly of no loss to the discerning videogamer.

Indeed, there may be an upshot of all this. If this can encourage publishers and developers to shed their hang-up on violence and lose their hard-on for gore, we might see more genuinely innovative, interesting, creative and engaging videogames.