Manhunt 2 banned in the UK.

The BBFC have the right to censor games as well as films, and their refusal to give Manhunt 2 a classification means you are not allowed to buy it in the UK. However, you are still free to import it from abroad for your own personal use. There are precisely three kinds of stupid going on here:

1. The ban is politically motivated. Troglodytes blamed its predecessor when a boy murdered another boy with a hammer. That’s about as useful and valid as blaming the fact that the murderer was black.
2. Since importation is legal, just buy it here instead. Thanks for putting another speed bump in front of British industry, BBFC.
3. This is censorship, born of self-important busybodies who think they have the right to tell consenting adults what they can buy with their own money, in the privacy of their own homes. Censorship is bad when ignorant foreigners do it to our books, and it’s bad when ignorant domestics do it to our games.

Globalisation lets us route around this kind of censorship via importation, but that is almost bad news for advocates of liberty. In a sense the ruling doesn’t matter, because anybody who wants the game can still get it perfectly legally, and so it slipping by unnoticed means it’ll nibble away at our freedom without sparking mainstream outrage. Bummer.

Manhunt 2 is an ugly, ugly game, but if freedom of expression means anything, it’s the freedom to express that which is unpopular.