Remember the furore over Madworld in August? Mediawatch UK were at the centre of it, after their director complained that it would wreck Wii’s family image. Now they’re complaining that gamers aren’t happy about their moral compass.

In their autumn newsletter, the watchdog pointed fingers over all the “hostile emails” they received:

“Within hours of these remarks being published a rain of hostile emails from gamers poured into our office telling us to ’shut the f*** up’, suggesting that we have ‘got our knickers in a twist’, demanding, as though we were on trial for an heinous crime, to know
what right we had to impose our ‘narrow minded bigotry’ on them and stopping them playing an ‘adult’ game of their choice.

“Others, of a more sober character, asked reasonably why we should be so concerned about games when there was so much violence in films and on television! We were also accused us of being ‘cowards’ for not responding properly to belligerent strictures and one ‘emailer’ observed glibly that “violent acts are not a symptom of video gamesand films, but rather the human condition”. Another said: ‘If you don’t like violent content, don’t view or use it’.”

He then complained about feature artcles in the gaming press were responsible for “grossly exagerrating the significance of our comments”. But surely that’s what Mediawatch want isn’t it? Surely they are doing this to get their voice heard and get games banned?

They are right in that abusive emails aren’t doing the gaming community any favours, but it’s telling that the only respondents that appear to come off well in their eyes are the ones who said ‘yes, games are bad — but TV and film are worse’.

Source: Mediawatch (via GP)

Tags: Censorship, hate mail, John Beyer, madworld, Mediawatch, watchdog

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1 Comment » The Whaler on November 13, 2008 12:03 am Ruin the Wii family image my ass. If you don’t want to play then don’t buy it; plain and simple. No More Heroes is an “M” rated game and it still got released, hell move “MadWorld” to a different platform then if it’s getting this much flack cuz of the specific gaming platform it’s on; Then again, easier said then done, but damn it’s ridiculous. RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.