While Manhunt 2 has come in for variable reviews, the importance of its banning has actually always been far greater than a simple matter of UK gamers potentially not gettting to play a particular game, or Rockstar taking a drop in profits. Videogames have developed and matured into a medium in their own right, and are now far in advance of their original conception as a plaything. As such, the array of things they can achieve has massively expanded, to the degree that the word ‘game’ is often now applicable only in the loosest sense of the term.

Of course, videogames are still a case of manipulating on-screen imagery via a controller in order to achieve a series of set goals, but in the same way that animation has matured in order to become a medium capable of dealing with any kind of subject matter rather than just being there to show us cats and mice beating the hell out of each other in a variety of amusing ways, games can and should be able to deal with a whole lot more. Games can now complicate our actions by forcing us to make complex moral and philosophical choices. They can make us laugh. They can make us cry. They can scare the hell out of us. They can let us safely appreciate experiences we’d never be able to partake in in real life, and at their best, they can force us to ask questions about ourselves that we’d ordinarily never have to ask.

Of course, videogames don’t have to do any of that. They can just be unashamed, unapologetic fun, and we love them when they are. But they have to be allowed to address more complex and adult content if they want to. In just the same way that movies should not and are not forced to limit their subject matter and content to fit some pre-concieved assumption of what the medium should be, games have proven themselves time and time again to have every right to achieve to the full potential afforded by their art form, and a ruling against Manhunt 2’s release on content grounds is a blow against gaming’s potential growth. Yes, Manhunt 2 is very much about the gore, but movies are allowed to pass with similar content all the time. So why is Manhunt 2 having a problem that cinema doesn’t? Well the answer is two-fold.