Censorship Alert: StarCraft 2 Edited for South Korea

In case anyone is not yet aware, South Korea is easily the biggest individual market for the original StarCraft, with about half of the roughly 10 million copies sold in the Korean market. Gamers have continued to play and join competitions to this day despite the game having been released in 1998. The obsession with this game was so all-encompassing that the government had to step in and implement forced gaming curfews in order to get residents to sleep instead of staying up all night playing StarCraft. All that said, it is easy to imagine the level of insane drooling excitement going on in South Korea right now in regards to the impending release of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty on July 27. In that light, it was perhaps a smart move by Blizzard to remove some adult themes from the Korean version of the game, such as references to smoking and vulgar language, in order to release the game with an Age 12 rating. This will enable the game to reach a far larger audience than if the aforementioned parts were left in, and therefore pretty much the whole country can take part in the second installment of their national pastime. I am generally against any form of censorship, but in this case, the edits are small, they don't appear to affect the overall theme of the game, and if they didn't happen, the combined screams of thousands of teenage Koreans would haunt our dreams forever. Good thinking, Blizzard.

Game Censorship Abroad

There has been an alarming new trend of non-US countries cracking down on games they consider too violent or sexual in nature. Most gamers are aware of Australia's relatively new stance on violence, drugs and sex in games. Many Australian versions of games have been reclassified as unfit for gamers under the age of 15, and some have even been modified to remove objectionable content, such as stripping the real-world drugs from Fallout 3. Germany regularly changes the content of games as it pleases, such as when the country only allowed the Germany-modified version of Call of Duty 4 to be purchased online. Now Venezuela is jumping on board, imposing a ban on violent games that would put distributers and manufacturers of banned games in prison for 3-5 years. This trend is alarming, for as more countries decide to impose stronger censorship on games, more companies will edit down their original games to fit foreign guidelines. It would be costly to create multiple versions of the same game with differing levels of "obscene" content, so instead the entire gaming world will get watered-down versions of games that were intended to be powerfully edgy; for example, the above-mentioned drug references in Fallout 3 were removed from every version of the game, not just Australia's. In my opinion, video games are a multimedia art form, and it is sad to think that potentially envelope-pushing games may end up like a Venus de Milo sans visible bosom - defeating the purpose entirely.