Reservoir Dogs game sent to the kennel in Australia

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 28 June 2006 19:44

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One thing you have to say about Quentin Tarantino movies is that they always seem to come up with novel ways to explore the dark and violent aspects of human nature. At the same time, they somehow manage to get the audience to empathise with the characters perpetrating the violence.

The movie Reservoir Dogs is a classic example. The hero is a murdering, bank robbing criminal who would die to protect his new found friend and supposed partner in crime, who in actual fact happens to be a wounded undercover police officer. The movie is violent, dark and explicit. However, it played to rave revenues in Australian cinemas and is freely available on video and DVD. The same cannot be said for a game based on the movie, which has been banned in Australia.

For some reason, in the eyes of the Australian censors, empathising with the warped characters of the Quentin Tarantino movie is not quite the same thing as acting out and expanding on their parts in an interactive game on a PC, Xbox or PlayStation 2. This is possibly because the game allows players to expand upon, intensify and further develop the themes of violence and torture portrayed in the movie. Thus, cutting off a hostage's ear with a cut-throat razor, as shocking as it is, can become burning a hostage's eyeball with a cigar, which is even more shocking.

There are arguments for and against such bans. The pro-banners may argue quite correctly that games such as Reservoir Dogs de-sensitise players to the shocking realities of violence. On the other side, those opposing such bans might say that depraved individuals who would actually inflict violence on others have no need to act out their fantasies in games. They might get a few ideas for more novel forms of torture but it's not likely. The truly sick mind can no doubt come up with much more intense forms of torture than anything depicted in a movie or a game.

In such a climate of pros and cons, it's hard to say whether the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification was right to refuse to give a classification to Reservoir Dogs the game. There are many who attribute the shooting skills of the young perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre to the practice they got with shooting games. Yet shooting games still exist and massacres, thankfully, remain a rarity.

Hopefully, burning eyeballs with cigar butts will also remain a rarity in the countries that have not banned Reservoir Dogs.