No real-world drugs for anyone, clarifies frustrated Hines
Fallout 3 has been a troublesome game to the powers that be for awhile now. Its product manager Pete Hines has already expressed his frustration with the censorship situation internationally, but the team seems to have relented, presumably seeing the upside (money) outweighing the downside (forced self-censorship), which is understandable, if not depressing.
In any case, Hines clarified the Australian, US and UK versions of the game will be identical to each other, that is, none of them will have real-world drugs, but fictional ones:
“We want to make sure folks understand that the Australian version of Fallout 3 is identical to both the UK and North American versions in every way, on every platform.”
“An issue was raised concerning references to real world, proscribed drugs in the game, and we subsequently removed those references and replaced them with fictional names. To avoid confusion among people in different territories, we decided to make those substitutions in all versions of the game, in all territories.”
“I didn't want people continuing to assume the version in Australia was some altered version when it's not. There are no references to real world drugs in any version of Fallout 3.”
He explained in more detail in a separate interview:
"The chems in the original Fallout used fictional names ... Buffout, Jet, Rad-X, etc. Those all appear in Fallout 3 in exactly the same way as before.
"We had added a new chem to Fallout 3 and had given it a real-world name, Morphine. Questions were raised about the use of that real-world drug, not only in Australia, but other territories as well. We decided there was no reason it needed to be named that and it should be a fictional name like the other chems, so we changed it to "Med-X".
"That's the change we made in response to those concerns, nothing else."
While this is disappointing, and frankly, a little pathetic on the part of each country's rating bodies (especially since Morphine is a commonly used drug, in a very similar manner, in hospitals worldwide), I say props to Hines for his all-or-nothing approach to altering the game content. While I envision some kind of pre-utopian developer stampede whereby all studios having trouble getting their game out there the way they want (or at all) refuse to release them period, or fight this silliness together, this is nice in its own way too. I'm about as sure as I can be there are far, far more people who would rather these games released, and in their true form than those who do not, so why the current situation? Seems to me these bodies are no longer serving their supposed cause (the people).
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anyway, who cares about the names of some items? however this whole situation is ridiculous...i mean drugs are medical substances used in hospitals to sedate and whatever patients, then, some failures of nature alter them and sell them to dealers or sell them to their victims themselves, other failures of naure even grow this stuff...failure of nature is a light insult to them...whatever, though
censorship is stupid, the games that need censoring ARE going to receive an M rating in the end...
On the other side of the coin, in all honesty I think its more fun to do strange, made up drugs like Jet and Mentants and stuff that than their real world equivalents. In the future they are going to have crazier drugs anyways, not the stuff we have today.
And yeah, kspiess also touches on the asinine logic. Violence is OK, but drug use is somehow much worse >_>
In other words, the ratings board is like "Adults are mature enough to know fantasy violence is different from the real world thing. However, we cannot trust them to make a similarly mature realization that the drugs [with their original, real world names] are also bad [to abuse], and we believe that changing the [in game] names of said drugs to something else will somehow rectify this issue."
I mean, seriously?
/sarcasm