Prime Minister Gordon Brown is seriously cracking down on knife violence in Britain, and hopes that developers will think twice before including them in videogames.
Brown told The Sun, "You cannot be casual or cool about knives. Society cannot cope with people carrying guns and knives and threatening to use them." A recent spate of fatal stabbings prompted Brown to focus his attention on knife-related crimes.
While Brown didn't claim that videogames were inspiring or causing the crimes in question, he did say that he is "very worried about video and computer games."
Brown would seem to prefer that the developers take it upon themselves to exercise what he would consider good judgment when designing their games, saying "No one wants censorship or an interfering State. But the industry has some responsibility to society and needs to exercise that."
Given the relative dearth of knives in videogames-- when it comes to in-game weapons you'll have a far better chance of finding a rocket launcher than a knife-- I can only guess that Brown had Manhunt 2 in mind when he made that comment.
Gordon Brown's blitz on blades [The Sun]
