I’ve been down in San Francisco all week for various meetings (hence the lack of blog updates). And, I must say that I am embarrassed to be heading back home to Montreal after reading about recent actions to censor game content in Quebec.

Sony removed a level of its soon to be released game, Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain after receiving criticism over Quebec based terrorists invading Toronto. Despite the concerns presented, I think it was a really cool idea and played up interesting historical references (if extremely exaggerated).

It really strikes me as a bizarre form of censorship. Clearly, this is all meant to be fictional, etc. I mean, this kind of stuff happens all the time in other media. Further, if everyone freaks out whenever there’s a remote reference to “their people”, what’s left? Does this mean that every game will have to use nondescript white Americans as the universal good guys and bad guys and every other guy? Well, that is until Joe average starts complaining…

This quote from the article is just unbelievable:

“It’s a sensitive subject, so of course we’re disturbed by that but we’re not disturbed when we’re playing a game where the bad guy is a Japanese guy,” he said in an interview. “We shoot him and that’s OK.”

WTF?!

Ironically enough, the huge hit Splinter Cell was developed in Montreal by Ubisoft and involves an elaborate plan by Chinese rogue officials to over-through their government. Hmm…