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Editor's note: I enjoy watching censored South Park episodes over uncensored ones because what the kids say in my mind feels much filthier than what's actually said. So I can understand what Jon means when he says sometimes less is more when it comes to violence in games. -Brett
When I was younger, going to the toilet in the dead of night terrified me. Whenever my bladder awoke me, I needed a preparation period of at least five minutes before I could summon up the courage to go. It wasn't the journey to the bathroom that terrified me so much as standing with my back to the room. As far as I was concerned, practically anything could have been waiting there for me by the time I turned around.
This fear, like so many others children possess (and thankfully grow out of for the most part), is not based around anything physically being there, but rather a fear of what can't be seen. Monsters will always choose to inhabit beds that are too dark to see under or closets whose doors are shut.
Our innate fear of the unknown has been exploited by numerous horror games. Silent Hill's fog introduced the possibility of monsters hidden right in front of you, and Doom 3 controversially had you hold a flash light independently of a gun, thus forcing you into moments of complete darkness if you wanted to keep your finger on the trigger.
Recently though, this design choice has crept into an action game, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. Players who get up close enough to an enemy before unloading a spray of shotgun shells into his face are greeted with a pixelated censoring effect over the remains of the bad guy's head.
The effect of this feature is really quite stunning. Instead of merely seeing a model's head colored red with computer generated blood, you're treated to whatever ghastly images your mind chooses to conjure up. It's literally as bad as you can imagine it to be, and the human mind is always going to be able to produce something infinitely scarier than anything a developer can show you onscreen.
This "less is more" approach to disturbing imagery is something that's been employed by films for quite some time now, although it could be argued filmmakers used this technique to get around censors more than anything else. In Get Carter, for example, there's a moment when Michael Caine stumbles across a piece of pornography featuring his niece. It's a truly shocking scene, even though it hardly shows anything of the video itself. Instead we as an audience are treated to her uncle's reaction, as his eyes slowly well up with tears and rage overcomes his entire body.
Of course, it's far easier for a film to selectively choose what the audience sees. In a game this is far more difficult. The player is often in control of the camera at nearly all times, and because of that developers need to get creative with how they limit what the end users can see.
From a quantitative standpoint, there's an obvious benefit here of lower ratings for games with potentially more adult content. Obviously something like Kane and Lynch 2 is never going to be appropriate for children, but it's not hard to imagine games whose selective censorship will keep them far closer to the dividing line.
More importantly, however, is that this subtle censorship could lead a whole new level of maturity in games. Not maturity in the sense of being old enough to watch a character realistically blow off an enemy's limbs, but the maturity that comes with listening a piece of classical music or learning how to drink in moderation. Can video games really be said to have "grown up" when they delight so thoroughly in showing us absolutely everything?