The Church of England has condemned as a “disgrace” the nomination for a Bafta for a violent shoot-to-kill computer game set in one of its cathedrals.
The Dean of Manchester, the Very Rev Rogers Govender, called for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to withdraw the game, Resistance: Fall of Man, from the nominations.
The controversial game has been nominated for the Bafta sponsor’s PC World Gamers’ Award – the only publicly voted award in this year’s ceremony. Although the winner will not receive a mask but a special gamers’ award, that the game is in the nominations at all has still provoked outrage at Manchester Cathedral.
BREAKING NEWS – ‘Canterbury Cathedral announces it is refunding “millions in ducats and groats” received from pilgrims in the Middle Ages who came to the shrine of St Thomas Becket. Canon Ball remarked: “We think it’s very wrong to be making money out of a fascination with violent military attacks in a cathedral and we’ll be donating the foundation’s resources to our ministry to archiepiscopal victims of sword crime. Or we’ll just keep it in trust.”
For the manufacturers of popular culture, profit-maximization involves going as close to the edge as they can get away with—and then a bit farther to assure a racy promotional buzz.
Gordian: Canterbury didn’t promote violence; it commemorated a murder victim. In any event, it paid in 1538.
# 3: Just my strained attempt at humor. But Canterbury milked the murder for nearly 400 years, and it still trades off it in tourist immemorabilia.
As for Manchester Cathedral: it’s a fantasy computer game set in a virtual ‘cathedral’ based on photographs of the architecture of that building, about combat between between aliens and defenders. Sounds almost biblical to me!
The sites of martyrdoms are all very legitimate and well visited pilgimage sites. There is nothing wrong with that. However, playing a game where you are the MURDERER on holy ground is very wrong, and one more step in the de-sanctificaton of things once held sacrosanct.
Jesus cast out the money changers nearly two thousand years ago. I wonder what he might do to halo and a bunch of other non-Christian items??