South Park: The Stick of Truth Censorship Shows Double Standard in Entertainment

We know of the handful of scenes that are censored in the European and Australian versions of South Park: The Stick of Truth, but what we haven’t yet heard is South Park co-creator Matt Stone’s take on the removal of content. What bothers Stone most of all about the censorship is the fact that just about everything that was taken out of the game would have been just fine to appear on the TV show.

"It does feel like a double standard, a little bit," Stone told The Guardian today. "We weren't willing to change the content, but also it doesn't ruin the game–it's like 40 seconds' worth of the whole game. As long as we could make a joke out of the fact that they made us cut this, that was fine."

Instead of seeing anal probing, those with the censored versions of the game are treated to the image of a statute making a face-palming gesture while a block of text describes what’s happening in the background. It’s not the same as what North American audiences are given, but Stone posits that this is due to the interactivity of the medium.

"There is an interactiveness that makes it different. In movies and television you can do stuff that's morally grey very easily, because you get to show consequences, you get to show reward, but in a video game there's a reason why everything is a Nazi, zombie, or alien–these are pretty clear moral choices," Stone said. "There are things that make people more uncomfortable in an interactive world, definitely. But that said, what we had in the game, we could have shown that on TV pretty easily, especially now."

The Stick of Truth is now available on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.