They got the last laugh
Speaking to The Guardian about South Park: The Stick of Truth‘s censorship in Europe and Australia over a scene involving anal probes, series co-creator Matt Stone said “It’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t change things that much, but we weren’t going to change the game downwards somewhere and just not tell anybody. You’ll see how ridiculous that is.”
Elaborating, Stone said “It does feel like a double standard, a little bit. 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.”
He feels, and many of us would agree, it’s the “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.
“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.”
South Park, satire and us – by Matt Stone [The Guardian]