KEY POINTS:
So what do you think the chances are of Sony pulling all those copies of Resistance: Fall of Man off the shelves to keep the Bishop of Manchester happy?
About zero, I should think.After the Goatgate scandal in March, where Sony featured a decapitated goat at the launch party for the game God of War 2, the latest incident, where allegedly an exact replica of Manchester Cathedral becomes the scene of a massacre of alien invaders, you'd think Sony was asking to have its games boycotted.
But while Sony is making the right noises publicly - it recalled the official Playstation magazine that featured pictures of the bloody goat and has pointed out that Resistance is a work of fiction and doesn't involve humans killing other humans in the controversial cathedral scene, it will actually love all this exposure.
That's because it needs anything it can get to deflect attention away from the fact that the PS3 isn't exactly going gangbusters - the Nintendo Wii outsold the PS3 at a rate of five to one last month, and Sony is laying off workers in its games division.
Sony's prize customers, male gamers aged 18 to 35, are unlikely to stop buying the game in protest. In fact, drawing attention to the cathedral's use in Resistance will just lead to more people playing it out of curiosity.
The Church of England should have just ignored the whole thing or quietly sued Sony if it thought it had a case. It is after all, not the first party to be aggrieved at its portrayal in a work of fiction.
Remember how the Kazakhs responded to Borat?
What will be interesting is whether Sony's designers were within their rights to use the interior design of the church and what they used as their source material - photos, sketches, maybe random images they found on Google. That may form the basis of any legal action.
What I can't understand is why Sony didn't just keep everyone happy and design a generic cathedral for the game, which incidentally features some great artwork. But at its heart, the Manchester Cathedral furore just stokes up the violence in video games debate, which is familiar territory for Sony.
There's still no hard proof that the portrayal of violence in video games contributes to widespread violence in society. So the violent games keep getting rating classifications and keep selling, even if the games makers have to push the boundaries of good taste in their pursuit of sales.
What do you think? Has Sony crossed the line with its dead goat or cathedral massacre? Are video games too violent or is the games industry just a victim of politically correct lobby groups?
The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark looks at the potential for customer lock-in that may come with Telecom's new GSM mobile network.
Geekzone asks why Vista support for mobile devices is so poor.
