10 DUMBEST Video Game Controversies That Went Too Far

9. PETA Takes Aim At Battlefield 3's Rat-Killing

Battlefield 3 rat
EA

Though PETA is a respectable organisation on the surface, it does have a habit of taking things way too seriously in the gaming realm.

Case in point: a press release that was issued in November 2011, in which PETA's German branch condemned Battlefield 3 for a sequence that allowed the player to stab a rat, pick it up by the tail, and toss it to one side.

The vast majority of players won't have thought twice about this moment (in a game where you can murder thousands of humans, why would you?), but PETA declared it would have a "brutalizing effect on the young male target audience."

Hammering home just how out of touch it is with the gaming scene, PETA then concluded by wheeling out that age-old, eyeroll-worthy "video games cause real-life violence" argument, which didn't help its case.

As you'd expect, this "controversy" received a ton of press, overblowing what was ultimately a nothing moment in the game. In fact, all PETA did was encourage even more people to talk about the rat scene - which mostly consisted of gamers making jokes at PETA's expense.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!