Earlier on Tuesday, June 23, the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) announced it would temporarily ban GoreBox and would be working to get the ban up within the day. The length of time for the ban was not stated.

The move comes following a school shooting in Tacloban City, where police said one of the underaged suspects had played GoreBox prior to the incident.

GoreBox, developed by German independent game developer Felix Filip of F2 Games, is available on Windows, Linux, and Android devices. The Steam version released on July 22, 2023.

On Android, the game is free to download and is ad-supported with in-app purchases said to be enabled too. Meanwhile, it costs P304.95 on Steam.

GoreBox, the gore-filled sandbox game

GoreBox is described as a “physics-driven sandbox game where creativity meets unrestrained destruction.”

It was given an R18+ rating by the International Age Rating Coalition due to depictions of extreme violence, such as the showing of blood and dismemberment, though the Android version has the option to tone the violence down somewhat.

As a sandbox game, it means players are free to do what they want within the game’s confines.

In this case, users can play around with various weapons and explosives against blocky versions of other humans. For lack of a better term, players can simulate killing enemies in the game or, prior to the removal of the multiplayer function, other player-characters.

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While previously allowing for multiplayer play, GoreBox removed its online functionality in March, citing an oversized emphasis on “battling exploiters, patching vulnerabilities, rebuilding systems, and doing everything in our power to protect the experience for legitimate players,” a war that F2 Games says it was losing.

“Over the past months, exploiters, bot raids, and security vulnerabilities forced us to shift our entire development focus away from content and bug fixes toward keeping multiplayer functional and secure. Development of actual content and bug fixes took a back seat for longer than we would have liked, and we appreciate your patience through that period,” the developers added.

The GoreBox community

While emphasis has been placed on the game being given free reign to simulate all types of violence, attention might also need to be paid to the size and type of community or subcommunities GoreBox fosters.

F2 Games has a Discord server — a social text-and-video-chatting-space where users can discuss the games of the developer or potentially find similar-minded GoreBox communities outside of the official Discord — with over 205,000 members,

Meanwhile, over on Steam, the dedicated Game Hub for discussions about GoreBox has about 14,000 members.

Due to the nature of Discord, which doesn’t necessarily list the identifying features of members to a particular server, it can be difficult to figure out who knows whom.

At present though, discussions on the official Discord are mentioning the temporary ban of GoreBox in the Philippines though it is difficult to determine if users are pigeonholing the shooting as being caused by the game, or fostered by a community or subgroup that plays it. – Rappler.com