Violence in games

[Delock]

Not completely true, but close enough for most games these days. However look back a generation in consoles, and you'll see a lot of great games with ESRB T ratings, or even an E rating (Kingdom Hearts, I'm looking at you here). Of course there where some games in that group that were hard T or extremely close to M (Xenosaga... How in the seven hells were you T rated throughout all 3 of your games?).

Mostly though, this has the same thing in common with movies. A lot of classics are R rated and animation is still struggling not to automatically be assumed to be kiddy.

I don't have much sympathy for the people who say that their games are only made for adults publicly then privately market them to kids and count the money. If they are not outright lying they are not being totally honest with themselves. They deserve Jack Thompson and mainstream critics looking down on games as an "art."

Thinking that kids are not going to play violent action games is nonsense since in reality they mostly are not going to be that interested in much else. The only question should be what sort of violent content is suitable for kids and how the content should be tailored for them in a positive way. Literature is tackling this head on with the concept of young adult fiction while game developers have their head in the sand by saying you are either playing "kiddie" Nintendo games or are a 30 year old responsibly playing Call of Duty or GTA.

That's like saying "of course kids are going to see R rated movies, how dare you market them to childern" (you lose all right to use that as a defense when you take your kid to see a movie called Kick-Ass or a movie based off an insanely popular comic that would have taken you moments to find out about when you looked up the movie for the time, Watchmen, just because there were superheroes in the commercials). There is a warning on the box that clearly advises that only people who are ready for such material should purchase it, and that parents themselves are to decide if their underaged child is to get this M rated game based on what ESRB found in it that gave it that rating. Sure you have stuff where the violence is so juvenile only a kid would want to play it, but due to its gorn they shouldn't. This is where things get a bit iffy, but at the same time, it feels more like a design flaw rather than a marketing one.

As for your last point, literature is a bit worse in terms of keeping things age appropriate. Yes, they do have young adult novels, but well, I love my Halo example here. I could get a 6 year old to buy any of the Halo books, which feature graphic descriptions of what bullets, shrapnel, and plasma actually do to flesh, in which the scene has to be completely imagined in the head (making it the most interactive media, not games). Same 6 year old would be turned away if they tried to buy a Halo game, in which only Reach might have truly deserved an M rating.

Speaking of books, of all the rating systems that people need to know, comics apparently have the least publicity. Look at stuff like Batman, where the newest movie was exceptionally dark, as was the newest game, but both were done within a PG 13/T rating. A lot of the most recent comics... are a lot less child friendly. And this isn't just Batman either. A lot of comics are much darker than parents seem to remember them, yet there seems to be a belief that all of them are for kids. Hell, I knew there was indeed a rating system for these, but given that I don't buy them very often, I really didn't know much about it until a few days ago (TvTropes linked an article on one of their pages during my WikiWalk with tabs).

 

[Something Amyss]

I don't have much sympathy for the people who say that their games are only made for adults publicly then privately market them to kids and count the money. If they are not outright lying they are not being totally honest with themselves. They deserve Jack Thompson and mainstream critics looking down on games as an "art."

I'm not sure you can "privately market," but in terms of marketing, the FTC indicates marketing to kids is way down. Offhand, the only real argument I see is one that the M rating itself markets to kids, but that alone is not so much an issue of the companies marketing as it is a fact of the ratings' system.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Not completely true, but close enough for most games these days. However look back a generation in consoles, and you'll see a lot of great games with ESRB T ratings, or even an E rating (Kingdom Hearts, I'm looking at you here).

I think we can put this down in part to the rise of PC style American games. On the PC in the 90s there was almost no tradition of successful young adult games while Japan was more inclined to treat young adult "shonen" type content as the most mainstream sort of content due to the success of things like dragonball and the influence this had on games. As the fad for Japanese pop culture is in decline the backlash extends to universal young adult fiction staples like coming of age stories for young protagonists.

I'm not sure you can "privately market," but in terms of marketing, the FTC indicates marketing to kids is way down. Offhand, the only real argument I see is one that the M rating itself markets to kids, but that alone is not so much an issue of the companies marketing as it is a fact of the ratings' system.

What I mean is doing publicity and marketing that is appealing to kids and putting them in places that kids mainly read but have "plausible deniability" as being for adults. A classic example might be putting an adultish covers story for a GTA game on the cover for an official magazine when the readership demographics for those magazines is quite young. Another is making controversial "keep this out of the kids hands" moral panic stories in newspapers that makes the game seem super appealing to kids. I don't know how the FTC measures how things are marketed to kids but I suspect that this lower spend could just indicate that more money is being spent marketing adult products to kids in more sneaky ways.

 

[Burningsok]

I personally disagree with age ratings, I think there should be psycholgical testing in oder to player certain games. Take the Manhunt fiasco a few years ago, the boy didn't kill because he was too young, it was because he was too impressionable, had difficulty distinguishing fiction from reality and already had a predisposition to kill. To quote Marcus Brigstocke "if we were all influenced by the games we played when we were young, we'd be running round in the dark, listening to repetitive music and popping pills."

On the other thing, when I was 7/8 I was a massive Civ player (and other games like it) so I don't think it's because children are too thick, perhaps it's because we live in an age of instant gratification. Ho-hum.

Ps. Awesome name.

Ah, my music appreciation professor has touched on this a bit; how our society wants instant gratification. We have become use to getting things quickly and easily, and now that's what our society expects most of the time.

 

[ireskimo]

There is nothing wrong with the system we have now. Games are rated 18/15/12 for a reason. IF parents are willing to buy their child a game rated higher than their own ghilds age then they should take full responsibility. I mean why should the voilence get blamed when it says on the box "18+"