Violence in games

[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+"