Maturity dissonance in gaming

[Bells]

Don't you find it weird that the more "mature" a game rating is, the more... well... immature the game seems to be?

Surely not the case for all. Some games make very good use and earn that +18 rating and that AO symbol on their boxes legit. Others... not so much.

To me right now it would be silly to even suppose that the game makers aren't aware of this. To think that they don't know that under 18 kids want and buy +18 games all the time... and that's their actual market.

I dunno, sometimes it makes the Entire Rating system for gaming content seem like a really big corporate ploy, y'know? To get lawyers of the back of big companies for their gaming content. "It's not our fault your kid played our game, we clearly labelled that it was intended for an older audience"...

Sure... but that's not actually what most of these games are targeted at... right?

I mean, think of Mortal Kombat for a second. The new one. Surely gory and bloody, but the last adjective i would tag to that game is "mature". Not in the sense of "Maturity" but going even simplier to the fact that this is not content i would expect to drive in the larger mass of customers at that age rate.

Although, to be honest, there are a LOT of "bro-minded" gamers out there that would gladly giggle with Awe and superiority that their fatalities and impossible cleavages and sexy minigames are "totally for grown ups only"...

This a broad topic to tackle, there are layers and angles here... but overall, sometimes it bothers me that just like it bothers some when a move that clearly has an adult mindset gets dumbed bown by a PG+13 rating, games get Dumbed Up. By masking themselves as some sort of "Forbidden Fruit".

A remain thought from the dark age of comics where many of these gamers grown into, where the "raddest" thing to ready was Spawn and where a Hero that doesn't blow the head off of everybody was a wuss...

But does that affect our ability of actually having mature games? For damn sure we are over saturated with bad content in the recent years, and bad form in game making. From our chest high walls to the brown or blue pallets of color to the obligatory minigames and turret sections among many other tropes of recent gaming...

Maybe our classification is bad, or maybe the loud group that drives what the industry makes is just overly intoxicated with it's Pre-Order bonuses and online DRM and Tits and leather in gaming to ever notice when they are being played... i dunno, i just find it weird that most of the time a game appears rated for Adults or 18+ hardly ever i felt the game actually earned that.

[Ramary]

Ratings are not for how mature something is as far as subject matter, its for how many and how much blood and tits and bad words there are to protect the children from things that will turn them into murders and stuff. The ratings exist solely because the government was breathing down the industry's neck in the early 90s.

Also as someone who has played and know very well every age of gaming there ever was, we have been like this for awhile, since Doom I believe. The only time where most Mature rated games were actually Mature was a huge chunk of PC games in the lateish 90s and early 00s.

You know what is a really Mature game? Majora's Mask. Deals with pretty damn heavy stuff, end of the world and how each person copes with it, and it is rated E. Because it looks child friendly and there is no blood or anything "tainting".


The real problem is that triple AAA games are really rock stupid now to appeal to everyone. Oh hey you know what everyone in our main market demographic likes? Blood and Tits, shove both everywhere.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Like Ramary said, the rating system is only meant to regulate what kids should and shouldn't play. Though I'm against the idea of letting your 5 year old play something like monster girls or duke nukem forever. So I'm fine with the rating system. It's when wanna-be gamers claim they are mature because they play an M rated game and berate T and below games that it bugs me. Especially that "weeabo" crap that said folks love to throw around when a jrpg is involved. Often regardless of rating.

[Aldurin]

Blame Mortal Kombat, if it wasn't for it then Conker's Bad Fur Day would have been able to take even more parents by surprise.

[Amake]

Did you know ESBR has given out 32 "18 years and up" ratings in 19 years? They're well aware of how games could use their stamps as a Seal of Guaranteed Excitement for Teenagers. And they don't allow it.

I don't think age restrictions are a problem for videogames as much as the age of the art form itelf. Games are still in their infancy, or their [url=http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/05/14golden age[/url]. If they follow the development of comic books to any degree we should next see a silver age, a bronze age and a dark age.

This could take decades; first the market has to be saturated and collapse under the sheer simple-minded lowest-common-denominator-appeal business model that's been working so well since about the last days of the SNES. Hopefully we'll get a standardized console format out of it, once people are no longer willing to pay top dollar for a new machine every five years.

Then we'll see reckless experimenting in place of reckless streamlining. There will be a red kryptonite equivalent for Mario, Donkey Kong will travel through time and fight Nazis, Master Chief will go through whole games armed only with knitting guns, and we'll probably see the first good game with the Martan Manhunter. A self-imposed code will keep all mainstream games family friendly without even trying.

The bronze age of comic books saw the rise of awareness of social issues, and perhaps games will echo that, trying to be "Mature" by preaching about world hunger and sexism.

Then some game will take it too far, breaking the code and freaking everyone out. I predict something related to the Holocaust. While future generations will recognize it as a turning point, the first truly "hard" (or "mature") game, it will also signal the onset of the dark age, games trying to emulate its grimness while failing to understand that what makes it great is its unflinching commitment to its own, original artistic vision and blah blah.

But anyway sooner or later comes the renaissance, the enlightenment, the reconstructionism and the rise of the truly great, definitive games. Probably they'll be standalone games that tell stories with beginnings, middles and ends, using original characters, which will stand out like islands in a sea of MMOs.

[Bells]

Maybe my head is mor turned towards the marketing department (actually most evils come from marketing than from game making itself...) where the makers of a certain game are fully aware that their game is being marketed for +18 but they use it as a bullet point to market for a clearly younger audience.

Again on Mortal Kombat, incredibly immature game. But the +18 rating is there simply because there is a lot of really silly and over the top gore.