Post by Lance Falcon on May 1, 2010 23:51:53 GMT -6
An Open Defense for Mature Games
[Warning: Some content may be NSFW. These are my personal beliefs and do not reflect those of my editors or “publishers” This is something of a rant, but, my point is still made if you sift your way through my ramblings. Thank you.]
Originally, I called this “An Open Justification for Mature Games”, but, that really isn’t the point here. It’d be like trying to justify adding in twelve extra minutes of gore in an “Unrated Edition”. This is a rant in which I defend the games as not being at fault for being what they are – just games.
[Warning: Some content may be NSFW. These are my personal beliefs and do not reflect those of my editors or “publishers” This is something of a rant, but, my point is still made if you sift your way through my ramblings. Thank you.]
Originally, I called this “An Open Justification for Mature Games”, but, that really isn’t the point here. It’d be like trying to justify adding in twelve extra minutes of gore in an “Unrated Edition”. This is a rant in which I defend the games as not being at fault for being what they are – just games.
I’m sixteen years old. In August, I’ll be old enough to get my copy of whatever game I want. Oh, except “Adults Only” rated games. Because, you know, those exist.
Let me reiterate, here; I’m an American Sixteen year old. Because of the ESRB (Or, Electronics Software Ratings Board) we have a seventeen and up rating for Mature games. This is a simple rule and it is enforced at all retailers. For all my life, when you try to get an M rated game, you have to have an adult with ya’. Sure, there were bypasses to these rules. For example, it can be easy to just get someone older than you like a friend to do it. Sometimes, employees do not follow this rule. I once met a clerk at a local FYE who had been fired by Gamestop because he sold M rated games to teens without asking for an adult, leveling with the kids. So, the rule is enforced. The only time I ever saw a chance to get M rated games without an adult was during the great liqudation of Circuit City. Of course, so much controversy has come out of that little liquidation, that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
My point is, the rules are here, and they are enforced. While it can be bypassed, it still doesn’t matter because parents are the people who should be involved here. For example, how many times have you been in a Wal-Mart or Best Buy, maybe just a Gamestop, where a kid was trying to goad his mother or father into buying him a game you know that he is not old enough to play and understand.
In the end, the core thing here is that it’s the parents job to be involved, here. Online services such as xboxLIVE carry a parental feature, such as when an account is registed under the age of eighteen, and parent can make their own account to edit their Childs settings. Automatically, content on LIVE rated M and above (Again, I sarcastically point out that exists) are blocked. Parents can change this with their own account. Parents need to be checking what their kids plays. The theme of that is even there in the website “What They Play” (However this website is somewhat biased and often neglects to look at Maturity as a factor – just content.). Games come with family settings, and if they trip an alarm on the childs account, they can’t even be played. The limitations on violent games are already there, but are often neglected and not enforced by those who should be – the Parent.
Now, blaming the parent is a piss poor argument now ‘n days. Everyone does it. It was actually the tagline for a flick about these teens that murdered a school bully. So why am I acknowledging this even though it is my biggest defense?
Because it’s still valid.
Take films for example. I can walk into any Wal-Mart and buy an “Unrated” copy of any movie because it’s marked as “Unrated”. Here in America, we got these DVD’s by the truckloads, and I can guarantee you the reason for this is our growing fetish for gore and promiscuous content. But the point is, these movies are often rated R (Parental guidance needed for seventeen and up) for violence or some sort of inappropriate content. I’m not going to even bother mentioning how kids access these, but they do. My point here is I can buy an even gorier/promiscuous/inappropriate version at the store, with my own money. Hell, I’ve done it before. (Though, I thoroughly regret it because “Gamer” is the stupidest garbage since Transformers 2) So we can access horrifyingly gory content like, say, Saw but not “Fallout 3” which contains about as much gore. Yes, there are other themes to both, but watch a Saw movie, any one (Though I’d say the third...or was it the fourth with the crucifix?) then go play Fallout 3 with the bloody mess perk. Hey – notice the difference? One looks gruesomely real, the other is almost a cartoon.
But that isn’t the point to the ratings. The point of all this is that it’s a game – it’s interactive. You control what happens, somewhat. I suppose it adds a layer of concern or two when you child is the one twisting limbs, and not simply watching it happen to another human being. (That is intended both non-sarcastically, but works just as well sarcastically. Take your pick.) So here we come to the fact the child is doing it. Allow me to quickly reference the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings. The shooters at Columbine were evidenced to have played Quake, and some claim they had made models of their school (Some rumors say even their classmates) that they played in. On Virginia Tech, I can remember the news (Which network, I cannot recall, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt. I am also paraphrasing.) Pretty much saying “Oh well it’s all explained now. He played Counter-Strike.”. However, as I do know for a fact, this was Jack Thompson saying that, his exact words saying that the gunman (Who hadn’t even been identified yet.) had likely “Trained himself” in CS. (In the – somewhat paraphrased words – of Adam Sessler, “[Thanks, Mr. Thompson!]I wasn’t familiar with the keyboard based Assault Rifle.”) It was later found that the gunman had never even played Counter-Strike as no evidence in his dorm, home, or at school alluded to it.
Perhaps the interactivity in video games leads some to believe they may be more ikley to be mimicked than films or television. I can understand that, but, it’s still part of the parents job to explain to the child that whatever they are playing is not what they can really do. My good friend “SickNdehed” knows this is a priority. While I’m not sure I should be telling her story, she has told it on open podcasts before so I suppose it isn’t any secret – and It is a valid example. Her son was under the impression when he got older he could do what he could do in certain video games. His mother barred him from the game for a period of time, and sat down with him to enforce the fact there is a difference between a game and real life.
My first games were rated M, but hell, they were cartoony and fun and I never took them seriously…well, other than Jet Force Gemini introducing a young me to the fact women wore a different kind of underwear. I read books from a young age to I always had a good understanding of fact and fiction. I remember in third grade I got a book from the school Library called “My Brother Sam is Dead”. This was a story that took place in the Revolutionary war and was the first book to ever open the door to the real brutality of killing. It’s one thing when it’s a weird giant ant, or a pig alien. It’s another thing all together when you imagine a human being losing his head or being executed.
Because I had an understanding of real and fake violence (I always will love me some Terminator which actually taught me at age six about how killing doesn’t solve everything.) my parents only every worried about sexual content in the games I played (The majorly gore-y revolution didn’t seem to happen until PS2/Xbox/Gamecube). I’ll always lul a bit at how when I got Syphon Filter 2 (Very fun treasure of mine) my dad asked why it was M. I told him the box says violence and partial nudity. He asked me if it had any boobs in it. I realize, now, that what I’m saying kind of paints my parents in a negative light. “Oh, he learned morals from Terminator 2. Clearly his parents are crap at their job.”. Don’t even freakin’ go there. I love my parents and they’ve taught me many good things. Who doesn’t reach some self learning from secondary sources? Moving on. . .
I play violent games and go through my life with an understanding that killing everything isn’t a solution. In my English classes I’m the kid who sighs when the other students ask why the Protagonist can’t just kill everything and be content. My generation is warped, and maybe it’s just as much their fault for being desensitized and such by violent games, if at all, but at the end of the day, I know I cannot walk through my school hallway like Makarov in “No Russian”, I know that I can’t go flying down the street in an Audi and hit a streetlight and expect it to just break and fly off as I cannonball through the city. Mature games are for the people who are mature enough to understand the themes behind them. I almost think there should be a scantron test when you buy them.
See, you have to understand things. It’s like . . . okay look at Gears of War and all the stupid gay jokes about Marcus and Dom. Say you want a copy of Gears of War 3. You have to write out an essay, in three paragraphs, why they are completely heterosexual comrades who’ve been friends since childhood. (Call me, Cliffy, let’s make this happen.) Or take Mass Effect (Or, now, any BioWare game) for example and its approach to sexuality. A moron isn’t gonna view those scenes and pop a boner thinkin’ “Oh my god this is the hottest fricking thing I’ve ever seen!” No! You watch those scenes, and while in certain cases (Jack) it can simply be about lust, you realize that it’s because these two specific characters have been through a whole mountain of crap together and are possibly about to die. Actually, one of the best examples of “love” in a video game (If you don’t mind shock value, slap some Gears of War here too) I’ve ever seen is the Obsidian follow-up to BioWares “Knights of the Old Republic”, in which my Male Exile hooked up with the Handmaiden (No spoilers because if you haven’t played this game yet you fail and need to get it nao….also canonically, the Exile was female.) and certain oaths that weren’t just Jedi oaths were betrayed.
Maturity is arguably something that isn’t even technically required when purchasing Mature rated games, but to sum it all up, this whole rant, and my fan-rage, it makes more sense to make a law where you have got to read and describe the themes and irony’s in “Animal Farm” than to just ban “violent” games outright because a crap-ton of parents aren’t doing their jobs; sitting down on the bed and talking to Billy.
One last thing – I know there are games (COUGHJAPANCOUGH) that are above the “Mature” rating, but most of these are just sex sims anyway and if you wanted me to talk about those, my editors’d be veeeeeeery busy cleaning that up to even a publishable level.
Special thanks to that guy at F.Y.E, Desirai Labrada, John Labrada, my local Gamestop, Adam Sessler, Cliffy B, Rare, Epic Games, BioWare, Bethesda Softworks, Bungie Studios, Respawn Games and maybe some of Infinity Ward and Rockstar Games.
No thanks to Jack Thompson (Who is a real cockbite), Uwe Boll (He knows what he did), Dead or Alive Extreme Games (No), Bobby Kotick (If you think I need a reason, get out), and Cliffy B (He never called).