Lock up your sons...

Video games ratings are a hot issue at the moment. Thanks to growing pressure from the games industry, the joint attorneys-general are opening up the R-rating issue for public comment.

Now, if you go to most games websites, the overwhelming attitude will be: "give us R-rated games! We're not kids anymore! How can we be one of the few nations in the world that don't allow R-rated games into our stores?"

I have a few problems with this attitude, as I've mentioned in an earlier post. There are two issues: the increased level of interactivity, and the uncontrolled nature of games releases (and uneducated community attitudes).

Here's a statement from a games developer regarding their philosophy on an upcoming release:

"Often times, brutality is expressed in a spiteful nature. There are already plenty of games out there that hit this mark; however, we decided that MADWORLD's brutality should be aimed at providing the user with a sense of exhilaration during play."

How are they going to do this? Read on (slightly disturbing):

"To give you an example from gameplay, we have a scene where you can pull a street sign from the ground and shove it into a enemy's head. However, I thought that it is much more fun to stab someone with a sign that actually has some sort of meaning as opposed to a knife. We tried the idea out, and the reaction amongst the team was so positive, I knew this was the way to proceed."

Um ... ok...


I don't know whether this will be given an R rating. It's a cartoon-styled game, so chances are it may only be rated MA15+. Which begs the question: if our ratings system allows this sort of game into circulation, why on earth do we need anything more violent???