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"X-Rated magazines?"

I was looking through my copy of PCZone today, when i saw this:

"I should explain why we haven't run a demo of Undying, despite the fac that it is freely available over the internet. Over the past couple of months you might have noticed a tiny ELSPA certificate on the cover of your CDs. We've been told if we don't use these voluntary ratings we run the risk of being sued for any obscene material that might appear. Like Undying. Having raved about the the atmosphere and playability we were desperate for you to get the chance to play it for yourselves, but then the bad news came. "It's an 18 certificate." So if we run with an 18 certificate you'd find us on the top shelf in between Fiesta and Escort."

So what does this mean for us games players then?

Well, having managed to download the demo, 96.8Mb, and just finished playing it i can safely say that it is quite scary and i agree with the 18 certificate. I'm 20, and if a game can make me jump and shock me, then i can understand why people don't want 14 year olds who buy games magazines to play it as well.

The thing is, as hardware increases and games become more realistic, we will probably see more and more games have ratings. It was quite obvious in the original Doom that things weren't real, when you shot something the blood was a big, square, pixellated mass. Games are now coming along like Duke Nukem, which will almost certainly be an 18, others will be released as well that may be too realistically gory for some, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, the new Doom game as well. Both of these may have some shock tactics in, and certainly have a fiar amount of blood. So more games will get the rating and have demos we can't play.

Or will they? How many people buy computer games without playing a demo first? Reviews are good and can be informative, but i personally prefer to play the game myself as only i know what game i will be prepared to spend £30 on. I suspect the majority of people also like to play the game themselves. If they can't get the demo from a magzine, or spend 3 1/2 months downloading it over their 33.6K modem (after all, not everyone has broadband net access, something developers would be wise to remember), will they still go out and buy the game?

So what is the answer? Tone down the demo so it is acceptable to the magazine publishers? But that will have it's own problems, people may complain when they get the game and find out it is more scary/gory/rude than the demo indicates. Imagine it, you play a demo of "Violent and Rude Game 3", which has been toned down, so all you do is walk around. You enjoy this, for some reason, so you buy the game. When you load the game up, oh no! There's lots of swearing and violence and blood, cue a law suit against the magazine and the games publishers. So maybe that's not an answer.

Another option would be to keep the gore/rude bits/scary bits in the demo so only a few people can get their hands on it, and hope word of mouth does the trick. Nothing sells ssomething better than rumour and expectation, look at the GBA, there has been so much on the 'net recently, only a handful of people have played one and yet that doesn't seem to be doing the sales any harm.

The third way would be for a special 18-rated magzine to come out. This magzine could deal primarily with 18 rated games, have all the disturbing demos on the one magazine. However, i feel that this option would cement gaming even further into the "geeky" section of some peoples minds if they saw a games magazine on the same shelf as Mayfair etc.

The answer that i'm hoping won't happen is for games developers to tone down the actual games themselves. We may see more FPS going along the same route as Nerf:Arena Blast. Oh god, please no!

All in all it's an interesting problem. Please discuss.

Seen Solid Snake in MSG2?

:-D

Must be when Carrington fiddled with his... you know what when Joanna enters his room in the game.

Armitage Shanks wrote:
> DeltaJava wrote:
> Can someone tell me how BBFC managed to rate
> Perfect Dark as an 18?
> And WWF No Mercy - a 15? It's gentler
> than Shrek, for boffin's
> sake.

Well... the sex scenes are
> pretty graphic....

What scenes?

DeltaJava wrote:
> Can someone tell me how BBFC managed to rate Perfect Dark as an 18?
> And WWF No Mercy - a 15? It's gentler than Shrek, for boffin's
> sake.

Well... the sex scenes are pretty graphic....

Can someone tell me how BBFC managed to rate Perfect Dark as an 18? And WWF No Mercy - a 15? It's gentler than Shrek, for boffin's sake.

Personally I don't see the point of vast amounts of gore in a computer game. Sure, a few specks of blood are OK, but when it gets to the point where when you shoot someone and there guts explode out of their back it is going too far. If people want games to be this realistic they are sick, and if they are that obsessed with gore they should be locked up before they become a threat to society.
All gore does is limit the appeal and possible audience, without adding anything.

I have to admit it is a different story with horror games-if someone enjoys havins the hell scared out of them thats fine by me, and for these games obviously a high certificate is needed.

That is an interesting question. There are more and more game that are getting age ratings. Some of them deserve it some of them do not. Command & Conquer a fifteen? That is one that I do not feel deserves a high rating. Erotica Island I imagine does deserve its eighteen. I have not played it but there have been some screenshots and from them the graphics are so bad looking that the eighteen will at least prevent some people from hurting their eyes looking at it. I noticed Conkers BFD had a music style Parental Advisory on it. For some games that are aimed at adults like Erotica Island then they I think should be reviewed in adult magazines. For others like Conker they should just have warnings and not be submitted to the BBFC. I know Conker is on a cart and you can not get a demo disc of it but it was the first game of that ilk that I thought of. Ratings are something that are more likely to crop up now than ever before as now consoles and games are aimed at adults and in all honesty the Master System etc were mainly aimed at kids and that is why there have not been more adult games on older consoles and that is why now we are facing the ratings question.

Thanks for the kind words MCG-Highlander.

You make some good points about Half-Life not being an 18, but being really atmospheric and scary. You suggested it's because you had to kill aliens and not 'real' people.

Undying had you chasing around a haunted mansion, at leas the demo does, you're not confronted with people, but monsters and ghosts 'n' ghouls kind of thing, yet it is rated an 18.

I think that demos WILL be toned down however not toned down as much that "all you do is walk around."

Movie trailors are the same idea as the game demos, it is a taster of what the full thing is supposed to be like. It is intended to wet the appetite. You see movie trailors for 18 certificate movies being toned down to 15, perhaps even 12's. So I believe computer games will follow movie trailors in "watering down" it's contents.

How do you water it down? Well it is just all down to withdrawing/modifying things that have enforced the certificates what they are. For instance, Half-Life was an EXTREMELY atmospheric game and there were many instnaces when I nearly fell off my chair with fear, yet this game never had an 18 certificate, why? Realism, in society killing aliens seems okay as aliens aren't real but as soon as we have to kill humans in computer games, a 18 certificate is called for. So basically modifying small parts of the game but keeping the essence of the game the same shall games be okay. Also if swearing were removed in the demo would gamers miss it that much? (I suppose the swearing was relevant in Kingpin, but it was over done just a bit).

If worst came to the worst, then magazines may be only to provide 18 certificate demos on cds from the magazine subscription customers (providing they had some sort of consent or something).

(Good topic YH, glad you won and it is ashame you weren't elected notable)

I think i was most scared by a game when i first played Quake.

I was playing the demo in the dark and it was the first time i'd played a game like that before. Hadn't played Doom as we'd only just got the PC.