Violence and the R 18+ Rating

Apparently, the Australian government is still mulling over the decision on whether to introduce an R 18+ rating for video games.

This means that all those gamers looking for an even greater level of violence to exceed GTA 4 (or Manhunt 2) will have to curb those bloodthirsty fingers on their trigger sticks for just a while longer.

Personally, I'm not too fussed either way. There's plenty of violence and gore out there already- how many times have we watched losers in Mortal Kombat fall screaming to their gory death on a bed of spikes?- so an R 18+ rating shouldn't really change things.

However, it did make me think of a family I sold an Xbox 360 to a couple of weeks ago- they were Asian, with a teenage son (a rather non-communicative little teenage son if I may say so myself.) One thing with Asian parents is that they believe that their teenage son is a little paragon of virtue who would never entertain the idea of virtually disembowelling someone, or teabagging a hapless n00b in an MMORPG, or viewing porn at a friend's house. Why, not my wonderful-little-boy-who-is-top-of-his-class-in-Maths-Methods.

Anyway...

...so the kid starts looking through the shelf of 360 games. Except his mother is standing over his shoulder overseeing what he's looking at. Which is never really a good idea.

The kid laconically informed me that yeah, he'd played Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War at friends' houses, but his mum wouldn't let him play anything violent.

Inwardly, I smirked.

His mother vetoed anything that looked remotely violent. In fact, I felt like falling on the floor and howling with laughter when she finally picked up one title and tried to convince the kid to get it.

Suffice to say, he was not impressed by his mother waggling Viva Pinata in front of his face and saying, "Look, this is a nice game!"

So she asks me for my opinion on a game for his new 360.

That isn't violent.

So I start pulling stuff from shelves.

Assassin's Creed. (Involves stabbing targets in public places and watching their blood billow out into fountains, then running away in kick-ass chase scenes).

Nope.

Crackdown. (Free rein to bash everything!!!)

Nope.

Saints' Row. (It's not like it sounds.)

Nope.

Call of Duty 4. (It has SOLDIERS on the front. Go figure.)

Nope, also out.

Gears of War (Note the use of the word "war". Also note the image of Marcus Fenix looking considerably grim and on some kind of steroid.)

Nups.

Mass Effect (This is currently set to eclipse KOTOR as my favouritest RPG, which is really saying something. However, it also features a suggested alien/human lesbian sex scene, many many drug references and mentions Krogan testicles. Man, I love that game so much.)

But yeah, that was out of the question too.

The kid finally settled on some kind of FIFA game. So that was nice and relatively non-violent, and I'm sure his mother must have been somewhat pacified by ther fact that her beloved Viva Pinata was packaged with the Xbox (along with Forza).

And this is why earning money and being over 18 is so much fun. You can buy your own Xbox 360 and get whatever you want.

Or you can get your parents to buy it for you, where the maximum level of violence in your games will be limited to hitting a cartoon pinata over the head with a shovel.

That said, I did reflect on the fact that there are very few family-friendly games for the 360, and that's just because of the demographic it's aimed at. It's not like you''ve got six year old girls wanting to play Bratz on 1080p, but after playing Scene It!, and looking at the popularity of the PS2's Singstar/Buzz games, maybe it's not such a bad market to tap into.

If you're under 18 and have a console, you're probably still living at home, in which case you probably can't play an R18+ game without getting grounded. So for all the other gamers out there, an R18+ rating won't really change things, it'll just open up more ground and more titles. The only thing I'm worried about is that eventually it might lead to a whole influx of gamer porn...like Playboy the Mansion for PC on crack.

But we'll see how this all pans out.