Quote: "So I've come to the conclusion that this is one of those problems that has no clear solutions because all the people involved are sitting on different sides of the fence."
Well, if we summarise the current system (at the risk of stating the obvious)
1) Companies make games. They want to sell lots of copies. They may make these games violent to appeal to a demographic - however, putting too much gore in will push up the rating, lessening their customer base. If they go too far they might even get an AO rating, which means they'll probably sell very few copies.
2) The game is rated. The more gore, violence etc. the higher the rating.
3) The game is bought. The kid doesn't care about the rating: they care about the game. (I mean, that's only natural: they don't play games so they can feel good about how obedient they are to the ratings system!) The kid may be refused at the point of sale because they're too young, of course.
4) They get it home and Mom walks in and says "WHAT are you playing? WHAT is that? Is that BLOOD?" and promptly switches off the console and confiscates the game.
So there are three limiting factors: the danger of putting in too much gore, refusing to sell the children, and the role of the parent. The first is not too important in the grand scheme of things but does at least indicate that it's not simply a case of "blood = money". The second is fairly important and I think it's good that it's implemented. But it is the role of the parent which is, perhaps, most important. It's not easy for a parent to say that their child can't have the latest thing that they really want, but it's a decision that they all have to come to their own judgements on. (If a parent decides, by the way, that it's okay for their 14 year old son to play an 18, then that's really their business. It would be wrong, I think, to deny them the right to make that choice.) And if a parent doesn't realise that an 18 game may not be suitable for their 7 year old child, then the child is probably antisocial for reasons other than that of the game. This would not be the fault of the developers.
I'm not really sure if this legislation would have any effect anywhere, though. If the kid buys the game on their own, it would have no effect. If the parent buys it for the kid, I think the large, red "18" emblem would be enough to make them reconsider, label or no label. (Video games have enough of a presence in scare-stories that parents would no doubt already know that some of these things are violent, and can come to their own conclusions on that, without requiring a label.) Of course, another problem with this proposal is that it tars all games with any kind of violence with the same brush: if anything, it sounds like it lumps together Manhunt with Deus Ex and Broken Sword, which would actually isolate the public image of video games further, and put them
all in even more of a "violence bin", so to speak. Not to mention that the actual wording "has been linked to violent behaviour" is not entirely suitable (I mean, Nietszche has been linked to eugenics but that doesn't mean he would ever have approved of it), plus, of course, it would probably cost a fair bit to put these labels on.
Secretary of Unknowable Knowledge for the Rock/Dink administration '08
