If nothing else comes of it, at least the next time somebody asks “has a rating system ever been discussed” they can be pointed to this thread. And maybe it’s just a solution in search of a problem.
Yeah, I guess not. But I had really hoped it would be.
I’m not worried that I would accidentally let my kids play AIF. I think the risk of that is almost nonexistent. Rather, there are lesser shades of what I’d consider inappropriate, which wouldn’t be clear unless I’ve played the game myself, or at least fully researched it. If a rating system just isn’t practical, I understand.
I dunno. I still think that an author-led opt-in system could be pretty valuable. Authors have access to their full code, and they generally care about what their games are going to do out in the world. As long as you don’t require a comprehensive and retroactive system, I think there’s definitely room for us to do better without going all FCC.
For what it’s worth, Victor, I strongly agree with you that grouping sexuality with Bad Evil Things is a terrible cultural trope. The part of it that particularly pisses me off is when sexual violence is considered more acceptable than [what I think of as] healthy sexuality – many feminist arguments have been made about how sexual coercion is generally rated R at worst (and honestly slides under the radar in, say, many “romances”) and female pleasure is generally rated NC-17. The MPAA is, ah, not unknown for its sexist (and otherwise!) double standards.
But I think that, ideally, ratings are a descriptive system. And in my culture (North American, which I believe is the one we’re taking as normative in this discussion), the mainstream media already conflate sex and violence, and idealize nonconsent. There’s so little healthy sexuality in the media that much of the time “sexual themes” is going to mean the unhealthy kind. And, frankly, some days I am unable to deal with serious themes, if by “serious themes” you might mean sexual violence.
So, I’m not disagreeing that it’s a problem, but I’d argue that it’s a problem that’s more deeply embedded than the ratings.
The purpose of a “Sexual Content” rating, as it would apply to IF, wasn’t meant to pass judgement on whether it’s good, bad, forced, romantic, or whatever else; merely that it exists in some form. I don’t want my 8-year-old daughter reading about sex of any kind until she’s older. That’s what a rating is for - to simply state that it exists. I don’t believe a single person here in this discussion is grouping sex with Bad Evil Things.
I know my suggestions were too complicated, but that is pretty much exactly why I had an additional level above S++ (SX) which would apply for nonconsensual sex or sex outside of legal limits (children, animals). That way it could be possible to have a “mainstream” game that dealt with sex in a healthy manner (I, DR. RUTH!), or a knockabout farce that goes further into titillation than a stage show. Of course consensual, natural sex is nothing to be ashamed of, but I don’t think you’d encounter a parent who’d want to take their kid to the latest superhero movie and be surprised when spandex starts getting ripped off and wow-chicka guitar starts after a successful mission.
I do agree that American culture is way skewed toward the concept that taking a kid to an action movie where thousands of bullets are fired and hundreds of faceless minions are dispatched is somehow more acceptable than a movie where two people find love and enjoy each other as two people will do. I think it’s because most of our movies are usually PLOT PLOT PLOT ACTION ACTION DO SOMETHING and the only way to portray sexual relations in that light is someone attempting to have sex and getting rejected, or using rape as a stock reason to not like the villain. I’ve noticed that many non-American movies often have scenes of people waking up nude with nothing sexual about it, or expository scenes set in a locker room/sauna where nudity occurs but is barely the point. You’d never see that in a Hollywood movie - you only show men in locker rooms from the waist up or the back because there’s a metaphor of dominance underlying the scene even if nothing is actually shown.
There are too many touchy subjects, too many IFs, and you can’t expect every author to bother rating his IF, and checking through entire source-codes for objectionable things, is just a sad, sad task.
This is why I simply suggest that ratings shouldn’t be set according to a set scale. If either the author or a wiki editor, wants to recommend an age group, or divulge content, they should be free to. “Suitable for children.” and “Suitable for all audiences.” is a reasonable tag to set, because apart from that, there’s really no big problem. Adults are expected to cope with all aspects of reality. After I was sexually assaulted, I found that things like Pepsi (outside IF games) triggered memories that made me break down into a shivering wreck, but I can’t blame people for having Pepsi cans in their games. You shouldn’t have to handicap proof the entire world just because somebody has a mental handicap. They can always just stop playing and breathe a bit for five minutes.
Anyway, I wonder if ratings for graphical games fit IF. For example, Robert E. Howard’s writings were pretty graphic for the time, and are still pretty gruesome today – since most every movie or comic made from them is Rated R (or should be) – but the works were read by all ages. Would an IF rating system be more literature-based, or more game-based? Another example – I was reading Stephen King in the 4th grade, but I wasn’t allowed to see Rated R movies. How do you rate literature for content? And why haven’t the same divisions been made in literature as in games and movies? Is it because it is easier for a mass audience to see extreme content, but only one pair of eyes at any given time are reading a book, so it’s more of a passive activity?
I’ve also made another observation, having grown up with video games since the Atari era: as games are becoming hyper-realistic, it’s not as easy to mow through waves of pixelated enemies, since I can literally see the whites of their eyes, now. And even games that enjoyed having zero morals (GTA) are becoming somewhat more cognizant of this, that there is a cost for bad acts. I wonder if ethics in games like Dishonored, or Deus Ex, are examples of a backlash against an immoral ‘hero’, who will do anything at any cost to ‘win’.
I don’t know. IF is in this weird gray area between game and fiction – how do you rate it?
I feel it’s not so much “rating” that should be done as “categorizing”. Again, I feel IF is more literature than game. There aren’t ratings on books, but they are categorized as “young adult”, “horror”, etc.
I like that. But again, there is the flip-side, that these are games, have game mechanics, and can have pictures and sound, so the literature categorization doesn’t completely fit in every case. I’m trying to go for, what in my mind, is a “PG-13” rating for a game I’m working on. There is extreme fantasy violence, but I’m keeping depictions of gore to a minimum. However, I was reading a Conan story, and it was extremely gory, so that depiction would get an ‘M’ rating if it were to be translated verbatim into a graphical game. But, these stories are considered classic literature (by me, at least ) and I would recommend them for any age.
Because of this thread, I’m going to voluntary add a rating to any games I make, by following the standards already set up for rating games. It’s hard, though, because words are hard to rate. I do agree with Merk, though, that the content of the game should be ‘on the box’. If I was just writing a story, I would never do this.
(Edit)
Here’s a link to Wikipedia with game rating standards. Teen covers a broad range of games, and I think Arkham City barely skated with the Teen rating, if that’s a benchmark. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertain … ting_Board
And one more edit. There is a cite in the above example where the rating for Oblivion went from T to M because of increasing graphics fidelity. Here’s where the IF gray area for ratings is cited. I would say that text or low-res graphics could have more adult-themed content and get by with a lower rating, while increased graphics means stricter ratings. So, a text-only version of Conan, if it was faithful to the source, could get by with ‘Teen’, whereas a graphics intensive version would get an ‘M’ for the same content.
I always prefer categories like “young adult” to age specific ratings both as a consumer/parent and as an author. What’s appropriate to a given age is too personal/subjective to the way parents raise their kids, and what people find offensive or objectionable is too personal for a single letter/term to adequately explain content. I think it would be great if there was a formalized set-up for the IF community using a short list of content warnings along-side a general category for voluntary use. If there was a longer list of suggested warnings available on a site somewhere for people to optionally consider using, I don’t think it would hurt as long as the “primary set” was kept light-weight. As people have suggested, making it a more consistent trend would require what amounts to a social-movement within the community.
Regarding censorship, I think a well managed voluntary system is probably the best way to preempt folks like the FCC and their cohorts trying to muscle in on us. In one sense, having a rating system of any kind effectively gives the author permission to include things that the FCC-&-friends might try to block entirely just by saying, “hey, I put a warning on it. It’s up to them if they play it or not.”
I suspect that the reason ratings systems appear to endorse censorship is based in profitability. Hollywood has figured out that lower ratings = broader audiences = more money. So, production companies and distributors censor writers and directors because they want those ratings low to get more people into the theater. I was really upset when Guillermo del Toro had to cancel his project for adapting Lovecraft’s horror story “At the Mountains Of Madness” because they tried to force him to make it PG-13 instead of R, and he felt that would ruin the film. But most of the IF that’s out there right now is being done by hobbyists (EDIT: to my understanding, not sure if true). Even stuff being released for profit is still usually made by individuals or small groups, which means we don’t have to deal with that kind of non-sense. It would be different if people like Andrew Hunter or David Kinder were going around telling people what ratings of games people were allowed to produce using INFORM 7, but I doubt anyone would expect them to do that, as they have no real reason to.
No, there’s really not, and in retrospect my overall point might better have been made without that whole statement. I probably just dislike the FCC enough to be a little paranoid of them, lol, but they’ve got plenty of much bigger issues to worry about than IF. I probably should have started with something like, self-imposed labeling is very different from government censorship/labeling, and therefore contribute less to the broader social issue of censorship in art, in my opinion; and if people felt they could reliably count on content labels, they might be more comfortable playing (or allowing their kids to play) more games.
EDIT: In my head, I was comparing “self-imposed labeling” to categories and content warnings designed to be informative
and “government censorship/labeling” to ratings like PG-13 or R which feel more like a restriction.
So, in other words, I think audience categories could actively be beneficial to authors,
where as I can see how “ratings” could contribute to censorship issues in culture.
This is a really interesting discussion, because it gets to the heart of what a strange medium IF is. Personally, I’m voluntarily going with the ESRB guidelines, even though it’s completely subjective – I’ll be rating my own game! That’s not exactly any kind of true rating, at all, because I’m already too close to the material to accurately rate it. What I am doing is not really censoring myself, but using the ‘T’ rating as a guideline. If my literary blood thirst gets out of hand, I’m toning it down on purpose to keep with that kind of tone, purposely making things more cartoonish, because that’s the tone I want. So, if I do have violence or adult content that’s graphic, I’m purposely showing it without being too graphic, cutting away, using ‘off-camera’ techniques to describe it. It’s not really censorship, more like a guideline that I’m following for a certain effect.
On the flip side, I have other story ideas designed to be more mature. And, this is not a standard I’m suggesting anybody else do. I’m doing this because it’s helping me keep the tone of the story on track, as well as acknowledging that IF is a balance between story and game, and I’m adding heavy ‘game’ elements. I’m considering it a form of future-proofing, that if this game were ever to be turned into a graphical game, then it could be done in the same tone, and be completely true to the source, and get a similar rating.
That’s too bad to hear about “In the Mouth of Madness”. That would have been awesome. On a positive note, I think G. Del Toro is remaking Slaughterhouse 5. I can’t wait for that.
Since IF does have an inconsistent mixture of text and graphics, I think it would be good to have the listed content warnings go ahead and say something like, “narrative gore” vs “images of gore” or in some way distinguish between what’s in the text and what’s in pictures, because it is very different.
Not that it’s really relevant, but to clarify, the film G.Del Toro was going to make (and hopeful someday might get to) is based on a specific Lovecraft story called “At the Mountains Of Madness.” There is already a great film starring Sam Neal called “In the Mouth Of Madness,” which is ironically one of the best representations in film of the way Lovecraft wrote despite not being based on any actual story by Lovecraft.
That’s why a lot of good movies and TV shows are coming of out of Australia and NZ, among other places. Hollywood is a money machine. Luckily there are still great directors and writers breaking through that, because all the demographics and pie charts in the world can’t trump a good story when it comes to the box office.
I’m not only mad because they want to censor stories for non-children, but also because ideally the finished amputated product will be something like “Hi, children! Welcome to the magical world of surprise sex. One day little bunny Marcy was walking through the forest, when suddenly papa bear found that she looked nice. …so he hugged her a lot. Little bunny Marcy didn’t like to be hugged at first, but papa bear hugged her until she was happy again, and they all laughed and had icecream. The end.”.
) and I would recommend them for any age.
Removing another eyesore. The previous post is a troll.