Unfettered Blather

I haven’t said a whole lot about the Hot Coffee Mod specifically because to me it is just one more example of how little people bother to understand what videogames are capable of these days.

At the heart of the debate on videogames and children seems to be the belief that videogames are “for kids”. Most parents I know, even the really bad ones, will not buy their kids a movie that is rated ‘R’. Yet we know that most games, regardless of rating, that kids play were purchased by their parents. I believe the figure was somewhere around 82%. So why would a parent that most likely would not let their kid see an R-Rated movie allow their child to play a game like Grand Theft Auto?

The fallacy is thinking that anything can be just for a particular age group. For example, in the United States we tend to think of animation as being primarily for children. Yet in Japan, animation is considered just another medium for telling a story. In fact, I’ve even seen something that strongly resembled an animated soap opera! They produce many animated features that would easily earn an ‘R’ rating, or worse if you get into the more perverse side of it. While I am less than thrilled with how far they are willing to go with some of their animated endeavors, the Japanese have still managed to greatly explore a medium simply because they were not narrow-minded in their approach.

The problem is that videogames haven’t been “just for kids” for a long time, so the narrow view of them is giving parents unrealistic expectations. I don’t believe it’s about something as simple as a rating system either. Parents don’t pay attention to the ratings because they believe that all videogames were made for someone who is 18 or younger. They become shocked and outraged when a game contains adult themes (Profanity, sex, graphic violence, etc.) despite most games being clearly marked in this regard. What the news media doesn’t seem to care about is that the average gamer is well into adult-hood. Video games have not been a kid’s hobby for a long time now. Still, the pop culture thinking is that the people who play videogames are typically your white male who is between the ages of 10 and 15. It’s an extremely narrow view, but one I come across more often than not. Not only does it seem to exclude a wide age of ranges, but there are many assumptions made about gender and race as well.

The real battle is over a rating system or whether or not the ESRB needs to consider modability. The rantings of Jack Thompson and company are irrelevant. Once the general populace begins to realize that gaming is a very real pasttime for adults and not just kids, I suspect a lot of the rumblings we hear now are going to subside. Until the news media stops focusing on one small piece of the picture though, I don’t see the realization coming quickly.

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