Throughout my time as a gamer I have welcomed the presence of “adult-oriented” content in video games. I like my “Mature” rated games and all the ingredients that come with them – profanity, excessive violence, etc, etc. But, as I’ve become a father I started to think about sharing the gaming experience with my son and how that would all play out with what I consider to be epic-must-play games and the content they depict. It led me to think about how the mature content ( and subsequently the rating ) on games vs. the configuration I have as the player to finely tweak them have become less inter-twined. For example, although I still see some games where you can toggle “gore”… in the good ol’ days I remember that setting to be much more configurable.
Ie:
- - No blood
- . Some blood
- . Lots o’ blood
- . Heads explode
- + Alien blood
On that note, what if I see fit as a parent to allow my child to play & or watch me play “Kill Zone 2″… but in order for it to pass my parental guidelines the only thing I’m concerned about blocking is the excessive profanity in that game. How can I do that? Currently I don’t know of a way ( short of muting the audio ). What I’m proposing is that the video game companies ( or maybe even digital media companies as a whole? ) standardize a way in which, at least, profanity can be completely toggled. Ultimately it would be great if the platform could control that setting globally via the parental controls, but I imagine that would be a much larger change architecturally on both sides. Maybe subtitles and caption information could be “tagged” to various levels of profanity, cut-scenes that contained mature content could as well and then the ESRB would be describing what the highest level of those configurations would allow in the game, but not what it could be throttled back to. Granted some games are doing this — but not at the level in which I am suggesting and obviously there are limitations and it would potentially require more work. But, I think starting with profanity toggling may reveal more avenues of what could be possible.
