(EDIT: Ok guys, it’s 1:00 PM PST and the comments are now closed, so we can go through the rest and pull some for the show. Some great, great stuff in here. I think this might become a regular thing. -Arthur )
Greetings all. We’ll be recording Episode 7 of Rebel FM tomorrow afternoon for a Wednesday night release, and this time we want to try something a little different for the discussion segment. With the debut of The Lost and the Damned’s Penis Extravaganza yesterday, we thought it might be interesting to ask you all about “mature content” in games.
To start with, we feel like there are two ways to do more extreme content: gratuitously, and respectfully in service to the game and story and atmosphere. In other words, there are games that handle content maturely, and games that throw a lot of gore and profanity at you and call it “Mature Content” on the ratings sticker. Chuf feels like a good example of the first kind would be specific points in “The Darkness”, because he felt that it served a purpose, and added a gravity to a lot of what was going on. I feel like an example of the second would be, say, Ninja Gaiden 2, which was absolutely gratuitous.
So, what do you all think? What are some examples of both, and what are you ok with? What’s bothered you, and what do you feel has been portrayed unfairly by the media at large? It can be violence, gore, language, or sex (or whatever else you guys can think of that you feel falls into the topic). Leave your comments here, and we’ll go through them by tomorrow at 1:00 PM PST to discuss them on the show.
I feel that mature rated content is pretty lame. I feel that an M game should be able to have content that an R rated move should. IE Nudity, sex, violence, etc. As we have seen before, this is not the case. IE GTA Hot Coffee.
Just my opinion, love ths show
-Matt
Mature content in games is just the same as mature content in movies. It is up to the game developers what goes into a game and then it gets cut down to what won’t be viewed as “too far” (MAKING IT SHIT, CRAP, HORRIBLE, I COULD DO THAT ALL DAY) but if killing someone with a bag like a seriel killer or a woman with her tits out, if that offends someone, then why buy it. i will say that if a game was made where they showed bones sticking out and blood everywhere, i would call both the consumer and the makers SICK MINDED FREAKS.
Mass Effect was a game that had plenty of mature content and the most memorable moment was not the rather modest sex scene, but when – spoiler alert! – you choose to gun down one of your own team members.
What gave the scene even more power was the fact that it happened slightly off screen, giving you less to look at and more time to think about the impact of your decision. It just goes to show you don’t need gore to make a point.
Mature is kind of overloaded here. We could be talking about content that is intended for consumption by people over a certain age. I think the more interesting definition would be content characterized as more “ripened”. Fully fleshed out and sophisticated.
Under this definition there could be overlaps where there are games with sex and violence that you could still consider immature.
A few have already alluded to the idea, but perhaps there should be a Mature rating and an Immature rating to distinguish between games trying to use adult content as a way to advance the story and games trying to use adult content as a way to titillate and boost shock value.
Ironically, it’s that immature set–the Gears of Wars, the DOAs, and the like–that end up being easier, I would think, to take as “just games.” Those games that dare to delve into deeper and darker places for a greater reason end up both more controversial in their closer approximation of real life and perhaps less popular outside of a certain audience.
I think that’s generally the case in movies as well (and yes, I think there are exceptions in both movies and games). Michael Bay may feature boobs and explosions and a shallow sense of reality, but he’s also going to make more money than the guy who directed “The Reader,” which also features sex and violence. The masses (including me) prefer escapism. A smaller population (also including me) wants depth.
I’d guess overall, though, the immature outsells the mature, which is why we’ll keep seeing more of the former and less of the latter.
I think that both sides are important. I think rockstar has found a third option. They have created a scenario that they think will bring out the inner middle-schooler of many gamers and cause them to panic, immediately going on the “IM NOT HOMOSEXUAL” path. It also gives the gamer a good grasp of how uncomfortable Johnny must be in that situation by giving you a similar experience.
[...] never played this game, or even heard of it until reading about it in the comments section of a Rebel FM post (it’s comment 18, but the rest are pretty interesting too). The commenter linked to an [...]