Adults make up the vast majority of video game players - I don’t have any fancy statistics on-hand (cite? CITE?!), but it’s established that there are more “18-45’ers” playing and buying games than under-18’ers. Video games are a relatively new medium and (arguably) artform than other forms of entertainment.
But there’s still an attitude in our culture at large that video games are “toys,” and are therefore “for children,” when the reality at-hand is that games are a medium and there are some for children, some for adults, and a ton in between.
This attitude creates major problems for the development of games as a medium, and for the adult consumers that want to play them, as evidenced by the whole recent Manhunt 2 debacle, in which a violent game rated for adults-only was forced to be censored because stores won’t even carry or sell games that receive that highest content rating - even though the same stories carry rated-R and unreated movies that are aimed at adults. The prejudicial mentality is that “toys” shouldn’t have “adult” content.
I’ve played many games that were clearly censored in many ways, even though they had Mature ratings - games with licensed songs where the profanity was censored, where nudity was blocked that was clearly unblocked in the japanese version, etc. It’s silly, and as a gamer adult, it feels like the equivalent of paying to see a rated R movie and having the blood and nudity pixellated or covered with black bars.
Newsweek’s game guy has a nice exchange about it here .
Do you think that this is a serious problem for adults? Is it hindering the development of games as a medium for mature adults?
I’m disgusted in every way when I have to bend to kids. Childproof caps on medicine? But no kids will ever be in my medicine cabinet. Can’t buy turtles smaller than a certain size, because NYS thinks kids play with the little ones more and get salmonella? But I always take precautions and wash my hands the few times I pick up my turtle.
And yes, the video games. It’s incumbent on parents to supervise their kids. Not me. I didn’t have them, they did, so why should I be denied an adult video game? And the nudity thing really sickens me. Sims is a really cool game but they have blurs when the people go take showers. Why? They have sex! (woohoo) Why is a naked person on a screen so dangerous, and secondly why should I even care if kids can’t buy it or do buy it and see it?
Yeah, it’s crazy that they blur the naked people in the Sims but I just spent five hours of my life trying to get my pinata animals to get down and nasty in Viva Pinata, which is a game for eight year olds. (Oh yes, we did achieve minigame.)
I agree with the OP. Maybe what the gaming world needs is a more concerted effort to portray itself as a serious medium for adults. It can start with something as simple as terminology (“Don’t call it a comic book; it’s a graphic novel!”)
The same reason “sex and violence” have become perma-linked in one bite-size phrase. That one always gives me a major “WTF?” feeling. Yeah let’s just lump those two totally unrelated activities together. Why stop there? Hey, this movie contains chairs-and-goldfish.
I think video games should be no different than movies as far as content is concerned. Just rate them and if they’re rated R (or equivalent), then there can and should be lots of tits and blood in them, just like movies, but they’re not for kids.
However, the real infantilization is occurring in adults; 50 years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a bunch of middle aged moms sitting around the pool reading the latest Nancy Drew or grown men extolling the virtues of some cartoon in the confines of their basement.
I saw a thread here the other day where presumed grownups were seriously dicussing the plot direction of my 9 year old son’s favorite cartoon.
So, in a way, it’s not necessarily that kid stuff is being foisted upon adults; the adults are hijacking the kid stuff, in a way. With all these adults wearing Tweety tshirts, eating Trix, watching cartoons, reading comic books and playing video games, what’s left for the kids?
I have no idea what the Hell any of you are on about. I’ll continue to set fire to half-naked Splicers in Bioshock, and get health from hookers in GTA, and cap terrorists from behind the slots in Rainbow Six.
That being said, I must confess I got a little bit disturbed when my six month old daughter started laughing uncannily at the moment a bunch of body parts floated out of the trash bag in Dexter.
At a certain point I’m not even sure whether or not the content on the idiot box even matters when I see how addicted myself and many people my age are to some sort of video screen, whether it’s Top Chef and Tim Gunn with my wife, Battlestar Galactica and the SDMB for me, or talking to people on her phone constantly for my little sister. I think it might just be the medium itself that is the problem with the content being largely irrelevant.
Yeah, people are pretty childish these days. It’s kind of disturbing. It’s amazing how many times some little personal pique ends up being a matter of righteous indignation for people.
It seriously irritates me that more and more the whole world is supposed to be childproofed. Video games included. No child is ever likely to even enter my home, much less play my video games. Can’t parents even be troubled to screen what video games they buy or let their kids play now ?
And the whole anti-nudity thing is ridiculous on the face of it. Children are not going to be harmed if they see naked people.
You know I love video games… Cartoons and comic books (That is what they are) and I have to agree with you. There is something less adult about modern North American Culture.
Everything seemes to be aimed at a teen and twenty something sensibilities and very little entertainment is actually grown up. I’m not talking about boobies and exploding heads, I mean there seems to be something missing in adult culture. I’m not even sure what that might be… seriousness? an ability not to share all interests that your Kids have… selflessness?
I’m not sure, but winging about video games being unadult strikes me a childish too.
I agree here. I don’t know why the video game industry didn’t just adopt the same G, PG, PG-13, R, X rating the movie industry has. Instead they came out with their own odd rating system.
I don’t know how someone could argue with it then? “Uh, lady, that game is rated R. Do you have a DVD player in your home? Do you have any R-rated movies at home? Do you let your kids watch them? Do you think there should be a ban on producing r-rated movies?”
[flame retardant suit] Exemplified by the millions of adults who elevated a series of books about a teenage wizard and his friends to the major literary phenomenon of the last half century [/flame retardant suit]
I remember my “Stability and Control” class in college started with the Prof say, “Stability and Control are a lot like Sex and Violence; people often say them together, but they are really very different things.”
I don’t think it has anything to do with age limits - after all, Pong got its start in a bar, and the first video game ever, SpaceWar, started in an MIT lab. I think the real issue, just as in movies, are the Priudence Goodbodies (male and female varieties) who don’t like anything “adult” and use protecting the children as an excuse.
You better keep that suit on buckeroo. If not for the clever html jokery, I may well have flow off the handle.
At any rate, I do agree with the OP, (although I wouldn’t call it a “serious problem”). I think part of it is that video games, until fairly recently, were in fact a childish pursuit. I’m 26 and grew up with a Nintendo, but beyond the occasional Leisure Suit Larry, I can’t think of too many games that were intended for an adult audience until much later (admittedly, I’m not much of a gamer, so prove me wrong by all means). But I think, remembering that video games are a fairly new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things, that a large part of society is still unable to divorce themselves from this idea that video games, by their nature, are intended for kids. I think its ludicrous, but I do think that there are a ton of folks out there who hear “video game” and think of children playing it, regardless of the intent of the producer. I really can’t think of a better reason that this topic is so insistent. Every time someone pushes the violence envelope, there’s a gaggle of concerned parents demanding accountability. Considering the cost of games and the control parents should have over their children, it should be much easier to keep their children away from Grand Theft Auto than it is for a parent to monitor their child’s television watching habits. A kid can sneak a few seconds of horrific violence on a primetime TNT or USA movie pretty easily, right?
While I’m sure it’s annoying - I’m not enough of a gamer for it to matter to me - I’d hope this is something the market will eventually correct. If the major developers ignore or don’t satisfy adults, somebody else will come along and do it. PC games don’t have these kinds of restrictions, right?
Minor correction to the OP, though: stores won’t carry Mature Only games, but they’d probably never have the chance to - Microsoft and Nintendo (among others?) won’t manufacture them. It’s probably the same as major studios not wanting to make NC-17 (non-porn) movies: if it gets that rating, you lose some of your audience, your get bad PR and you end up losing the money you put into it.
It’s neither, really: if you have to slap a label on it I’d call it the adolescentization of everybody. Kids grow up faster and play violent video games, and adults are okay with watching cartoons and playing video games. In the context of entertainment, it seems to me that everybody’s happy and nobody is harmed by this. More broadly - just to tout my own theory - I think adulthood as we used to know it has been abolished, which obviously has positive and negative qualities.
I think adults are just realizing that kids have more fun. The Sound and the Fury is about two hundred thousand times less fun to read than Harry Potter. If that’s some sort of indication that America’s going to hell in a hand basket and we’re all becoming childish buffoons, I’ll eat my hat.
Heh. I read and enjoyed them too - more than once, in the case of all but the last two. But when the poster pointed out leisure/entertainment phenomena that would have been unthinkable among adults of the 1950s, it was the first thing that came to mind.
