December Days 09: Rated M for Mature
Dec. 9th, 2019 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
Okay, so since I've mentioned Doom and Quake, now seems like a good idea to talk about a particular cycle as it pertains to new media. Specifically, New Media Are Evil, which is a trope that goes about as far back as there is recorded history, and, to some degree, across various cultures. More than one person had issues with the idea of literacy, because it would mean people's memories wouldn't be as strong as they had been, and just about every technological or media innovation beyond that point has had someone complaining that it is a thing that will cause all kinds of societal problems. Usually, the favored argument is some variation on "Think of the childrens" or "it corrupts the youth."
Video games are no exception to this rule. For people who look bemusedly back on the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and how a very popular role-playing game was implicated as turning people to devil worship (and who correctly tagged the furor over the popularity of the Harry Potter books as coming from the same space), remembering it more as the heyday of some risible Christian comic about TSR's finest product than the social panic it was, the phrase "murder simulators" and their associated attorney, Jack Thompson, will probably bring you back to about the right frame of mind, although Thompson is actually later than we want to examine.
Before that, though, there were serious Congressional hearings about video games and violence, based on games like Doom, Mortal Kombat, Lethal Enforcers (all of which have made appearances in earlier entries) and Night Trap, although that one seemed to be as much about sexuality as much as violence, since it was a game set around surveillance of teenagers and allowing or preventing their deaths. While many of them were in something very 80s, but also conveniently very revealing of skin. For a sleepover. (Had they actually bothered to play the game, they would have had to rework their opinions of what Night Trap was actually about. They didn't.)
At this particular point in time, the Congress is considering legislation to regulate the game industry over these concerns. If there's one thing the game industry has as an advantage in this situation, it's that they've already seen, three times over, what happened when the government got antsy about regulatory threats. The Motion Picture Production Code, commonly referred to as the Hays Code, after the person that created it was adopted in response the the very real possibility that films would be censored, with different standards applied based on state or locality, and films suffered under very stringent rules for thirty plus years while they slowly worked their way back into the good graces of everyone. (Eventually, the Code would be replaced by the now-familiar MPAA rating system [video, Freakazoid!]) Additionally, in a similar moral panic about children and terrible behavior depicted, the Comics Code Authority served a similar purpose for the comics industry, with a similar time period of self-censorship until the industry got itself back on solid footing and government regulation was, to some degree, looking at something else that was new. And finally, Fred Rogers testified before Congress in 1969 about the possibility and power of public TV to be a good thing in the face of Congress that was not feeling friendly to TV at all. By the 90s, TV has done a cycle of moving shows meant for grownups to later on at night, and then on to pay television exclusively, so as to shelter the small children from more grownup shows.
The cycle staring them in the face seemed to be
Animation is just getting out of its own self-censorship period, although it will still be a few years before anime surges to popularity and the Comics Code loses most of its teeth, completing their cycles.
And really, games wouldn't have received so much baleful eye themselves except for the innovation they provided: interactivity! Film and television have already done their cycle and compared to shows and movies, what's happening on screen for violence wouldn't be that out of the ordinary (and properly rated). However, when it's software, that means instead of being a passive consumer of the violence, one is actively pushing buttons to make the violence happen. Which, for most people who do not command significant military systems and resources, is nothing like what it's like to visit violence on another being. However, most of the objections I saw from that time were of the nature of "a steady diet of causing the death and destruction of others would instill in a child the idea that others are simply NPCs to be killed or harmed at will." This would have a snarling resurgence after Columbine, where the gaming habits of the two killers would be pointed at as proof that violent video games had created mass murderers. We've shifted away from that point of view, because the data doesn't bear it out, but it's still not that far away from the surface, waiting for the next incident that looks like violent media caused violence to return.
To avoid the cycle that they had seen so many times before (or so it appears, anyway), the video game industry jumped straight to the rating system as solution, and created the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), modeled fairly explicitly on the MPAA's rating system for movies, with the current system of EC, E, E10, T, M, and AO as the ratings available for games, corresponding roughly to a preschool educational movie, G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings for movies. The first set of ratings was a series of thermometers, each with a different level of material in it to rate the amount of language, gore, violence, and other content markers. Those content markers have been folded into a box on the side of an ESRB rating describing the specific themes or actions that earned the game its rating
As an NC-17 rating is a death knell for movies wanting to be screened in regular theaters, (and a G rating sometimes to be avoided because it's seen as "for kids"), the AO rating basically prevents a game from being displayed on game store shelves, and is not very likely at all to be carried by general software distribution platforms. Or the version of the game that is carried has been toned down from the original so that it can carry a lower rating. For some games, especially in the visual novel department, there exist patches for the lower-rated and sold games that bring back their original AO rated content, assuming that the uncut game was actually submitted for a rating, instead of the censored or cut version. For all the AO-rated examples I can think of, the AO rating was for sexuality rather than violence, although Duke Nukem 3D might have been for both, because I think the lower-rated versions of it removed the adult cabaret dancers, since you could interact with them and have them flash you their breasts. (It might have also prevented some of the more ludicrous gibs.) Most famously, a Grand Theft Auto game had a sex minigame patched out of the final game shipped, although the content was still on the discs themselves. When "Hot Coffee" was discovered through the use of hex hacking and cheat engines, the ESRB threatened to revise that Grand Theft Auto game's rating up to AO from the M it had been comfortably sitting in unless something were done, because the content was accessible, even if it wasn't actually accessed through normal gameplay. Discs with "Hot Coffee" were recalled and a new version that does not contain the content at all were shipped in their stead. Thus, the game kept the M rating it had initially earned and continued to sell extremely well.
It is not lost on me that video games have followed essentially the same thing that other media have in the United States, where we permit a large amount of violence to be seen, but sex is very tightly regulated and controlled.
The ESRB has successfully broken the cycle of games censoring themselves for a long period of time because of the threat of the regulators, and instead, most people complain that games, like movies and television shows, aren't doing a lot of innovation at the big-budget AAA level.
And, thankfully, we've found more accurate and more proximate causes of why people commit mass violence in the United States, so video games are mostly being left alone.
Okay, so since I've mentioned Doom and Quake, now seems like a good idea to talk about a particular cycle as it pertains to new media. Specifically, New Media Are Evil, which is a trope that goes about as far back as there is recorded history, and, to some degree, across various cultures. More than one person had issues with the idea of literacy, because it would mean people's memories wouldn't be as strong as they had been, and just about every technological or media innovation beyond that point has had someone complaining that it is a thing that will cause all kinds of societal problems. Usually, the favored argument is some variation on "Think of the childrens" or "it corrupts the youth."
Video games are no exception to this rule. For people who look bemusedly back on the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and how a very popular role-playing game was implicated as turning people to devil worship (and who correctly tagged the furor over the popularity of the Harry Potter books as coming from the same space), remembering it more as the heyday of some risible Christian comic about TSR's finest product than the social panic it was, the phrase "murder simulators" and their associated attorney, Jack Thompson, will probably bring you back to about the right frame of mind, although Thompson is actually later than we want to examine.
Before that, though, there were serious Congressional hearings about video games and violence, based on games like Doom, Mortal Kombat, Lethal Enforcers (all of which have made appearances in earlier entries) and Night Trap, although that one seemed to be as much about sexuality as much as violence, since it was a game set around surveillance of teenagers and allowing or preventing their deaths. While many of them were in something very 80s, but also conveniently very revealing of skin. For a sleepover. (Had they actually bothered to play the game, they would have had to rework their opinions of what Night Trap was actually about. They didn't.)
At this particular point in time, the Congress is considering legislation to regulate the game industry over these concerns. If there's one thing the game industry has as an advantage in this situation, it's that they've already seen, three times over, what happened when the government got antsy about regulatory threats. The Motion Picture Production Code, commonly referred to as the Hays Code, after the person that created it was adopted in response the the very real possibility that films would be censored, with different standards applied based on state or locality, and films suffered under very stringent rules for thirty plus years while they slowly worked their way back into the good graces of everyone. (Eventually, the Code would be replaced by the now-familiar MPAA rating system [video, Freakazoid!]) Additionally, in a similar moral panic about children and terrible behavior depicted, the Comics Code Authority served a similar purpose for the comics industry, with a similar time period of self-censorship until the industry got itself back on solid footing and government regulation was, to some degree, looking at something else that was new. And finally, Fred Rogers testified before Congress in 1969 about the possibility and power of public TV to be a good thing in the face of Congress that was not feeling friendly to TV at all. By the 90s, TV has done a cycle of moving shows meant for grownups to later on at night, and then on to pay television exclusively, so as to shelter the small children from more grownup shows.
The cycle staring them in the face seemed to be
- Industry birth
- Rapid innovation and boundary-pushing
- Public outcry at excesses of boundary-pushing
- Government threat of regulation
- Industry severely self-regulates for decades, turning out "safe" products
- Eventually, self-censorship fades, and the baleful eye has moved on to a new thing, leading to a Renaissance of the medium.
Animation is just getting out of its own self-censorship period, although it will still be a few years before anime surges to popularity and the Comics Code loses most of its teeth, completing their cycles.
And really, games wouldn't have received so much baleful eye themselves except for the innovation they provided: interactivity! Film and television have already done their cycle and compared to shows and movies, what's happening on screen for violence wouldn't be that out of the ordinary (and properly rated). However, when it's software, that means instead of being a passive consumer of the violence, one is actively pushing buttons to make the violence happen. Which, for most people who do not command significant military systems and resources, is nothing like what it's like to visit violence on another being. However, most of the objections I saw from that time were of the nature of "a steady diet of causing the death and destruction of others would instill in a child the idea that others are simply NPCs to be killed or harmed at will." This would have a snarling resurgence after Columbine, where the gaming habits of the two killers would be pointed at as proof that violent video games had created mass murderers. We've shifted away from that point of view, because the data doesn't bear it out, but it's still not that far away from the surface, waiting for the next incident that looks like violent media caused violence to return.
To avoid the cycle that they had seen so many times before (or so it appears, anyway), the video game industry jumped straight to the rating system as solution, and created the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), modeled fairly explicitly on the MPAA's rating system for movies, with the current system of EC, E, E10, T, M, and AO as the ratings available for games, corresponding roughly to a preschool educational movie, G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings for movies. The first set of ratings was a series of thermometers, each with a different level of material in it to rate the amount of language, gore, violence, and other content markers. Those content markers have been folded into a box on the side of an ESRB rating describing the specific themes or actions that earned the game its rating
As an NC-17 rating is a death knell for movies wanting to be screened in regular theaters, (and a G rating sometimes to be avoided because it's seen as "for kids"), the AO rating basically prevents a game from being displayed on game store shelves, and is not very likely at all to be carried by general software distribution platforms. Or the version of the game that is carried has been toned down from the original so that it can carry a lower rating. For some games, especially in the visual novel department, there exist patches for the lower-rated and sold games that bring back their original AO rated content, assuming that the uncut game was actually submitted for a rating, instead of the censored or cut version. For all the AO-rated examples I can think of, the AO rating was for sexuality rather than violence, although Duke Nukem 3D might have been for both, because I think the lower-rated versions of it removed the adult cabaret dancers, since you could interact with them and have them flash you their breasts. (It might have also prevented some of the more ludicrous gibs.) Most famously, a Grand Theft Auto game had a sex minigame patched out of the final game shipped, although the content was still on the discs themselves. When "Hot Coffee" was discovered through the use of hex hacking and cheat engines, the ESRB threatened to revise that Grand Theft Auto game's rating up to AO from the M it had been comfortably sitting in unless something were done, because the content was accessible, even if it wasn't actually accessed through normal gameplay. Discs with "Hot Coffee" were recalled and a new version that does not contain the content at all were shipped in their stead. Thus, the game kept the M rating it had initially earned and continued to sell extremely well.
It is not lost on me that video games have followed essentially the same thing that other media have in the United States, where we permit a large amount of violence to be seen, but sex is very tightly regulated and controlled.
The ESRB has successfully broken the cycle of games censoring themselves for a long period of time because of the threat of the regulators, and instead, most people complain that games, like movies and television shows, aren't doing a lot of innovation at the big-budget AAA level.
And, thankfully, we've found more accurate and more proximate causes of why people commit mass violence in the United States, so video games are mostly being left alone.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-10 07:35 am (UTC)*facepalm* no. no, honey, sex is not the only thing that authors should advise people that sufficiently detailed descriptions of the thing might ought to be reserved for interested adults.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-10 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-10 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-10 03:05 pm (UTC)