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http://www.pissheadnerds.com/forum/viewthread.php?forum_id=2&thread_id=3

And, while the gaming side of it came off better than I thought it would, they still didn’t pay any attention to the way in which games are played.

Then we have the report linking up with a number of other government inquiries that all seem to be saying the same thing “we need to restrict your net access because, you know.. there’s dangerous stuff out there”.

Their suggestion of placing “parental control software for restricting net access onto every new computer” is so technologically unsound and pointless – software will never work. A person browsing the net with you will, until the parent either feels you can be trusted or feels you are mature enough to no longer be supervised.

Yet more demands for censorship using someone elses definition of what is “acceptable”.

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The message here is clearly very ambiguous, with ‘rating’ being a noun for both the process of deciding on a classification and for the fruits of this process: the classification itself.

If it simply means that the classification will be applied and displayed in the same way film ratings are displayed, using a homogenised display system for ‘front-of-the-box’ notification: fine.

If it is used to mean ‘the classification process’; that the BBFC will analyse the varying degrees of adult content in games using the same process they apply to films, clearly this is a doomed system. In a perfect ratings system, games would require exhaustive, systematic testing with every item acquired, every geographical nook and cranny checked and an invasive check on the game files to rule out the possibility of any hidden content (a la Hot Coffee).

In a lot of cases, the QA testing process already assumes this role. The amount of stories I’ve heard from testers about penises drawn on walls by texture artists, rude messages to publishers scrawled in hard to spot places, naked ladies, etc. is seemingly as neverending. There are at least a couple of instances in each game, all of which, once found, are reported in view of complying with the rating the game is being aimed at. Sometimes the content is less obvious, like corpses left hanging from hangmen’s posts needing to be removed.

The point here is that if, for some reason, these items were overlooked by the first-party QA system, they would need to be picked up by the third-party rating system (i.e. the BBFC). Depending on the size of the game, this becomes a task demanding days of work per title, including cross-platform checks (since in some cases, different platforms would have to use a whole different set of game assets). This simply isn’t practicable, which is why I would recommend first-party self-regulation, followed by a roadrunner check by the BBFC, followed by retrospective punishment with significant fines/legal action taken for anything later found to undermine the rating given.
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Apart from completely ignoring the issue of how the ratings process is to be best formulated for games in an accurate and bespoke manner, the report has been carried out with a good deal of sense, impartiality and dignity.

The next step is to put together a ratings system that can do the same, and judging from the BBFC’s recent behaviour, this will need some addressing.

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KG

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KG

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I thought I’d finish what the Daily Mail’s art team started.

http://www.darttweb.co.uk/uploads/anne_diamond.png

She got 99 problems, but a game ain’t one.

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Anyway, I expect mainstream reporting of games to change over the next 10ish years as the older journalists who still handwrite everything are replaced by people who have actually played a computer game.

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Rather than, say, ban all forms of gaming and imprison any involved on the Sun.

This sentence threw me for some time due to the capitalisation. Is forced labour on the nation’s biggest tabloid so bad?

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Wasn’t she the one who said the fall of the Berlin Wall was a good thing because it meant East Germans could go shopping?

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