Gamernode: Columns -

"We have some strange guilt about sex"
That's good ol' American (Western?) dichotomy when it comes to sex. We want it, It's everywhere, adverts, stories, jokes, media. Yet when it's brought up in other forms or attempted to be talked about openly it be comes taboo. Now I'm not sure if this is only in America, but I can't speak for elsewhere.
Games just need to age a bit more and more of them old folks gotta start cycling out of the main voting block, and everything will be hunky-dory.
Also, conerning age approiate games, certainly you aren't suggesting that little 7-year-old timmy be allowed to play GTAIII? I mean, teens sure, but that young? I'm not sure i'd want my (imaginary) kid doing so. And that extends to other forms of media as well mind you.

Of course, I think parents should be determining what content their children can see, but I don't want the ratings system to become a tool to enforce a political agenda on game developers, as is often the case. I know this happens with the MPAA and movies as well, but we need to try to escape that while the medium is still young.

I remember talking with Professor Henry Jenkins a while back when I still ran StopStopkill, and he mentioned that in his opinion, games could do a much better job of explaining "hard to explain" events to kids due to the interactive nature allowing them to experience it themselves rather than just see what happened.
I know from an anthropological perspective (I can't speak on psychology -- I didn't get my degree in that) there are a lot of cultures which rely on games to teach children important information. It's actually fairly recent (in anthro terms, that is) that games have been considered something kids do or people play for fun.

Censoring is bad indeed. It's the customers' choice if they want to invest in games that may have extreme violence or sex in it, not the government or console manufacturers. Censoring is true dictatorship.

As for the sex in America, it is the christian right that is lobbying against it. Remember when mortal kombat first came to home systems? To be released in Japan, the blood had to be changed in color, *making it sweat HA*. Any oppressive government (all large ones are) will find ways to sensor or styful the public. For most people, seeing humans as "the human animal" is to much to take. Get over it. We like violence, conflict, shame, horror, and anything that produces large amounts of dopamine to light up our pleasure receptors. As long as people look to their gods or governments for what content is good or bad, expect this trend to not only continue, but to accelerate at an alarming speed.