Because the ESRB already does limit where games are being sold in the US. If there was no ESRB rating, stores would simply stock games based on whether they sell (aside from if a particular game raised a controversy that the store didn't want to be associated with). However, with the ESRB ratings, that's a convenient tool for people who don't play games to complain about which games shouldn't be sold in stores. The people who want censorship are generally lazy and aren't going to research every game that comes out to decide if they should protest it being sold. But it's much easier for them to protest that AO games shouldn't be sold (which worked and now they aren't available in most retail stores) and now that that worked they're moving on to try to target M-rated games in general. The people who care about games are going to look into a game before buying it and will know whether they object to it or not. The ratings system will only help people who want to push for censorship of ideas that they disagree with.

Australia does have censorship. Its terrible. Its not the rating system that is the problem, however. The rating system is fine. Its the Office of Film and Literature that is the problem. That Office has the power to not permit a game to be sold (and its games that are considered too terrible to be given an R18+ rating by a group of people all over the age of 60).

If we just had a rating system, there would be no issue. Its the fact that the majority of Australians are conservative right-wingers and they have no problem with a conservative right-wing body preventing us from consuming certain media.

I would be totally with you if the Swedes were saying sexist games should be banned, but thats not what is happening here at all.


Again, rating system is not the problem. Its this perceived pressure from unnamed groups of people shouting "somebody think of the children" that is the problem. If that is actually happening, that's the issue you should be focussing on, in my opinion. The rating system has some use in that it allows lazy parents who don't pay attention to what their children are doing, to have some idea of what a game is about.

Although that said, who actually buys games from brick and mortar stores anymore? Time to move into the 21st century, methinks :)

Books don't have ratings systems. There are a few particular books that often stir up controversy and might be banned in schools in certain areas, but people don't try to get all "mature" books taken off the shelves at stores. I think it would be the same way for games if there was no ratings system to generalize games.

By its very nature the ratings system is designed to flag games that are "inappropriate" in some way. Lazy parents don't pay attention to the ratings system and buy the games for their kids anyway, and non-lazy parents will have done research to decide if the game is appropriate for their child, so I really don't see the ratings system helping parents. However, like I said before, it makes things so much easier for the moral crusaders because they don't even have to look up specific games to complain about or know anything about the games that they are crying should be banned. I'm sure those people would do the exact same thing to books if we adopted a similar ratings system to flag which books are "mature" for whatever reason.

If the ratings system is fairly pointless in terms of helping parents or informing consumers, but it does significantly help the people who advocate censorship, then why would we want to add more ratings systems into the mix?

Hee hee, I agree :P But retail sales are still a big enough portion of the revenue that publishers cannot risk losing that market, so that restricts what developers are allowed to do in the game because the publisher doesn't want to risk getting too high of a rating which would limit where the game can be sold.

Aah, but there is exactly the point. Books don't have rating systems, yet they do get banned. In Australia, books are often banned (again, yay for conservatives). The fact that books are banned, notwithstanding there is no rating system goes to show that its not the rating system that is the problem, its the ability to ban (and the misuse of that power) that is the problem.

I don't think it does help advocate censorship. Books are banned, notwithstanding the lack of ratings. Even in the US, they are banned at schools, notwithstanding no rating system.

Did you know that for over a year now Sweden has had a rating system for movies based on the Bechdel test? Not one movie banned as a result...

To clarify, I don't have a problem with saying its not a good system and it could lead to censorship in theory. My problem was with the initial post describing the rating system itself as censorship.

I'm sorry to hear about how bad the censorship is in Australia :( I was mainly thinking about the US in my posts. As far as I know there aren't any books that are banned for sale here, and whenever there is a controversy people target a particular book for a specific reason. People don't try to get books removed from stores en masse like they do with videogames. I think the ratings system makes it much easier for people who want censorship to protest against a lot of games at once without even knowing anything about the individual games that they are saying should be banned. Maybe things are different in Sweden, but I definitely don't think the US should add a ratings system for sexism. I don't think it would help anybody here, and it would just be used by people who hate games to "justify" why more games should be removed from store shelves.

Schools are different though. Since children are required by law to go to public school (unless their parents can afford private school or can home-school) the parents don't have any choice in what curriculum their children learn. I think the school has a responsibility to err on the side of caution and not force other people's kids to read books with extreme content in it.

Incidentally, I just remembered something from high school which is kind of funny (okay, maybe not really) and is somewhat relevant. My parents always let me play M-rated games because they knew that I knew it wasn't real, and to be honest the M-rated games back then were much less extreme than the M-rated games now. None of the games I played ever bothered me. However, there was this book report I had to do in 9th grade and I picked "Gone Fishin'" from the list because I thought it was related to the comedy movie with Joe Pesci and Danny Glover. It wasn't. At all. It had a really disturbing rape scene in it and I still to this day don't understand why it was on the damned reading list for 14-year-olds.

Edit: And before it sounds like I'm saying little kids should play M-rated games, it was different circumstances XD My parents knew that my brothers and I were mature enough to not try to imitate anything we saw in the game, due to graphical limitations the games didn't really show more violence than a standard action movie (if that), and the computer was in the living room where they could see everything we played.

I definitely don't think young kids today should be playing modern M-rated games in their own rooms where their parents have no idea what their kids are seeing. I don't think there would be anything wrong with most kids playing the games I played if they were old enough to be interested in playing it, but the current games today are significantly more graphic and detailed (there's no way Diablo or Soul Reaver are even remotely comparable to God of War or Wolfenstein: The New Order XD). Parents really need to judge each game based on whether it would be disturbing for their own child.

I think the whole world is failing but as flawed as democracy is (even direct democracy as the most ideal kind) we are still very fortunate compared to most places in the world. Despite all the BS in politics I count myself lucky to live in a country where I can actually vote directly on issues, even if I have to fight that inner nihilistic voice that says it's all just pointless. Can't allow myself to descend into total cynicism, must work with what we have - which is still better than what most people elsewhere have. But I agree with you, most people don't dissect an issue into pro and contra and then vote based on careful deliberation, too many people have simply chosen the easy route which is to delegate thinking to someone else, thereby killing the whole purpose of direct democracy which is to think for yourself and not just vote by habit or by what the left or right wing recommend who have turned politics into some kind of silly soccer game where one side constantly tries to ruin the fun the other side has.

Did I advocate using the government to prevent private organizations from creating such a system?

And what exactly *would* you call it when a government spends taxpayer money to promote one side of an intellectual debate about a social issue?

What exactly *would* you call it when a group of people with a particular subjective viewpoint is given public money for the purposes of stigmatizing certain products as objectionable?

The swedish institutions seem to have a fondness for such topics:

"Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analyzing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/26/gender-bias-egalia-preschool_n_884866.html

So, interesting little development that's happened. The IGDA has adopted a blocklist that an anti-GGer made based on who follows more then one of multiple people (I don't have the exact list, but I know it previously counted Adam Baldwin and Christina Sommers, who were removed due to how it messed up the list due to twitter API.), calling it 'A third-party Twitter tool developed to quickly mass block some of the worst offenders in the recent wave of harassment and also accounts that follow those offenders.'

Now, what's interesting is some of the people on it, David Pakman, KFC (YES, Kentucky Fried Chicken is on this list! I saw it with my own eyes.), Alexander Macris (Founder of The Escapist), and one very peculiar one. Actually, let me get the tweet, because I find it very interesting to me. THE CHAIRMAN OF IGDA PUERTO RICO . They put a chairman of one of their own local branches on them.

Now, this strikes me as interesting, considering when I checked his tweet history real fast, I only saw these two posts related to Gamergate: , [url=https://twitter.com/siloraptor/status/532917891679944704]Two.. That's it, and the comment he denounced was pretty horrible.

I don't know what to say at this point, the list the IGDA has also has developers on it so it has the look of a blacklist, which is pretty illegal, but people are looking into it. I'm personally disgusted by this, I would expect an organization to actually look into the list that they are putting up, but I guess some people can't be assed to bother.

Edit: Oh!~ Forgot, I wanted to show people this. Got distracted by killing Nazi Robots.

http://thespectacularspider-girl.tumblr.com/post/102919064149/representation-of-women-in-video-games-the-cause Definitely was a damn good read.

I have to admit that this article actually made me smile, at first I thought it was a joke, seriously ? Making a "sexist" rating is already pretty silly in itself but using the Bechdel "test" for that ? It's not a test, it's basically a joke.

But just for fun let's try to "test" some games using it :

Tetris => Sexist - fails point a, no woman in it
Chess Master 3000 - Sexist - While there are two named women in it (White queen and black queen), they never talk together so it fails point b. (And given that the "white" always start first you can also consider the game to be racist.)
Angry birds => Sexist - no woman in it, and even if the gender of some birds is undetermined they never talk together.
Dear Esther => Sexist - only one named woman in it.

But on the other side you have :

Bayoneta 1 & 2 => Not sexists - 2+ women, they talk together about something other than men.
Lollipop Chainsaw => Not sexists - 2+ women, they talk together about something other than men.

And of course the list wouldn't be complete without :

Rapelay => Not sexists - There are two or more named women, they talk together, and about something other than men.

More seriously, I heard about this so called "test" some time ago but never understood how anybody in their right mind would consider it seriously. You could have the most offensive ever game/movie, as long as two women are "named" and talk together for 2 minutes about the weather or what they eat for breakfast, then your game/movie will pass the test.

@TwilightBard: Mass censorship... bullying... now blacklisting... all in the name of the cause, eh? Even those who simply give GGers a fair shake and consider both sides of the issue get blocked. Crazy. You'd think these tactics would alert more people to the nature of those employing them. But no, it's all about blaming all GGers for the actions of a few sociopaths and trolls.

Yes it is!

kalirion linked it in another thread:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/interesting_take_on_the_whole_representation_of_women_in_video_games_thing

and it's being very well received here. :)

Any suggestions for promoting it? Whose attention can we bring it to, etc. Needs more exposure!

---

@Gersen: +1 :)

To be fair, Gamergate constantly gets blamed for actions which occurred before there was a Gamergate. Like Anita's Kickstarter, or when Zoe Quinn first pulled her game off Greenlight due to the poor reviews and alleged harassment. Some people go back years, find every instance where a female developer was even remotely inconvenienced and try to attribute it to modern-day Gamergaters. It's all a bunch of revisionist history and piling-on.

No, it's not. Sexism is discrimination based on gender, that's all there is to it. Discrimination is nothing bad by itself, it simply means you "differentiate" people in some way. If I were to apply at a university for a music degree I would be discriminated against because of my lack of any musical talent, and rightfully so. If a restaurant needs to hire a waitress over a waiter (or the other way around) with good practical reasons, then there is really nothing wrong with it. Discrimination is only wrong when there is no practical reason to differentiate.

What really pisses me off is how a simple term is being constantly mangled and warped to fit some narrative to the point where no discussion can be had because it always means what's convenient. A stupid video game by definition cannot be sexist because it cannot differentiate between people. It's as simple as that.

Watch the first 5 minutes and some other parts of the following and you know why it is completely ok for a gamer or someone in the gaming industry to roll eyes and say "Yeah, move on to the relevant stuff, we know you are a woman." or "F...k o.f".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KM9xwns-8

edit
PS In my many years of gaming I did not care at all and never spent one thought on woman in gaming. I met women in games not many, but that was never at no point as long as I can think back a topic worthy of disccusion for anyone in a game, because it does not matter, the game matters and having fun playing the game.