“It’s legal to a minor making a M (or AO) rated game”
I am proposing you to discuss this situation
Do you think that as an example,imagine that a bunch of ultra-geek 15 year old succesfully makes a commerical M rated game (i know that is weird),do you think that they can do it,knowing that THEY can’t buy their ow game in the store ?
Discuss legal issues in an international forum is not going to give you many answers. Sorry.
I don’t want awnsers
I want opinions
I just a little discussion
Eh, well, in the US, game ratings have nothing to do with the law as far as retail goes. Game ratings are self governed by the game industry. If you want your game sold by Best Buy, Walmart, etc., it’s probably best to have them or they won’t sell the title, but again, it’s not the law.
The likelihood of a bunch of 15 year olds making a commercial game is pretty low though. Now an indie game, sure. They can make it as violent as they want.
Now if it had anything to do with sex (ala hot coffee), that might be a different story given this country’s rather odd puritan values. Remember there was the underage (17 I think) girl who was convicted as a sex offender for showing naked pictures of herself on the internet…
Why even make an AO rated game anyway, they’re a contribution to the downfall of society.
Stick with T ratings, avoid bad language, don’t make things super gory, stuff like that.
I don’t even have a clue about what those ratings mean.
That is to show my point.
Things like that vary from culture to culture.
As long as the parents are fine with it, there should be no problems. The laws just regulate who can buy the games, not who can play them. I general don’t play M rated games because they always seem immature. That being said, I do enjoy the Half-Life series and Bioshock was pretty cool. It really depends on the content, too often a simple rating isn’t a very good guide. I would also like to point out that you can’t go to a local Best Buy or Wal-Mart and purchase a AO rated game. That is why there was such a large problem with the Hot Coffee “patch” for GTA: San Andreas. It caused the rating of the game to be revised to AO, and the game to be pulled off of store shelves.
I am fairly sure that it would grab alot of attention from the media. The news would focus on it and the “downfall” of society. If the game was actually good, I’m fairly certain that the kids would have some nice employment offers. I would imagin the biggest problem would be the actually selling of the game. There would have to be a publisher, and the game would have to be rated first, before it could be sold in stores. The chances of 15 year olds getting a mature game published are fairly slim when games like The Conduit and Ghostbusters: The Video Game don’t have publishers yet. Companies like EA won’t even think about starting a new IP unless they think it can clear a million copies.
For those who don’t know the rating system, Mature(M) is for 17 years or older. Adult Only(AO) are for 18 or older. These games tend to have very strong sexual themes(basically pornographic). There have only been about 30 AO games made, mostly because stores don’t carry them. The ratings are basically just another logo slapped on the box that the parents ignore and that children use to decide which games are “cool”.
-Trevin
Look’s like in Brazil there’s no game rating system, the entire Europe uses the PEGI system,M from ESRB is equivalent to 18+ (How funny,i discovered that ratings are diffrent in portugal the 4+ and 6+ in portugal are the 3+ and 7+ in rest of europe)
But maybe it’s not a problem a minor making a M rated game (well,it’s hard to make it commercial)
But imagine an artistic group with 15,16 year old kids,where is legally represented by a 20 year old guy,and they sell a Very Violent FPS,an M rated one,it is possible for that “company” be sued,it depends the law
First off why would you want to buy a game you made? I mean you already have it…
I think the rating thing is stupid, some people can play M games or whatever and not be affected by it and some people get totally offended and freak out about it. It should be up to the parent not some ratings thing that groups every single person of the same age together.
And aren’t they just not supposted to buy the game? I think if the rating is too high then they can still play it but just not buy it… but I’m not sure.
Minors creating anything “very violent,” regardless who is representing them, would probably be the worst thing they could do in terms of the gaming industry. While it would be great that they were able to accomplish such a feat as it is no easy task, it would immediately be twisted into “see what video games are doing to our youth?” and would further fuel the feeling that such things are the “downfall of society.”
I general don’t play M rated games because they always seem immature.
Ironic, isn’t it? M for Mature.
All twenty-five of them, working together to erode the foundations of God and Our Country.
can they? if they are talented enough. would they? just look at all the nude patches for variouse games. spore even had a problem with kids being kids. can a buch of 15 year olds make a comerically sucessful game? i doubt it in this day and age. they might be able to make a popular mod for an existing game. i have seen that happen. but big games require big budgets nowdays, in the millions.
I’m going to change your hypothetical question a little and ask “What would you think if a group of 13 or 14 year old kids made an AO rated game?” I do this for two reasons: 1) It’s more of an extreme sort of question and really challenges one to think about it, and 2) it’s already happened several times in the mod community. Any time someone mods a game to make the characters naked you’re looking at what would be an AO rated mod, and there are some more complex mods that turn games like DooM into full-out orgies. Made by kids.
So I will answer that question instead, and my answer is “no”. i wouldn’t have a problem with it at all, and I’d probably get a nice chuckle out of some of them myself. But I would be greatly impressed if a group of 13 or 14 year old kids could turn out something that had any kind of profound meaning or which used it’s AO style design to do anything more than just make people naked and/or make vulgar sexual references. I consider that sort of behavior childish and it surprises me how many people can take something that most people would probably think of as immature and somehow expect kids to not be interested. If anything, AO games are designed and targeted directly AT kids. People old enough to buy an AO rated game for the boobies would probably not bother shelling out $20 or so for it, when the same money could easily be used to net you a few skin magazines and some lotion.
But I have no problem with AO rated games, and if someone took the time to make an AO rated game based on something like Schindler’s List or something I’d probably buy it just to see how well they could pull something like that off, and if they used the rating as an excuse to put boobies on the screen or if they actually tried to make a game for mature audiences (mentally, not via some age technicality). If a few kids could pull off something like that then I’d not only be impressed as hell, but I’d probably hire them or something.
This comes up a lot on GameSpot stories, most people think ratings are pointless, I personally think their opinions are terrible because where will be the agent to enforce that some games will be innapropriate for everyone and should be banned to begin with.
I support banning 100’s of M and AO rated games to enforce the right values in kids. Games like GTA will only tell kids and adults alike it’s fine to re-enact behaviors like heavy drinking and going to sex clubs that sadly many gamers no longer see as an abomination.
nah, super gory is so much fun… i strongly agree with you on the other stuff though 
The real abomination is groupthink and not being able to see and/or accept things from other people’s points of view 
In other news I’m not sure many gamers saw drinking and sex clubs as an abomination in the first place seeing as how both have been around for centuries, not sure what games have to do with either thing continuing to exist 
right CD like they dont see the same things every day on tv, at the movies, and even in advertising. you cant keep kids from seing it in real life, why should you in games? the better tact is to teack kids how to act and think for themselves rather than being instructed by media. your way would leave a kid not knowing the answeres and having to figgure real life out later, when they are teenagers and impressionable. remember how you talked about sex with other kids as a teen? remember how much of wht you learned from friends was bs like pulling out prevents anything bad from happening? you shouldn’t try to leave kids with the impression that life is a big fairy tale. real life will chew them up and spit them out as adults. if games are raising your kids you aren’t doing your job as a parent. parents need to teach kids that fantasy and reality are two diffent things. that actions have consequences, that life isn’t fair, and to follow the golden rule. that games are an escape from real life, that games are just fantasy. that reality is reality, and how to deal with it.
@CD You claim yourself an artists… have you ever looked at the old masters paintings? The gory details they depict? Now I ask you where is the difference to a M rated game?
See, CD… banning games is a bad bad idea. First, it sets a precedent that it’s OK to limit how one is allowed to ‘speak’. Free speech gets thrown around a lot, but that’s what this is. Yeah, a lot of games are commercial products, but plenty of people make games, and many games out there on the web would be AO rated if they were published. Banning the commercial games would only lead to those people on the web from being forced to remove their games as well.
But there are plenty of other reasons. Government is not supposed to be deciding morality, and you’re asking that it do just that by banning things you don’t like because they don’t reflect your morality, all the while ignoring the fact that the things happening in the game aren’t actually happening. Are there stupid people who drink and drive and normal people who goto ‘sex clubs’? Sure. Hell, I’ve been to a few strip clubs, and I used to goto one joint in particular about once a week a few years ago. But blaming games on that sort of behavior is insane. INSANE! People have been going to strip joints or the equivalent for hundreds and thousands of years, and people have been drinking and driving since the invention of motorized vehicles. They were probably drinking and galloping before that.
Comics had this same sort of crap happen to it, when people decided that it would be a good idea to ban comics. Luckily for comics, tho, there were people smart enough in the industry to suggest that it self-regulate instead, avoiding legislation (tho there are laws on the books in many states - ignored laws - that prevent ‘unsavory’ content in comics…). Great! Except the guy in charge of the self-regulation was a huge jerk who enforced a large list of psychotic rules like “No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime”, which might sound like a great idea, until you realize that a simple-sounding rule like that completely destroys any sort of crime / detective comic. The result of the Comics Code was the destruction of 90% of comic genres and readers. Today, tho, comics have thrown out the code and self-regulation entity, choosing to regulate themselves on a book-by-book fashion, and the industry is improving and diversifying as a result. The indie scene is also growing a lot lately, tho this growth throughout the industry is still nowhere near the million issues or more that many comics enjoyed in their heyday.
If you don’t like GTA 4, then don’t buy it. Tell other people that they shouldn’t buy it either (or try to convince them…). But when you start getting the government involved and start trying to legislate morality, then that’s a bad day not only for the citizens of a country like this one, but for artists here in particular.
/end rant.
The people that think that just because they do it on a game it’s ok in real life… They shouldn’t play those games. BUT the people that aren’t idiots that know just because they do it on a game doesn’t mean it’s ok in real life don’t need the ratings because they know it’s JUST A GAME and not real. Values on real life have nothing to do with on a game because it’s a game it’s not real it’s colors on a screen.
And that’s what I mean by it’s stupid to be grouping everyone together.