Wired magazine has a fantastic little feature about the “Adults Only” rating used in America, and how it’s having a potentially chilling effect on the development and marketing of all games with mature content. Manhunt 2 was the most high profile victim, but plenty of other, less well publicised games have been struck down in its wake.

The gist of the article is thus; because the AO rating greatly reduces the ability of a company to sell games - and because the “Hot Coffee” incident drew so much political fire around the world - publishers are censoring themselves to avoid trouble, and in some cases they err on the side of caution. This effectively makes the AO rating redundant, since game companies would rather avoid it entirely rather than risk being slapped with a commercial kiss of death.

This issue of self-censorship chimes in pretty much with what Gordon Hall, Rockstar Leeds Co-founder and Studio Head, had said a few weeks back. It’s good to see that intelligent debate about the issue is continuing to grow, and the industry can start fighting back against the stereotype of videogames being strictly a children’s medium.

Via Wired

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm by Bulent Yusuf
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