Saturday, February 19, 2005

Can Someone Say "Lawsuit"?

At Media Play tonight, we bore witness to a harried mother trying to drag her son--I'll guess he was about 6 or 7 years old--away from the playing with the PlayStation 2. After the mom peeled her kid away from the game demo, I happened to glance down at the game that was in the console. They were demoing NanoBreaker by Konami. I cannot speak to the content of NanoBreaker, as I have not personally played it; however, the story is apparently that you are a cyborg fighter trying to slay the nanomachines that harvest human blood. The game is rated M (Mature), a rating roughly analogous to an R rating for a movie. In the words of the ESRB, "content may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older." Content descriptors for NanoBreaker indicate that the M rating is for blood and gore and violence. If the screenshots with that link are any indication, they're not just blowing smoke.

Now, I am all for letting video game developers (and movie producers, etc.) create products with as much blood, gore and violence as they deem necessary. Game developers will put out games they think they can sell, and there are people who enjoy a good polygon hack-and-slash. People are free to not purchase those games that they find objectionable. However, on purely a practical level, stores are getting sued for selling M-rated games to 16-year-olds. Wouldn't someone think that having an M-rated game playing in the demo consoles where any unsupervised 5-year-old can pony up to the controller might just be a bad idea?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If a child that young is unsupervised in a public place, I would say a video game is the least of the parent's problems. Can we say amber alert?