Apologies to those who missed last week?s Guff ? we know how much you love it and how it ranks amongst the most-viewed pages in hecklerspray history, but the hive mind went on a road trip. By train.
So, back to normal service it is. Hey ? aren't these things that happened over the last couple of weeks in gaming funny! Ho ho ho.
Seriously though ? that whole PEGI/BBFC furore has produced some amazing bitchiness and a lot of people who didn't care about the whole thing reacting in a way that suggests they still don't care about the whole thing.
What a (two) week(s)!
In a nutshell: games in the UK were rated by one of two boards.
Either by PEGI (the Pan European Game Information ratings system), who would slap some easily-ignorable signs on a box to advise people on whether they should buy the game for their kids or not. These were not legally-enforceable, so an 18-rated game could be sold directly to a child.
Or by the BBFC (the British Board of Film Classification), who would put big, nasty signs on, the same as those you see on DVDs. These were legally-enforceable, meaning little Johnny couldn’t buy Grand Theft Auto himself. This meant his mummy would just buy it for him, then complain to the Daily Mail when the game swore/had violence/prostitutes were present/anything else happened that they would have been warned about would they have paid any attention to their child’s activities.
Basically, these two entities didn’t get along, and it was decided that one of the two should take over the reigns, rating all games released in the UK and telling you idiots out there whether something is appropriate for you or not.
The winner was PEGI, possibly after some kind of censorship-off where they saw who could fuzz-out the (in)appropriate parts of a woman’s anatomy fastest.
Hilariously, the BBFC commented after losing, saying:
?The BBFC has always supported PEGI and wished it well, but it continues to believe that it satisfies these requirements better than PEGI.?
Or: ‘they may have won, but we don’t care – we’re better. We don’t even care. We didn’t want to do it anyway. Rating games is for fat idiots.’
Petty, petty censorship children. You have to love it.
The main problem with all of this, though, is that everyone in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an idiot, and these new certifications will either be completely ignored, totally misunderstood or not trusted by the populace.
Which would make them – as anyone who has worked somewhere that sells games or DVDs knows – just as useless as the current ratings system, legally-enforceable or not.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what they’ll make of the game based on Lars Von Trier‘s new film.
Minami says
PEGI rated the game SSX Tricky with a 3 rating stating that it could play played or viewed by a 3 year old. A character in the game says the world BOLLOCKS often. I wouldn’t want my 3 year old to pick up words like that!