“Parents More Concerned About Video Games than Alcohol or Pornography”

Via the “What They Play Blog”

Bruce Everiss aptly dissected the recent media hootennany (as exhibited by The Sun and The Daily Mail in the UK) with Sega’s upcoming Wii title, MadWorld, and in the progress pretty much gave us viable answers to why we gamers are so off-put by the recent results in the headline poll carried out by What They Play.

I feel we can easily combine the factors here, as parents seem to be afraid of, generally, sex and violence. To adapt his message for this post, I’ve exchanged any specific statements for more generic ones (changes in bold):

  • If games are family friendly then presumably a DVD player is. And you can play totally execrably disgusting content on a DVD player.
  • Game content is mild compared to film and book content. Games just pale into insignificance compared to what is on these other media.
  • Games are age rated with the excellent PEGI system. Every parent can clearly see this on the front of the packaging. Books are not age rated and any child can buy the most horrifically violent and graphically sexual book with no hindrance. Why doesn’t the Mail campaign against books?

Check out the rest of his post here, and for an opinion on What They Play’s poll, check out Ars Technica’s view.

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