If you're a parent of young children, odds are good that your little ones have expressed an interest in video games. I mean, come on, it's 2023. Children these days aren't exactly begging to go outside and roll rusty, old hoops down the street with a stick. By way of comparison, video games are a much safer form of entertainment due to their greatly reduced risk of giving one tetanus, but they come with their own dangers.
When you're not a gaming enthusiast yourself, the world of video games can be incredibly difficult to navigate. Maybe you don't call every video game-playing machine "a Nintendo," but it's hard to know what games are out there and if they're the right choice for your growing girl or boy. For that reason, this article will mark the first of three where I do my best to outline the three most important factors to keep in mind when selecting a game for your kid(s).
Age Rating Systems: The ESRB and PEGI
The first of these three factors, as mentioned in this article's title, is Content. This is the most obvious thing to think about when purchasing a game for your children, because no parent wants to set their seven-year-old loose in any of the hyper vulgar, police-killing, prostitute-having simulators that make up the Grand Theft Auto series. For that particular example, parents could be tipped off by the fact that the franchise is named after a literal crime, but parents may not know by name alone that the Bayonetta games are about a woman who frequently makes hairless cats feel overdressed.
Luckily, the majority of a parent's work is done for them when it comes to assessing a game's content thanks to age rating systems. Here in North America, that rating system is the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). Even if you've never known it by name, you're likely familiar with the ESRB rating system. E for Everyone, E10+ for Everyone Ages 10+, T for Teen, M for Mature17+, and AO for Adults Only. (As a brief aside, you'll never have to worry about your child getting anywhere near games with an AO rating as all three major console manufacturers, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, refuse to sell any game marked as such. PC storefronts also make it an absolute nightmare for any game with that rating to actually be seen. In fact, there are only twenty-six AO games in existence and there hasn't been one since 2015.) For the most part, any parent that follows the ESRB rating system should be perfectly fine. If your child is in second grade, don't buy them an M-rated game. Easy peasy!
HOWEVER. A word of caution before we continue: I've heard countless stories from GameStop employees where parents ignore the warning they're given about a game. Heck, I've seen it happen twice. The employee will explain to a parent shopping with a small child (since any store is required by law to do so) that the game they're wanting to purchase is rated M for Mature. Not M for Mommy's Little Helper. Just because you're buying something that is called a video "game" doesn't mean it's automatically suitable for children.
Now, perhaps you noticed earlier when I said the ESRB rating system does the "majority" of a parent's work. This is because sometimes the ESRB is a dadgum disaster. Here's an example: just as I was doing my research and preparing to write this article, I noticed, for the first time, that 2017's phenomenal masterpiece Super Mario Odyssey is rated E10+. What? I mean, it's not like E10+ suddenly means Mario is running around like a Grand Theft Auto character, but all of the plumber boy's mainline games have always been rated E. So, I popped over to the ESRB site where one can search for a game and find a reasoning for its specific age rating (if the game's not too old, that is). For Super Mario Odyssey, I found this, "In a lunch-themed level, a giant bird-like creature spits out a trail of pink soup (and other food items) towards the player." Really? That's enough to bump the game up an entire age rating? Every other reason it gave was standard Mario fare! Why is the expectorated pink soup suddenly so damning?
You might think I'm being a bit silly, and that those folks at ESRB are just a careful bunch that want to help parents out, protect kids, and wish daily for world peace. Well, E10+ is only one, teensy jump away from the next age rating of T for Teen. Here's an example of one such game: "Players assume the role of Batman as he investigates Arkham City, a neighborhood overrun by psychopathic criminals and former prison inmates. . . . In some sequences, players must solve puzzles or use stealth to incapacitate enemies and free hostages; when players fail a challenge, the hostage will lose his life. Some environments contain bloodstains on the floor or furniture; other cutscenes depict spots of blood on injured characters. During the course of the game, some female characters are dressed in form-fitting outfits that expose large amounts of cleavage; one background sign depicts the silhouette of a woman and the words “Live Nude.” The dialogue also contains some suggestive references (e.g., “The anger, the frustration, the hints of repressed sexual tension” and “Sure could go for some porn right now.”)." These are the reasons that the ESRB gave for Batman: Arkham City having a T rating. Mario and his soup-spewing bird? They're one more upchucked stew away from being in the same category as large amounts of cleavage, psychopathic criminals, and bloodied crime scenes, apparently. Or, to put this another way, nearly every game in the Monster Hunter series is rated T. However, it doesn't have anywhere near as much mature content as Batman: Arkham City. Yet they're in the same category!
Part of the reason for this kind of bizarre situation is that the ESRB set up some weird age cutoffs for its much too broad age ratings. According to the associated age levels, the ESRB splits things into Everyone, 10+, 13+, and 17+. There's a much better approach taken by the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) rating system. Yes, it only applies to European countries, but look at how much more appropriate their age categories are. 3+, 7+, 12+, 16+, and 18+. With a quick google, one can see that Super Mario Odyssey has a rating of PEGI 7, Monster Hunter titles are PEGI 12, and Batman: Arkham City is PEGI 16. That is loads better! Loads better, but even PEGI shouldn't be treated as the be-all end-all for assessing the game content that your children see. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a PEGI 12 rating, but so does Ghostwire Tokyo. Not a single thing in Breath of the Wild will give a twelve-year-old nightmares, but the palpably haunting atmosphere of Ghostwire Tokyo may just send some of those same twelve-year-olds into your bed for a few weeks. How does the ESRB rate those two games? Zelda is E10+, and Ghostwire Tokyo is T. Congratulations! Now we're all confused.
Context Clues
One of the trickiest things that even the most well-intentioned age rating system has a hard time quantifying is context. In some ways, like the images above, it's a bit easier thanks to differences in a game's art style. Zombies in Minecraft make a cute, little zombified groan, slowly move their blocky bodies like toys, and if they're defeated by a player they disappear in a poof of smoke. Meanwhile, a zombie (or Bloater as the charming feller up there is called) from The Last of Us makes wailing bellows, lumbers along with a disturbing, malformed gait, and ruptures in a shower of realistically textured pieces when defeated. Of course, this is one of the more obvious and extreme examples.
Where context really matters and gets more subtle will undoubtedly be with the more mature games. Here's a little, hypothetical example: let's say you have a child that's 17, and they want to play a more mature title. They then present you with two options they'd like to pick from: Doom and Agony. Charmingly named, I know. Both are first-person games rated M for Mature, and both see players fighting demons in hell. (You might not want your child to play either game, but just stay with me for the hypothetical—you'll see where I'm going.) On the one hand, Doom sees the player brutally slaying demons in order to save humanity from a hellish onslaught. On the other hand, Agony sees players take control of a character that condemned themselves and others to hell through increasingly selfish and disturbing actions. While this difference may not seem like a big deal, the context for a player character's actions can have a big impact on what your child takes away from a gaming experience.
While Doom certainly spills gallons of demon blood in a multitude of violent ways, the tiny smudge of a story that the game has is, essentially, about saving one's fellow man. This all reminds me of one of my favorite video game studies from 2009. The gist of it was that players of more "prosocial" games were found to behave more altruistically than those that played games with less of an emphasis on helping others.
Again, you may not want to think of your child violently traipsing through a fictional hell, so here's one final example: imagine a game with dogfighting. You raise and breed dogs for the sole purpose of using them to fight other dogs. That's a pretty horrifying premise, right? Now, what if the dogs were super cute and they didn't kill one another, but they just made their opponent faint? Yay! Now it's Pokémon! I think one would have a hard time finding an issue with the incredibly kid-friendly nature of Pokémon. Except this feller of course.
At the end of the day, the most important thing for parents to know when it comes to video game content is their own child. Don't get me wrong, both the ESRB and PEGI systems are enormously helpful (most of the time), but ultimately it's up to you as a parent to know what your child can handle. Maybe they're not ready for T-rated games when they turn thirteen, and maybe they're ready for them when they turn ten. Knowing your child and knowing what's in store for them in their games will help more than anything.
If you have any questions or additional parental concerns when it comes to navigating the gaming world, please leave a comment below or feel free to email me at the.arcade.website@gmail.com. Thanks for reading, and next time we'll talk about Part 2 of what to consider when Choosing Games for Your Child.
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