Regulation is is a
legal provision that creates, limits, or constrains a right, duty, or
responsibility. This can be put on movies, TV shoes, videos and definitely video games. As you know, many parents and guardians have complained about their children playing on games that were not suitable for them and also against the law and many morals of our society.
The games that were deemed unsuitable for children usually consisted of violence, sex, racism, drugs etc. The producers of games have been rating their own games until 1994, the ESRB formed in America to rate all American games making sure that games do not break laws and satisfy consumers and by doing this they placed the rating on the box of the video game.
BBFC
(British Board of Film Classification) were created to serve the purpose of ESRB but for the UK. Until the summer of 2012 the BBFC were replaced by PEGI (Pan-European
Game Information) for this role.
(From left to right: Language, Discrimination, Drugs, Fear, Gamblings, Sex, Violence, Online)
PEGI uses these symbols on their box to inform consumers of what they are purchasing. There is only one sticker for the age and there can be as many of the bottom row icons on are games boxes and extremely likely that will be rated 18.
Does that mean all games are playable?
Nope, in Germany Left 4 Dead 2 is banned from the shops simply because it was too graphic and that government decided it was unacceptable. Also Call of Duty: Black Ops has been banned from there too because there were depictions of Nazis in the game and in Germany that was against the law.
Many countries has banned games just as Germany did and they were all because probably one of the laws were broken by the game or it contains content from all of the PEGI ratings.
BUT! In some countries even though it violates a few laws, they urge to change the content in the games so that consumers can still continue playing. For example in Australia they have censored out many things from Left for Dead 2 but the result of this is that the game runs 30% faster. Valve knowing this actually watered out the gore in all of Left 4 Dead 2 games around the world just so that the game runs faster and smoother.
Here is a video of the censorship comparison.
Bad news is that not all games have this great advantage of having their game run faster when censorship is put in.
I have a relative who plays the Chinese version of World of Warcraft, he has been playing it probably ever since it came out. Now World of Warcraft is extremely popular in China that it has to be advertised everywhere. Only in the last 2 years they have censored and watered out the gore on World of Warcraft. He said that skeletons have now turned into filled sacks that are lying around on the ground and in some places they just added in corpses that are pure flesh. The reason is not entirely because of the gore or the pre-adolescence kids playing on this, actually a lot of this revolve around the culture and beliefs they have. They say it is a bad thing to show the dead and that it is disrespectful and brings misfortune to the household or family. I believe many countries have censored games also for a similar reason too.
Another place that has censored out original game concepts/art is North America, the ESRB has changed the public logo of Dead Island to a zombie rather than a man hanging himself in a tree. They did this knowing that an advertisement is out for a wider audience and the man hanging from a tree could have offended, disturbed or disgusted some of the audience.
Here is the a quote from the ESRB:
“We never censor or dictate in any way what type of content can be included within a game. However, a game's marketing materials are seen by an audience that is much broader than that which actually purchases the game itself, so we enforce industry-adopted guidelines as to what is suitable for inclusion in these materials.”
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