Zeke's Blog: Regulatory Issues in the Games Industry

Regulatory Issues in the Games Industry

What are regulatory issues? Due to the amount of violence appearing in more and more video games the government was pressured to be involved with controlling what the gamers of these types of games can see. Parents were getting worried about their children playing violent games, because of the graphic content they could see and do with the game content. But with all the different countries having different policies all over the world this created problems.

In the early nineties there were investigations of the impact of violence in video games on children, this is when the age rating was introduced and the age rating was put onto every game box. In the UK video games are rated by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) and PEGI (Pan European Game Information). With this put in place it is enforced by law that any BBFC rated video game sold to anyone who is under age is illegal. Staff would sell BBFC age rated games to anyone younger than the age states could be heavily fined or even sent to prison. If any video game contains depictions of human sexual activity, criminal activity or drug use, acts of gross violence towards humans or animals, by law the game is exempt from PEGI classification and must be classified legally by the BBFC before sale. PEGI age ratings are not legally binding and many people may not be aware of this, for example if a child of any age buys a PEGI 16+ game, no law has not been broken, where as it is against the law to sell or rent a BBFC age rating game to anyone younger than the age rate. But because the UK and the USA have different laws in some parts of the US it is not illegal for them to sell these rated games to underage children. Online games played though internet browsers and mobile phone apps are not subject to age restrictions this kind of industry self regulates. The reason they do not rate online games is because they cannot rate the online interactions that the player might incur.

My opinion on regulatory issues is that the rating system is very useful to parents that are concerned about what their children play and can easily pick and choose what genre of games they allow their child to play. Although children don’t really pay that much attention to these ratings and nor would some adults, and quite often the children have the parents buy the game for them.

Below is what will be found on the back of a video game