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Hatred has been rated by the ESRB. And it is Adults Only. Regardless of whether this game has been Greenlit, Steam will refuse to publish games with Adults Only ratings. This is why Manhunt 2 is not available on the service, but Manhunt 1 is. I think it is idiotic to have a rating that is never used because no one will sell your product (Hello NC-17), but that is kind of moot. So, after all that hoopla and bullshit, the game more than likely won't even see a Steam release anyway. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 03:44
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Curious why it would have gotten AO. Isn't that usually only for explicit sexual content? I remember Manhunt 2 causing a fuss by having castration on-screen, but I've never played it myself.
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Jan 18, 2015 03:46
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poptart_fairy posted:Curious why it would have gotten AO. Isn't that usually only for explicit sexual content? I remember Manhunt 2 causing a fuss by having castration on-screen, but I've never played it myself. Nope, it includes violence as well. Manhunt 2 got it for violence, but that was mainly thanks to the hysteria of the time (Most notably, Hilary Clinton. So politics played a part in that). Usually a game can be bloody as gently caress, but if it includes graphic depictions of torture, that shoots the rating up. Sort of like how some horror movies can be rated NC-17 the same way, but that is much much rarer now. The NC-17 has evolved to cover only sex and I can't think of any recent examples for violence. AO is still a large part self-censorship because there is no possible way to sell your game. No major distribution network will carry it, no stores will stock it and no digital retailers will sell it. The rating for all intents and purposes doesn't really exist and should not still be around. If your rating effectively eliminates a product from the market, it is no longer a rating. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 03:51
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Fair enough! I don't understand much of the American censorship stuff. Over here it's just a basic 12/15/18 with the latter covering everything from extreme mutilation to porn. 
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Jan 18, 2015 03:53
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poptart_fairy posted:Fair enough! I don't understand much of the American censorship stuff. Over here it's just a basic 12/15/18 with the latter covering everything from extreme mutilation to porn. Americans have a much....richer history with censorship. The movie industry started with the so-called Legion of Decency in the 1930s where the American Roman Catholic Church pressed for zealous censorship of movies (which eventually morphed into the MPAA ratings system that everyone knows and loathes. Oh, and the Catholics are still involved in rating movies too) and the Comic's Code Authority in the 1950's, which basically postulated that comics would turn youths into degenerates and sex maniacs. That was run by a hack child psychologist. It was decades before comics broke free of them and some books have managed to ditch ratings and the code entirely, unlike movies and video games. Video games tried to avoid the above unmitigated disasters of rating systems with self-censorship. It has largely been ok, but Adults-Only is still extraordinarily problematic and can be very arbitrary with violent content. It really should just be for pornographic games, but I guess they want to keep their options open. EDIT: Also, there have only been three games that have received Adults Only in regards to violence: Thrill Kill (a lovely mortal combat rip-off that was canceled and never released), Manhunt 2 (likely to political pressure and widespread exposure) and Hatred. Which seems to be the only one without extenuating circumstances, so it is basically unique in this regard. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 04:01
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if fye were still around i could buy this game boxed. rip.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:05
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Dapper Dan posted:Oh, and the Catholics are still involved in rating movies too) and the Comic's Code Authority in the 1950's, which basically postulated that comics would turn youths into degenerates and sex maniacs. They were right, though it's typically just Japanese comics that do this.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:09
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Dapper Dan posted:AO is still a large part self-censorship because there is no possible way to sell your game. No major distribution network will carry it, no stores will stock it and no digital retailers will sell it. The rating for all intents and purposes doesn't really exist and should not still be around. If your rating effectively eliminates a product from the market, it is no longer a rating. Though if the rating didn't exist, what would you use instead? Unrated? That presents the problem of games which aren't big enough to get ESRB ratings not being sold either. AO functions similarly to "refused classification" or whatever your local equivalent is, what would you prefer to be used instead?
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Jan 18, 2015 04:17
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OwlFancier posted:Though if the rating didn't exist, what would you use instead? Unrated? That presents the problem of games which aren't big enough to get ESRB ratings not being sold either. I'm not saying unrated, the consequences are the same. But when your rating effectively bars it from sale from pretty much every store in the entire country, digitally or otherwise, that's not really a rating anymore. A rating is ideally a guideline for the content you want yourself or your family to consume. It should not be used to push things out of the market. Not to mention the simple name of the rating itself "Adults Only", inspires images of pornographic games (which most of the games rated under Adults Only are) and not what the rating actually includes. So if you have an intensely violent, disturbing game with no sex, it can be lumped into the same category. Where it probably doesn't belong. From the ESRBs own website Mature Rating posted:Content is generally suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language. Adults Only posted:Content suitable only for adults ages 18 and up. May include prolonged scenes of intense violence, graphic sexual content and/or gambling with real currency. The latter two are easily definable. The former, however, is not. I can argue that plenty of Mature games have scenes of 'prolonged' intense violence. How long is too long? What is too intense beyond mature, which is pretty well defined anyway? You torture a guy for a prolonged time in GTA V. To some that would be intense. Enemies in other games writhe around on the floor for a while before you can shoot them. Same for this. The problem is when you start splicing content down like this, you start splitting hairs and things get murky. My solution is to remove the intense violence from AO, fold it back into Mature. Keep AO for exactly what it sounds like: Porn and Gambling. Or you could split the rating. Have a Mature+ that warns parents of graphic violence or torture without it being unsellable in major retailers. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 04:32
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Except the AO rating isn't designed to bar it from sale, it's a function of the content that elicits that rating. The content causes outcry, it earns the rating appropriate for that content, retailers refuse to sell it as a result, if you change the name of the rating, that will simply become the taboo rating. There's nothing wrong with the rating system in that respect, it's functioning exactly as intended, trying to categorise a very varied set of content into something approaching a simple metric so that people can make quick decisions. A retailer necessarily isn't going to playtest every game to make their own decision, that's what the rating board is for. Similarly most parents probably aren't either. Unless your argument is to just not bother making a distinction beyond a certain point so that extreme content and less extreme content both get the same rating, you're not going to change the AO effect, and if you do suggest that, that's quite contrary to the function of the rating system. The ratings board exists to make decisions about how much is too much for each given ratings category. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 04:43
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it amuses me to no end that all this hoopla is about an isometric game
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Jan 18, 2015 04:53
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The MPAA has a shadow organization board comprised of many different subsets of people. It is funny the lengths they go to keep them hidden from society.
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Jan 18, 2015 04:55
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OwlFancier posted:Except the AO rating isn't designed to bar it from sale, it's a function of the content that elicits that rating. My argument is that if you want to have a rating for porn, have one. You simply cannot have a rating that lumps in pornography and not pornography. Because everyone will associate the not pornography with pornography and the rating is effectively censoring unpopular content. NC-17 does not imply violence, it implies porn. Adults Only implies porn. That's a fact. Even a poster in this thread thought Adults Only was porn simply by reading the name. Retailers think that. Parents think that. If your game is not pornographic and gets an Adults Only label, it is not being fairly represented at all and basically going to not be sold simply because retailers don't want to sell porn. And as you said yourself, they will not distinguish between the non-porn AO and the porn AO. And you've mentioned the exact problem with Adults Only. The ratings board has a category where they can basically arbitrarily throw a game down a well, never to be seen again, where it is branded as pornography. If you have something that is too controversial with its violence, you can just find a way to toss the AO rating on it and have it be buried. To its credit, the ESRB hasn't done that many times (Manhunt 2, maybe Hatred). It is telling that this is only the third game in the ESRB's 21 year history that has been given the AO rating for violence only. However, the MPAA has branded films it didn't like with NC-17 since the rating has existed. Though, they get more leeway when they want a movie thrown down a well. Scalding Coffee posted:The MPAA has a shadow organization board comprised of many different subsets of people. It is funny the lengths they go to keep them hidden from society. Pretty much everyone should see 'This Film is Not Yet Rated'. The fact that the Catholic loving Church is still a major part of the ratings system in this country boggles my mind.
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Jan 18, 2015 05:16
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Why don't retailers, especially digital ones sell AO games? That's weird/stupid. Also move theaters these days have 20+ screens, why does an NC-17 rating matter? Who is telling these theaters not to show these movies?
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Jan 18, 2015 05:42
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they should do it like Blockbuster where the porn had blank cases that only showed the name
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Jan 18, 2015 05:43
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Powercrazy posted:Why don't retailers, especially digital ones sell AO games? That's weird/stupid. Also move theaters these days have 20+ screens, why does an NC-17 rating matter? Who is telling these theaters not to show these movies? There isn't really a host of must play AO games. manhunt 2 wasn't even as good as manhunt 1 and what else is there, rapelay?
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Jan 18, 2015 05:47
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Dapper Dan posted:Pretty much everyone should see 'This Film is Not Yet Rated'. The fact that the Catholic loving Church is still a major part of the ratings system in this country boggles my mind.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:17
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AO doesn't mean porn, it means stuff which isn't judged as suitable for the previous rating band, which includes porn by default because porn is already legally not sellable to minors, and it also includes things which are judged as being unsuitable on a more precise level. It is rare to find things that contain sufficiently extreme content to merit an AO rating without them also including porn in them, that says rather more about the people who make extreme content than it does about the rating system, however. Further, once again, the decision to not sell AO games is not an enforcement from the ESRB It is an elective policy by the retailers. You're trying to blame the rating system for what people use it for, and for the laws which govern what content can be sold to who.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:19
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Powercrazy posted:Why don't retailers, especially digital ones sell AO games? That's weird/stupid. Also move theaters these days have 20+ screens, why does an NC-17 rating matter? Who is telling these theaters not to show these movies? Again, the stigma is that they're porn and the a lot of people still see video games as toys for children. Retailers don't want to deal with the controversy because everyone associates AO games with porn, same with NC-17. Also, the thing isn't only with the theaters. Commercial networks will not play trailers for movies rated NC-17 (which is why you will frequently see unrated movies that might eventually be rated NC-17 run trailers). Newspapers will not run ad-space dedicated to them. AMC theaters and Regal Entertainment will not run NC-17 or unrated movies, and they are the major theater chains in the country. Because NC-17 is associated with porn and they don't want the controversy. Unless you've got an art house theater and are already a filmophile, you're poo poo out of luck to see an NC-17 movie at a multiplex. OwlFancier posted:AO doesn't mean porn, it means stuff which isn't judged as suitable for the previous rating band, which includes porn by default because porn is already legally not sellable to minors, and it also includes things which are judged as being unsuitable on a more precise level. And any rating that includes porn and non-porn, the non porn will always be assumed to be pornographic. You cannot separate this. This is why they are not sold, because retailers do not want to be associated with porn in any way, shape or form. And it is rare because the ESRB decides it is rare. All it takes is a changing of the guard, a shift in perspective and other games that aren't AO suddenly become AO. The only difference between M and AO in regards to violence is the word 'prolonged'. Rating systems aren't loving black and white. GTA V features a torture scene that goes on for several minutes and is graphically realistic, AO. Wolfenstein: The New Order shows soldiers being mutilated and tortured in graphic detail in cut scenes which include limb and organ removal for minutes at a time, AO. Postal 2, you are allowed to burn people, chop them and then urinate on their corpses. All of which takes a prolonged period to carry out, AO. See how easy that was? I just took 3 games that were rated M and moved them right into AO because the only difference is the word 'prolonged'. Now those games are not going to be sold. Newspapers, Magazines and TVs are not going to run ads. No retailer will stock them. Because they are considered pornographic, exactly like NC-17. And retailers do not want to sell pornography. EDIT: I should point out: It is completely legal for a minor to buy an M rated or even an AO rated game in the United States. The ESRB is NOT a governmental body, nor does it have any laws regulating it. The ID that you're required to show are store/industry policies to prevent the very intervention of government enforcement of ratings. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 06:24
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Bleg, double post.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:38
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Congratulations, you have established that trying to create an objective metric of a subjective medium is impossible. Now you just need to establish that there isn't a need for something which approximates one and you will have debunked the ratings system. Yes, your individual interpretation of what does and doesn't fit into each category will be different for every person. There is precisely gently caress all you can do about that and it does not negate the utility of the ratings system, which is quite necessary for the good functioning of retailers. As they will not want to sell all kinds of content and will have difficulty selling any content without consumers having the ability to pre-screen them first. That is why the ratings system exists. If you create a new content category specifically for games which would fit into the AO category for violence, do you think retailers will stock that? One of the three games total that have earned that rating did so because it created enormous amounts of controversy, this one also has managed to create plenty of fuss. Do you seriously expect that retailers will stock the proposed AO: Violence rating? Unless you are arguing that violence should be ignored and folded down consistently into the M rating, which is not a criticism of the ratings system and should not be framed as such, your point doesn't stand.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:52
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OwlFancier posted:Congratulations, you have established that trying to create an objective metric of a subjective medium is impossible. Now you just need to establish that there isn't a need for something which approximates one and you will have debunked the ratings system. I'm not arguing for the death of the ESRB or all ratings systems, even (but gently caress NC-17, for reals). Sorry if I wasn't clear. Here is what I am arguing: I am arguing that violence be completely taken out and dissociated from the AO rating because it is far too arbitrary and the rating itself will forever and always be considered pornographic, whether or not that is the intent of the rating. Preferably by folding all violence, prolonged or not, into the M rating. (Oh, and if a new violence rating contained CoD and GTA? gently caress yes they'd stock it). And it is a criticism of the ratings system, because 'Adults Only' is viewed as pornography and the ratings system has not moved to correct this. It is simply more convenient for them to have a rating where, if something gets too controversial with its violence, they can just basically eliminate it from being sold. However, AO does exist for a reason. You don't want hentai games getting an M or something and being stocked at Walmart next to CoD. It should not exist, like NC-17 does, as a well where you can throw things that are controversial down and hope they disappear. Which can very easily happen to video games. Scalding Coffee posted:A real good movie. The thing about it is that one person is representative of how that one group would react to each movie. One Islamic representative? One Asian? Why not? It really is the most 1950's way of thinking on how to analyze a culture. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so loving sad. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 07:20
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manhunt 2 was released
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Jan 18, 2015 07:25
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Black Baby Goku posted:manhunt 2 was released Because it was edited down to an M: quote:Later that same day, in an unexpected move, the ESRB issued the game with an AO rating. The initial impact of this decision was that major retail chains, such as Walmart, GameStop and Target would not stock the title. However, the following day, June 20, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony Computer Entertainment issued statements saying they do not allow AO titles on their platforms, which effectively meant the game would have been banned in the US. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 07:27
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Dapper Dan posted:Because it was edited down to an M: the pc one wasn't
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Jan 18, 2015 07:30
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http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-MANHUNT2/manhunt-2
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Jan 18, 2015 07:31
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Gamersgate is based in Sweden, not the US. You still can't buy it off of an American digital distribution platform as AO. EDIT: Never mind, it appears amazon is selling it uncut. But as with most console games of that era, PC is basically an afterthought. And you still can't buy it on Steam, so for many it may as well not exist. Dapper Dan fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 07:37
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Wow, wonder who had an uncle on the ESRB to get this stupidity pulled off. Well, since they've reviewed it, presumably the devs can edit it in a way that makes it's absurd violence as acceptable as that of the other absurdly violent games. Hey! Maybe they'll be editing on those antennae after all! The Snark posted:Launching petition to have the Hatred Devs mod alien antennae onto all of the characters to make it all OK. The Snark fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 14:52
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most DD stuff doesn't care except Valve with Steam but heck, if I have to go to a non-Steam platform to buy my copy of Hatred, I'm freaking doing it
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Jan 18, 2015 19:25
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I'd pay money for a device that let's me prove I'm the legal age (swiping my id? can't be more annoying then an always online check) to not deal with this stupid poo poo anymore. No, not especially because i want to play Hatred, but i live in Germany and i should be able to play titles where the blood is red instead of green or other poo poo they censored. Any kid who wants the game will torrent it anyway or play it at the cool friends house. I'd let them scan my apartment for other human life forms and then remotely lock my door while the game is running to just not have to deal with this poo poo of not getting the poo poo i want because most parents are loving irresponsible and have no idea how to watch the computers of their children. Sorry for this rambling, but this poo poo is driving me mad for years....
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Jan 19, 2015 17:44
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if you weren't going to pirate this crap out of idle curiosity and were actually going to buy it with actual money, i just don't know how to deal with that information
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Jan 19, 2015 17:54
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sharts posted:if you weren't going to pirate this crap out of idle curiosity and were actually going to buy it with actual money, i just don't know how to deal with that information You probably shouldn't advocate piracy.
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Jan 19, 2015 23:36
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I wonder if people will be even be allowed to stream it on Twitch now given the rating? I sure didn't want to buy it but I wanted to see some poor sap struggle through playing that garbage.
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Jan 20, 2015 00:11
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drat, I was hoping for the mobs of store-wide boycotts when this came out. Guess I'll settle for the droves of twittertards crying violence. The Snark posted:Hey! Maybe they'll be editing on those antennae after all!
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Jan 22, 2015 14:54
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New trailer out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa8sQb9nb7w
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Jan 30, 2015 02:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR9wxyDrud4 "It's disappointing that steam does not choose to stand up for freedom of speech here, ..., we need that in video games, ..."
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Jan 30, 2015 04:59
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Too late to be useful. Maybe a picture of ESRB saying nope?
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Jan 30, 2015 05:27
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ZZZorcerer posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR9wxyDrud4
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Jan 30, 2015 05:29
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sharts posted:if you weren't going to pirate this crap out of idle curiosity and were actually going to buy it with actual money, i just don't know how to deal with that information heck, i'm STILL buying it
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Jan 30, 2015 05:31
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CrashCat posted:Surprise, the guy with an alter ego that acts stupid as viral clickbait is someone generally unlikeable im going to rip your loving head off and gently caress the hole at the end of your neck with a chainsaw
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Jan 30, 2015 05:32
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