Does MMO really mean – Must be safe for kids?
I’ve long argued that adults should be able to play adult games in adult virtual spaces. This argument is most easily understood in terms of issues of sexuality, but it’s not confined to that. The men-in-tights type fantasy worlds can also have dark themes – in fact, they do, they just tend to side step them and sprinkle themselves with glittery elf-dust.
The theme now seems to be popping up in the Virtual World podsphere. Ryan and Gary over at Massively Online Gamer (MOG) have been complaining in their alcohol fueled way about, well, everything; but particularly the developments in Mythic’s treatment (or ‘kiddificatoin’ in their words), of Games Workshop’s property Warhammer. While Scott, Andrew and Randy at The Instance are miffed that Blizzard forced a re-name of their WoW guild “I Eat Babies”. Which as they point out is actually a quote from a character in the game.
This all harks back to the case of Mystere’s EverQuest fan fic and SOE’s successful efforts to have it removed from a non-Sony owned web server.
Let’s face it - we play games of death and destruction. Virtual worlds are replete with tropes of war, violence and sexuality. But what they will admit to is another matter. They just won’t go quite that far. They are neutered. Like so many guitar bands these days they have the ink and the piercings but the music formulaic, simple-melody, boy-band pop. It’s all fit for 12 year olds.
But as the MOGers point out, is the market for MMOs really 12 year olds? Would creating a world where black magic felt, well, a bit black, bring the end of days for the publisher?
I guess in the US the problem might be, to use the old term, ‘the moral majority’. So it’s ok to be hypocritical about what we are doing in online games, we can have characters with funny voices saying they kill babies, we can slaughter countless ‘generic young NPCs’ but we don’t seem to be able to say that’s what we are doing. Female characters are hyper-sexualized and there are ‘kiss’ emotes, but nothing stronger. It’s liquor on the streets in brown paper bags, that’s what it is.
Come on Europe. We embrace the dark. Men-in-tights + EvE sensibilities + dark evil badass magic. Make game now.
