This seems like a marketing move. When the Parental Advisory Label was created for the music industry, some bands and labels went out of their way to make sure they got it put on their albums, sometimes even altering their content just for that purpose, because it would actually drive sales. Of course every kid listening to rock and rap wanted “the real shit.”
Here again we are being promised “the real shit” by a meaningless content warning.
It also helps Konami keep its distance from Kojima, which is probably what both of them want.
I really wish game company owners weren’t so easily miffed.
PT would’ve been epic if it went well the way.
I think its also a way for the current studio to say that it doesn’t necessarily support or agree with the “outdated content” without removing it which would make fans angry.
The article lists like 3 offending things in a bunch of games totalling dozens, if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. As somebody who hasn’t actually played the games, sheesh. Give us a bit more content would ya?
Great to know they won’t remove magazine as a weapon
Well, I’m glad that they’re not butchering it like other games, but still this is just stupid.
I think it’s a reasonable middle ground. Much better than outright removing the content and the warning…
I think it’s stupid that this behavior is considered worthy of an article. This is how we should be handling this all the time. If the values change, then update the content rating, but don’t touch the content. And for some reason the norm right now is to completely memory hole anything that doesn’t fit the values. I should have been clearer with my comment.
Unrelated to video games but Taylor Swift has a song where she threatens to tell the friends of her Ex that he’s gay for breaking up with her. This has since been replaced entirely with a new line and can’t be found on anything but the original 2006 release.
She changed the lyrics of a song called Better Than Revenge where she basically calls a girl who “stole” her man a whore.
Can you still legally obtain a copy of the 2006 version? Because with music, if it’s a separate release, it doesn’t affect the past work. This is all, obviously, just my opinion. I feel that games suffer from the effects of this more because often when a “remaster” comes out for a 15 year old game, then it’s the only way to play it, because there’s no legal way to obtain a new copy of the old version.
Now that I think about I think the real difference is that games and other software require constant support, then music audio files don’t. Most people do consume music from a streaming platform, but you can still buy most of it in a physical format that you then are allowed to content shift to a format you can actually play. And theoretically once the copyright runs out, it can be shared. Although Disney has been ruining that for a while now. Games, for the most part are less “stable”. And since there’s almost no legal protection for people sharing old dead games, then the remasters can effectively erase prior art if they change content.
I think this kind of content warnings kind of makes sense for children’s television. But these are games primarily targeted towards adults. We’re able to form our own opinion.
I’ve been an adult for a little while now and I can confirm: Adults don’t exist. We’re all children with various levels of impulse control. But it is frustrating when you feel like you’re being treated like a child. The reason I learned not to repeat swear words on TV wasn’t because they took all the swear words out. It’s because I repeated them, got in trouble, and learned my lesson. So, I’m not against it, but it shouldn’t be news worthy that someone chose not to butcher prior art.
Fuck me I sound like I’m 60.
Isn’t a warning good for that, though?
A warning helps you make an informed decision.
When everything has a label, all labels are ignored.
Like This chemical has been proven to cause cancer in the state of California, literally plastered on everything.
If there’s no label, the option to not ignore it isn’t even there.
If you guys are really in favor of adults being able to make their own informed decisions, hiding important warnings is not the way to go. Or maybe you just want to complain, like many other people.
Make up your mind.
I design and operate monitoring systems, and let me tell you, information fatigue is a real thing. Warning labels make sense when sensibly used; otherwise people get conditioned to ignore them, even if they would be crucial. Think of road signs: if there was a speed limit of 10 before every turn, all speed limits would soon lose credibility.
Hardest part of the job is actually learning which alerts we need to keep and which to trim… if we simply slap warnings on everything, everyone would ignore them soon enough.
Uhhhhh I first played Sons of Liberty when I was like 12 lol. Video games can and will be played by children.
They can, but MGS2 is rated M as far as I can tell.
What is the “stepfamily incest subplot”? I don’t recall that at all. When I search for it I just find this very same article.
I believe that’s referring to
the whole relationship between Otacon and Emma and Otacon and his stepmom in MGS2. The backstory where Otacon slept with his stepmom while he was a minor causing his dad to drown himself in the pool and probably the fact that his step sister was in love with him.
I forgot about that
Yeah… MGS2 certainly is something…
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