Regulation
Within the games industry there are certain rules
regarding the regulation and even censorship of certain content given the
country or premise it is released into. Certain games get banned altogether in
certain areas of the world as a result of legal or ethical issues but ultimately
this falls under a regulatory point of view. In Australia they have a number of
issues with regard to regulations from the import of goods and the immigration
of people, but this stretches into the video games market there also. The
regulation standards board of Australia has certain things that it looks for
with new games that want to release publically there that have to be looked at
carefully and either censored horribly (like with Left4Dead 2) or just
completely banned in the country because it’s content promotes the wrong kind
of behaviour or is just considered inappropriate. Of course this doesn’t always
do what it’s supposed to do, a lot of the time when a particular game goes
through that sort of controversy it receives even higher levels of publicity
due to people being curious about just how bad this content might be. This
leads to a high level of patching and or piracy with regards to the game, which
wouldn’t have made money anyway in that country I suppose but it raises a moral
debate slightly.
A lot of the time the old paradigm that anyone over the
age of 18 is free to see and hear whatever they want, however this is often
contended by regulatory bodies as it becomes difficult to keep this kind of
content away from people under the ‘legal’ age of the classification of the
material their products contain. It’s not enough to put a stamp on a game cover
and have stores only sell to people of the appropriate age as there’s no way to
restrict where they go after that, who’s to stop a friend/parent/sibling buying
a game for a child that is deemed ‘inappropriate’ for someone of that age
group. At the same time who’s to say that the day difference between being
nearly 18 and actually being 18 makes any difference at all to a person’s mental
ability to distinguish what’s real and what isn’t from any age. Some people
develop a better sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ at an earlier age, is it right to
regulate what someone sees if they feel like the content is suitable for them.
This is the problem with blanket regulatory rules, a lot of the time the only
way to get something out of consumption is to ban the product entirely, but the
counter effect this has that the product gets even more hype because of content
that is deemed suitable to get rid of entirely. This leads to more and more
people going out of their way to try and find copies of versions of the banned
game and replicate it themselves to spread it anyway, in terms of monetisation
this doesn’t really make a difference to the producing companies in terms of
profit for the title as they aren’t allowed to sell it anyway, the difference
is that people still get hold of it and get to experience something that may be
perfectly acceptable for the games industry but has been subjected to a ban on
the grounds of unsuitability of perhaps even just one scene in the game.
From these issues we see where the difficulties in the regulation of certain content to certain groups is difficult because it comes from a moral perspective on the people who actually govern the representation and release of the industry under their jurisdiction. This means that in some areas people are massively underwhelmed with the amount of content they can actually legally get access to (like in China where internet censorship is a regulatory firewall), to places in which people might see the lax attitude towards regulation as a moral issue regarding whether or not it's right for certain forms of content to be so easily accessible. The internet is a huge place and it's nearly impossible to regulate certain things from it whilst still trying to allow people the right to be witness to whatever they see fit, this is slightly aided by the use of parental controls and certain ISP controls as well as built in restriction on what search engines provide, but at the end of all this it's very easy for someone to find whatever they want whether it's suitable or not because it's just that easy to get hold of, and that isn't always the responsibility of the regulatory bodies that do what they can to control and yet balance what content is allowed but alot of it falls upon us, the people who actually find these things. If someone is deemed to have done something that was purely influenced by content they had gone looking for then it's not morally right of us to question the regulation of their material, it is the responsibility of the people who take action as to whether or not they do what they're influenced by and the media takes it a long way out of proportion but at the end of the day the people who do ridiculous things based on 'influences' were highly likely to do it anyway.
~ZH
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