Fallout 3 Frustrated By Multiple, Contradictory Censorship Laws
Fruit Brute and I were just talking about this on the podcast - how difficult it must be to make games that can't show red blood in Germany or pink nipple in the U.S. - and then there's Australia, which recently confounded Bethesda by denying Fallout 3 a rating because of the future wasteland drugs/stims in the game.
Bethesda's Pete Hines sums up the difficulties of covering multiple territories and their various knee-jerk issues:
"The frustrating thing for us is that the standards and rules can be so varied across territories, that we work with five or six ratings agencies and each one has different 'hot buttons'."In one place nudity is a big deal but violence is fine, and in another place drugs are a problem but nudity is fine.
I guess that's the way of the world - not every country is the same. You're not aiming at one target, you're aiming at six different ones, worrying about how each one will feel about different things.
We just go through and make the game that we want to make. We have our eyes wide open, mindful of the things that could be flagged up and how we're going to resolve them if that becomes a problem."
Luckily, Australia wised up and realized that the "drugs" in Fallout 3 don't constitute "incentives and rewards," nor promote or encourage "the use of prescribed drugs" (if they're actually prescribed, isn't that a good thing?). Sigh.
Bethesda: Multiple censorship laws 'frustrating' [CVG]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 2 September 2008
Other stuff like this: bethesda, censorship, fallout 3, pete hines
Name: Dave