by Bill Todd

Created on: December 09, 2009   Last Updated: December 11, 2009

From a business standpoint, censorship is a necessity. It's no secret that any game slapped with an AO rating fails miserably. In this sense, developers must keep censor their own work to keep the rating, at most, an M.

In that sense, censorship works. Some great games have come out over the years regardless of the censorship and I'm sure many more are to come. The problem with censorship lies with the parents, and this is where I turn into the bad guy.

I'm sorry but I can't stand parents who automatically say "My child shouldn't see this". This comes down to where you're living. Some kids grow up faster than others. Your kid may have the safety of only seeing it in a game or movie. I, on the other hand, need only have to open my window on any given night to see it in real life. I would much rather have the comfort of knowing that it only happened in video games or movies but I am not so fortunate as that kid.

As such, I have found the argument of games becoming too violent or too sexy to be complete garbage. When I was 14 I was playing a game on the original NES called Operation: Rescue, in which you had to first snipe targets through windows and then infiltrate and eliminate targets inside the building so you could free the hostages. Make no mistake, the targets you were sniping through the windows were man-shaped silhouettes, and you had to hit them in the head to take them down in one shot.

This, surprisingly, was not considered a violent game. Let's take it a step further. Wolfenstien was the name, and assassination was the game. I don't mean the one that looked like Doom, I mean the original Wolfenstien where you had to get the bomb in the room with Hitler and all of his generals and then plant it on his side of the room. Again, not considered violent.

That kind of game has been around since video games started. The difference now is the graphics are up to par to show the blood. Have you watched the news lately? How many times to do you hear about a murder, shooting, or see blood on the news? And you still think video games are too violent?

And then there is the sexy side of video games. DOA comes to mind for this. Yet, if you've ever been to the beach, what are you complaining about? If you've ever been to a convention (especially an anime con), what are you complaining about? It's considered par for the course these days. The simple fact is that the entire world knows that sex sells and as long as it does you can expect it in video games.

Whether or not your kid is mature enough to remember that it's just a game is another story, but the first thing you should have taught your kid when they started playing was to recognize the difference between a game and real life. The game is there to allow you to do something that you couldn't, not wouldn't but couldn't, do in real life. If your kid cannot differ between real life and the game then you should take the system away, but heaven forbid you do that to your kid. Instead you make everyone else pay for it by getting rid of a good game by censoring it.

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