Building Alliances pt5

 Age Ratings Target Audience

What is an age rating? 

When it comes down to movies and games, they are all assigned their own age ratings that are attached to the content and media involved within said movie or game as well as any other content like trailers or spotlights that stem off from the franchise. The role of an age rating is to ensure the media is being targeted towards the correct age bracket and advises an audience what kind of content is included within it. A children's game would contain solely appropriate content that is suitable for its age range and its rating would reflect this. A game that includes adult themes such as nudity or drug usage would receive a much higher age rating that would tell an audience that this game is not appropriate for an an audience younger than it states and precaution should be taken when consuming such media. 

This screenshot comes from the official Pegi website. Pegi are responsible for reviewing games before they release and making sure its content is marked accurately so parents and consumers understand what content will appear within the game before they engage with it. The age rating solidifies and ensures a game is appropriate for a specific age bracket. Depending on the content included and to what extremity, different games receive different ratings and labels that they must display anywhere their game is accessible so a client can see it. These span through the 5 age brackets seen above and include labels for the things included in games that aren't okay for all ages. These include things such as fear, In game Purchases, Bad language and more. It is important to ensure these labels are attached to a game to a game to prevent the engagement of the wrong age range. A horror game filled with jump scares and fantasy creatures would have a negative impact on children of a young age. Not marking games with these things would mean vulnerable audiences may accidentally find themselves engaging with this Inappropriate content.

These Labels are also equally important for parents to be able to monitor what their children are consuming and interacting with as well as allowing them to keep their children safe while playing games that include any of these labels. A big one that has broke into the news with parents largely within the last few years is In-game purchases. In-game purchasing is a large way a lot of games make their money, not just through direct sales of the game itself. this is particularly prominent in free games where no money is made from an initial download. This is seen not only in games tailored towards adults with manageable finances and real world understanding, but within games aimed towards childish audiences too. A good example of this is the web game Roblox. This game can be accessed through website on browser or through app store downloads. It enables the player to join into various different games built within the platform and play with their friends. This game however, lets the player dress up and customise their own avatar which additional purchases can be made with real world money to gain currency to spend on their avatar. Within the news throughout the past few years, their have been many cases of children spending large sums of their parents money on these games due to lack of safety measures and awareness to parents. 

 

' Ten year old spends £2,500 on Roblox using her mum's money without her knowing'

Georgina Munday, 44, initially thought her daughter's Roblox account had been hacked and used to take money from her bank account, only to later find out her daughter had been making hundreds of £20 transactions over the span of a week to gain in game currency within the game. 

This story was published by the BBC and various other news outlets in May of 2023 and goes to show how important it is to ensure games are labelled accurately and clearly to avoid situations such as this one. Knowing that a seemingly free game does contain the ability to engage in purchases and transactions with real world money allows parents to choose weather or not that game is a place they want their child to be involved within or allows them to take precautions such as removing card info before their child is allowed access to the space. 

Some things that can cause a higher or lower age rating within particular medias such as violence and can affect the rating on different levels. If a game were particularly gory and overly violent, this would impact the rating highly. Some games use different methods to get around the age ratings while still maintaining a higher level of  mature content while maintaining a lower age rating. A game like GTA that includes heavy violence, sexual mechanics, drug usage, alcohol and more would be for certain a clearly labelled 18+ game with an array of content warning labels included. Other games manage to keep a degree of content while withholding a lower rating. A good example of this is the Japanese visual novel game Danganronpa. This murder mystery game does contain its fair share of violence, blood and foul play but it manages to avoid an 18+ rating. it does this by changing the colour that blood appears within the franchise to make it less realistic. Instead of having the blood be red like it should be, the opt for it to be a neon pink colour. 

The series producer Yoshinori Terasawa confirmed in 2014 that the reason they used this colour for the blood in the franchise was ' to keep the rating low and to lessen the grotesque feeling for the younger audiences' By making this creative decision to altar the blood allows for the game to lean more into fantasy that realism and be viewed as less potentially scarring and uncomfortable for a younger audience meaning that their rating doesn't need to be as high. 

What can we take from this for our game?

When creating our game we need to make sure our design work lines up with the age rating and target audience intended for the interaction of our game. It would be a bad design choice to make all of our designs really bright and colourful, very child friendly looking and to then fill the game full of violence and blood. These design choices are something we should be monitoring and taking into account when designing. The overall consensus of the direction our game is going in, our target audience and themes are much more mature and would tailor towards an 18+ audience. This should be kept in mind through the process. 

Bibliography

Anon, Pegi.info. Available at: https://pegi.info/ [Accessed 7 February 2025].

Bird, N., 2023. Roblox: Ten-year-old spent £2,500 of mum’s money without her knowing [online]. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65659896 [Accessed 7 February 2025].

Liang, L.-H., 2023. 10-year-old spends £2,500 on roblox without mum’s permission [online]. TheGamer. Available at: https://www.thegamer.com/ten-year-old-spends-2500-on-roblox/ [Accessed 7 February 2025].