“Uh, this game has spiders?”
PEGI, the ratings organization set to take over exclusive game rating duties in Europe sometime in the coming months, uses symbols instead of text for its content descriptors. If you don’t happen to know what they mean, they can be a little confusing. For example, the spider icon means: “Fear – Game may be frightening or scary for young children.”
Okay, good to know.
A few months ago, PEGI launched a campaign seeking to educate consumers on the meaning of those content symbols through the use of short, animated videos. Check out one of them below.
Cute, eh? You can view them all on PEGI’s YouTube channel in a variety of languages.
-Reporting from San Diego, GamePolitics Contributing Editor Andrew Eisen
Comments
Re: PEGI: 'Play Smart, Check the PEGI Rating!'
The video's kind of confusing. Is it really 'obvious' that the first one means the game includes swearing? It looks like it could mean it's the kind of game you're likely to swear at.
Re: PEGI: 'Play Smart, Check the PEGI Rating!'
When the symbols need explanations as to what they mean then surely they have failed. Symbols should be self-explanatory, not requiring videos like the above.
I am concerned with PEGI's rating system though, the incident with Heavy Rain is worrying. Heavy Rain was released uncut with a BBFC 15 rating, it has had to be cut to receive a PEGI 16 rating. PEGI rate too many games at 18 and probably seems safer for them to give games the highest age rating considering the amount of different countries and cultures they have to account for.
Re: PEGI: 'Play Smart, Check the PEGI Rating!'
While I can understand the need to use symbols rather than words (PEGI covers a variety of languages making it difficult to use anything else), they could have used more clear symbols.
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
OK Game Devs
Random Tower
Re: PEGI: 'Play Smart, Check the PEGI Rating!'
True, but isn't that the fundamental problem with PEGI (it's attempting to cater to too many cultures/countries)? You can't have a single currency, and this looks to have similar problems.
Although if I remember a few years, they did use captions with their symbols, but I guess they now want more universal packaging for different countries (otherwise the captions would have to be translated many times).
I'm also sure that they said that there would consultations over the symbols used as surveys stated that they weren't clear. But it appears that nothing has changed. The spider isn't great and the discrimination symbol is pointless (not many games dealing with discrimination).