I originally wanted to move our "NSFW" checkbox to the main project edit page, but I figured if I was making updates then I should see if there are some other simple changes I could make to plan for the future. Thanks for your feedback.
I do not wish to burden the developer with more noise
Considering the ramifications (vulnerable players getting PTSD because they played your horror game), I think this noise is necessary :-)
I think I'm considering this direction. It seems like age ranges aren't great, but having things like "Everyone", "Mature", and "Adult" will allow us to get the distinction we want without making assumptions about maturity and age.
I definitely want this new system to be front-and-center on the project edit pages, and not hidden away on a sub page. I think it's important that certain kinds of content is classified.
Yeah, but GameJolt's system ( like their entire publishing workflow) is clunky and vague, with especially unclear requirements and way too many steps. We want something people can actually use easily. Maybe something like the tag system to select what the game contains, and players could exclude the kinds of content they don't want when browsing. In fact, a lot of people are asking for the ability to exclude ordinary tags as well, so that would make a lot of sense.
I totally get what you mean, I'm more just pining for that auto generated rating image 😛 Something that will generate this kind of badge on the game page. (But obviously not the ESRB one, something that's custom design by itch)
Just fanning my vanity I guess 😅
Thanks for your feedback.
I think the difference between mature and adult is specifically to account for "adult content," and we're going to need that distinction.
Fair, though I would personally put that as "legal adults only" to make it clear it has potentially illegal content for minors.
While I agree that it probably shouldn't be required by game developers to be so fine-detailed descriptive of specific subcategories of sex, it may still be useful to allow these tags to exist as community-submitted contributions to the game page that are viewable (and rateable) by other users.
You seem a bit overly-defensive for what was a discussion of content rating descriptions and terminology. Immediately accusing others of being 'phobic' because they do not desire to be exposed to certain content in their entertainment is both narrow-minded and short-sighted of you. Every person, regardless of who they are, can choose to exclude themselves from being exposed to certain content.
If I watch porn involving people of specific ethnicities (or excluding them) then that is displaying a preference that I am entitled to do so as a consumer of such content. I never feel that game devs (or anyone) should arm-twist people into being exposed to content they do not desire to be exposed to. Caveat venditor and all that. Kindly keep the penises to yourself :P
In a recent AAA game (Assassin's Creed Odyssey), one of the (gay) male characters makes obvious unwanted sexual advances towards my main male character multiple times to the point where it might constitute sexual harassment. That is NOT ok. I don't give a damn if they are gay. Unwanted is unwanted.
TLDR: No means NO regardless of the genders involved. Get over it.
No, a community submitted ranking or tag only ends up in a mess. It happen in Steam, Gamejolt and Metacredit. They all have reviews that do not reflect on the game but on what they believe.
Consider the other side of the coin: the devs are important to consider, too, because it is part of their workflow, and ultimately their responsibility to jump through these hoops. Yes, it would be good to have every game thoroughly documented, but that friction will make devs less likely to want to put effort into categorizing their game. It's better to implement a 'subpar' content rating system that is actually used than it is to implement a content rating system that is in theory ideal but in practice inconsistent and subpar in its own ways.
The players don't see the rating system directly, they see the result of collaboration between system & dev.
I'd actually like to see an end-user contributed tagging system similar to how Steam does it. You have the basic tags added by devs and then additional tags added by the users (with inaccurate tags being reported if needed).
What about having "Everyone", "Mature Audiences" and "Adults Only" instead of specific ages?
As long as the specific warnings are at the forefront, I think that could be fine. When I'm trying to avoid certain content for my kids, or even for myself when I don't have the spoons to deal with a certain topic, knowing the content matters a lot more than the age rating imo
There's some PG-13 movies that I'm perfectly fine with my 5 year old watching alone and there's some PG and G rated films (Jaws, Poltergeist, Watership Down, etc.) that are just too much, so I'm sure it'll work the same with self rated E/MA/AO. For me, the warnings matter more than the rating itself.
While the whole number ranking concept seems novel, I don’t think it really helps the player in deciding if they should play a game. If I told you that some game had a score of 39, could you make a judgment off of that alone? The content descriptors are a good idea though.
Yeah the number alone is too vague to be useful by itself. Although it could be a good way to quick-search through stuff. ex - a search function that allows you to specify a rating range (adventure games with content rating 50 or lower) and then you could go through them in more detail to view the individual content warnings.
I don’t think the ESRB is a failed system. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough at conveying what it needs to. And if the content desctiptors aren’t enough, the ESRB provides a description for everything it rates.
except it doesn't for things like nazi symbols which under usa is ok for anyone since the usa does not care or Japan who used them for religion reasons. However in germany it is banned 100%, you can't even make it for art. This is what i'm talking about, different laws and different ranking will crash into each other leaving game developers with problems they never knew.
The ESRB has always been a system exclusively designed to benefit the games industry rather than to give a single iota of a damn about the consumers. As someone who used to work retail many years ago (and had friends/siblings who did the same), very few parents bother to even look at ratings or content descriptors at all. They buy whatever their kid wants them to buy.
The Target mom who bought her 5 year old son Grand Theft Auto 3. I will never forget that sale lol.
I’m not sure about it being exclusively beneficial to the industry (it costs developers to get their games rate), but I still see your point. Many parents don’t care about the ESRB ratings. But what are we supposed to do? Make the rating obnoxiously large on the box? Forbid the child from purchasing it? (Supreme Court ruled that you can’t).
Also, come to think of it, I’m not sure that the ESRB’s content ratings are the best. They give games with full frontal nudity a 17+ rating (not 18 plus, because that would be bad for marketing I guess), and lump them in the same category as “games with just a bit too much blood in them.”
First Amendment says you cannot ban games for their content; only put prominent warnings/labels about content that is accurate/descriptive within reason. I'd actually advocate for adding in QRcodes to the back that pull up the ESRB entry with more details about the game's content.
When I said 'exclusively benefits the games industry' I meant it benefits the major game publishers/developers as well as the ESA which lobbies heavily to maintain the 'licensed not sold' nomenclature that has become the standard for software both gaming and otherwise.
The ESRB's content ratings aren't the best but neither are any content ratings in any part of the world. They're only a band-aid solution to the absolute glut of trash that floods the games market on a near-daily basis.
Gamers and consumers alike need quality control and curation from multiple sources simultaneously. GoG can't do it alone. We need featured games and recommendations based on our past actually-played-games history. As gamers we should ask ourselves why we spent 500+ hours playing and complaining about terrible games when the good ones sit unwanted, unloved, and unplayed.
I feel the market is slowly starting to shift away from the trash and focusing more on rewarding the treasure. It is very VERY slowly happening but I am starting to finally see this with major AAA companies and their 50% or lower stock prices from their historical peaks. It is a downward spiral that never ends. It just goes on and on my friends...
Community voting & tagging can supplement the self-disclosure provided by (responsible) game developers. While itchio does a decent job of making sure actual literal asset-flips and trash don't get dumped onto this specific market, it is only a matter of time before the itchio staff get overwhelmed and cannot handle things on their own. The community should help with this and be rewarded for doing so. Itch points or whatever for helping to vote/rate/tag stuff accurately and bonus points when other (unique) users are upvoting their tags. We'll ignore downvotes since those are often abused to censor things.
Automation/bribery of any kind results in an automatic permanent blanket ban from the itchio marketplace for that developer and all of their game titles/products. That kind of threat would significantly incentivize game devs to strongly discourage their users from doing anything to set off the botting alarms.
But in hindsight, all of this kinda just seems up in the air and at this rate things may not really make traction on this rating system issue until at least early February 2019.
If ANY game developer has lootboxes in their games, then they should leave game development and NEVER return.
ANY game developer that is ok with unregulated unrestricted gambling to minors deserves nothing less than to have all their gross income seized/frozen and to be punished to the full extent of the (local) laws.
Something that like should be flagged as adult using our existing options. I've found the page and updated the setting on it.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize the game wasn't flagged NSFW. However, I'd like to mention that the game has a content warning right at the beginning that requires an action to start.
Sorry doesn't cut it. You deserved that catty pun :P
But really though; to torture a cat with a knife and you didn't flag the content as adult or NSFW? Shame on you!
This is why I feel we should have a community tagging system to make up for what game devs fail to do themselves.
Mea culpa. In my defense, though, I never released a NSFW game before, and last time I checked, which is to be fair quite a while ago, there was no way to flag a game as NSFW besides the tagging system (remember that itch is a very young site and it is constantly changing). Also, the flag is not on the main page of the game page creation, it is hidden in the metadata menu and you have to know it is there and look for it (which I didn't know until it was mentioned to me). Which is why I put the CW in the beginning in the first place, since I don't want to expose people to content they don't want to see.
You say CW is not enough, but to me it's actually the best way to approach this, since if someone happens on my game by chance, surpassing the internal filtering system of the site (like from an external link), they will still know if they want to play it or not. I mean, you can't get much better than having the dev itself say "look, this game has this and this, if you don't like this then don't play it." But I can see why it isn't a good choice to enforce CW at the beginning of every game.
Your humble response has moved me to forgive your transgressions. I'm hoping itchio makes a more easily-accessible NSFW/adult tag available for game devs to self-flag their games to avoid situations like this in the future. I know there's a (stickied) discussion thread on this and I'd encourage you to participate in that discussion if you haven't already done so.
If you are an 18+ adult and need 'trigger warnings' by others to get through life, then perhaps you should get off the internet :P
It is not the responsibility of ANYONE else to account for infantilized inadequate pseudo-children masquerading as adults and demanding that others cater to them. That's how CHILDREN make demands. They are not adults and not suitable to be treated as adults so therefore they should be denied access to adult content without further question or consideration. Take your trigger warnings and bugger the hell off the net already.
Literally the only people that I believe could possibly have a strong case for desiring 'trigger' warnings would be military veterans with PTSD. That's about the only type of group I could sympathize with to some extent but I still wouldn't feel 'trigger' warnings are a good idea. The individual needs treatment and society should not be required to bend over backwards for their individual situation.
no, voting system will always get abused. There is never a perfect way to make voting system, people will find a flaw and abuse it.
Those who abuse the system would have their itch accounts banned & an IP ban put in place to deter them from making new ones. Itch already has a system for Two-Factor Authentication so make that a mandatory requirement when making a new account. Even the most ardent trolls will find it cumbersome to go through the entire 'make a new account' process alongside creating new 2FA info & verifying it every single time.
If itch wants to go further to prevent abuse, they could require phone verification with a valid phone number via SMS. That would significantly cut down on a lot of potential abuse. However, that would also exclude a lot of people so I feel the 2FA requirement becoming mandatory would be a nice middle-ground, even for those without phones.
Doesn't work, Steam has an even more annoying system and trolls as well as scammers go to the process. Newgrounds is not even inmunite to this either, trolls will make somewhere to 10 accounts, rise them up weekly and they would have something to affect voting. Not even Voat was able to come up with a better voting system, the best they can do is delay the abuse and try to find them.
Voting is always a bad idea.
speaking of titles they may want to look into restricting the ability of a dev to change the title of a work. for example let's say the sell a game "X", then later they change the title to "X demo" or "X version 0.001". this happens a lot with adult games when the dev abandons the itch version in preference to selling on patron, or decides to milk the audience for more, granted milking could be somewhat defended if they had initially sold the game as "X demo" or "X version 0.001", but to sell it as "X" then downgrade it is a bit bait and switch.
I'd love to see a mandatory archival system for 'older versions' where developers can NOT prevent customers who paid for a game from downloading an older version prior to an update. That way if a future update 'nerfs' a game and/or removes features/content then customers have some recourse and aren't screwed out of money.
