Re: Including content ratings in games

[Richard Hughes]

On 9 March 2016 at 18:30, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek  wrote:
> So "Cartoon Violence" can be merged with "Fantasy Violence",

I don't think these are the same at all. If you look at the age
differences reported here
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/about-us/our-mission/about-our-ratings
you can see the different types of violence are treated differently.
You're probably right in that Fantasy isn't well defined, and we
should fix that.

> "Realistic depictions of bloodshed" and "Depictions of bloodshed and the 
> mutilation of body parts"
> can be replaced with "Depictions of bloodshed or mutilation of body parts".

I don't think mutilation can be equated with bloodshed. I always think
back to games like Doom where you see "splatter" but not much more.

> I think you can drop "Humor" totally, it's legal in most jurisdictions after 
> all.

I'm not really concentrating on the legality in a specific country,
more about suitability. I'm not sure I'd want my 3 year old repeating
profanity from a video game just yet.

Richard.
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Re: Including content ratings in games

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2016 at 01:57:07PM +, Richard Hughes wrote:
> I've uploaded my prototype generator here:
> http://apps-xdgapp.rhcloud.com/oars and I'd appreciate any feedback on
> that. Some of the categories may be difficult to translate or may need
> further (or better) examples, and so any comments on or off-list are
> very welcome. Also, don't actually add anything to AppData files yet,
> as the categories are nowhere close to being finalised. Thanks!

I think something like this could work, but it's just way too
complicated. If this is to be used for self-evaluation by projects for
purely informational purposes, categories can be merged.
So "Cartoon Violence" can be merged with "Fantasy Violence",
"Realistic depictions of bloodshed" and "Depictions of bloodshed and the 
mutilation of body parts"
can be replaced with "Depictions of bloodshed or mutilation of body parts".
I think you can drop "Humor" totally, it's legal in most jurisdictions after 
all.
Likewise, everywhere where there's four choices three would suffice.

Actually I think it'd be really great to reduce all questions to
binary choice, "no or negligible", "noticable i.e. yes".
And there's no need to ask separately about intersection of categories,
e.g. "sexual violence" could go away.
This would remove the number of questions by 50-70% and make it possible
to fill in with a few clicks.

Zbyszek
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Re: Including content ratings in games

[Sébastien Wilmet]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2016 at 01:57:07PM +, Richard Hughes wrote:
> It's probably also worth stating that I think this kind
> of content rating should be informational-only, i.e. we're never going
> to be stopping people installing applications.

For a young child (e.g. 8), I think parental control would be useful on
the desktop as a whole. To configure web browsers as well.

For, say, 12 year old children, having the 18+ information is just a
temptation to discover what is it…

--
Sébastien
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Re: Including content ratings in games

[Richard Hughes]

On 9 March 2016 at 15:59, Simon McVittie  wrote:
> Here's an earlier attempt at the same thing, which if I remember
> correctly was led by Miriam Ruiz of the Debian games team:
> .

Useful, thanks.

> Debian publishes Appstream metadata now, so there's nothing that would
> stop us from publishing content ratings there.

Right, I'll contact Miriam and see if I can re-use/share some of the work there.

> This seems like something that doesn't need to be GNOME-specific, and
> indeed probably shouldn't be, particularly if you want random game
> upstreams to be adding this information.

Right, it's not GNOME-specific at all, but we'll be the one (again)
pushing the feature forwards first.

Richard.
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Re: Including content ratings in games

[Simon McVittie]

On 09/03/16 13:57, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Sorry for the potentially off-topic posting. I've been working on a
> new content rating system called OARS.

Here's an earlier attempt at the same thing, which if I remember
correctly was led by Miriam Ruiz of the Debian games team:
. I don't think it ever went into
production, but it has what looks to me to be a fairly comprehensive
list of descriptors, and some attempt at being culture-neutral/not
applying any particular value judgements. (But I am not a parent or
teacher, so don't necessarily trust my opinion of content-rating systems.)

Debian publishes Appstream metadata now, so there's nothing that would
stop us from publishing content ratings there.

This seems like something that doesn't need to be GNOME-specific, and
indeed probably shouldn't be, particularly if you want random game
upstreams to be adding this information.

S

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Including content ratings in games

[Richard Hughes]

Hi,

Sorry for the potentially off-topic posting. I've been working on a
new content rating system called OARS. I wrote up some notes on my
blog[1] but I've been asked to post to this list by multiple people.

The content rating system I'm going to be proposing has aspects of
privacy and has the potential to cause all kind of politics, and I
thought here might be a useful place to discuss this as gnome-software
should have the information for all games in GNOME 3.22. We've not yet
talked with the designers about how (or if...) this is going to be
shown in the GNOME Software UI. Unless some consensus is reached and
applications actually add the missing data there would be no point
doing anything any further.

I'm kinda hoping the people on this list might have a more balanced
view of child protection and privacy than the internet at large,
cough, reddit. It's probably also worth stating that I think this kind
of content rating should be informational-only, i.e. we're never going
to be stopping people installing applications.

I've uploaded my prototype generator here:
http://apps-xdgapp.rhcloud.com/oars and I'd appreciate any feedback on
that. Some of the categories may be difficult to translate or may need
further (or better) examples, and so any comments on or off-list are
very welcome. Also, don't actually add anything to AppData files yet,
as the categories are nowhere close to being finalised. Thanks!

Richard

[1] 
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2016/03/07/age-ratings-in-gnome-software-introducing-oars/
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