Re: Issues with SuperTuxKart 0.9
Hi Miriam,
[ dropped the non-Debian lists ]
Miriam Ruiz <miriam@debian.org> writes:
> I haven't played the latest version of the game myself and I'm not
> personally involved in its packaging,
[...]
> I would be happy with just a warning in the package
> description so that parents and teachers know everything beforehand
> and can choose.
Could you be a bit more verbose what sort of warning you have in mind?
Like a first rough draft (doesn't have to be detailed)? You might want
to follow upstream's suggestion to try the game first though.
To get an idea of such warnings, I looked at the PEGI rating system and
noticed that it doesn't only have an age rating, but also some symbols
to describe the contents a bit more[1]. One of these is
Sex: Game depicts nudity and/or sexual behaviour or sexual references
None of the other rating symbols seems related to the topic of interest
here (bad language, discrimination, drugs, fear, gambling, violence,
online gameplay).
[1] <http://www.pegi.info/en/index/id/33/>
There's also a relevant mention in the PEGI 12 rating description on the
same page:
videogames that show nudity of a slightly more graphic nature would
fall in this age category
Note that to my understanding only the descriptors are used to indicate
the content: just the "PEGI 12" mark does not inform people why the game
got this rating.
Sadly I was unable to find a more detailed description what either of
these mean. I therefore tried searching for games and looking at their
rating and descriptors. I searched for the first game that came to mind
for displaying women in a sexist way: Tomb Raider. None of the Tomb
Raider games had any indication for "sex"; just different levels of
violence, bad language and online gameplay.
A second search for "Grand Theft Auto": no "sex" either, just lots of
violence, drugs and the like. However I remember reading about
complaints of sexist content elsewhere (I haven't played the game).
Third try: "Strip Poker". These four games actually have a "sex" marker;
I'm copying the longer description for reference (only the relevant part):
1.: - Graphic sexual activity showing genitalia
2.: - Graphic sexual activity showing genitalia
- Nudity of a sexual nature
3. & 4.: - Nudity of a sexual nature
1 & 2 are PEGI 18, 3 & 4 are PEGI 16. So my impression is the "sex"
descriptor is only for fairly explicit content. Note that there seems to
be no option to search for games which got the "sex" descriptor which
would make guessing a bit easier.
So, if Supertuxkart was rated in the PEGI system, I would assume it did
get either PEGI 3, 7, or 12; in neither case would there be further
notices related to the topic we are discussing.
Do you agree with this guess what would happen in the PEGI system? You
don't have to agree with what PEGI does, I'm just asking about what
would probably happen if we apply the (to me unknown) PEGI rules to
Supertuxkart.
If you were to add some sort of warning to games, do you think this
could use the "PEGI 12" criteria above for orientation when it might
apply? In that case, one should probably try to find out a bit more what
the criteria means in practice...
Ansgar
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