A Memory of Gaming

Nostalgia is a strange thing. The same part of my brain that stared back at me in bafflement this morning as I tried to remember where I'd put the key for the back door is the same part that effortlessly flew through the first chapter of Doom this morning as though it had been five minutes since I last played it, and not more like 15 years. Memory, it seems is a fickle bitch on the scale of Catherine the Great. >I do find myself worrying about how much I forget nowadays. Even worse is when I misremember something. I don't mean forgetting something; that's a simple absence of knowledge. No, misremembering is when you've gotten two things mixed up or been creatively filling in the blanks, and have a clear, defined mental image of something that never fucking happened. When you let thoughts like this enter your head, it's like a virus. Because if all your knowledge and assumptions are based on the thoughts that lead up to them, then having a misremembered fact or conclusion in there is like sticking a plasticine girder at the bottom of a skyscraper. Actually more like a beehive (I can switch metaphors if I want). Either way the foundations are rotten and all the conclusions that lead off it are unsound. I went through most of my teenage years - right up to university in fact - believing that birds were a separate classification to animals (an idea that can be blamed on a primary school teacher with horrific pronunciation issues). I mention this only in case I've misremembered two important facts that make me angry at the government's recent howling ravine of twattery, the Digital Economy Bill (I say recent; it being from a British government, it's moving at the pace of an entirely spavid horserace). The stupidity in question?

"Improving digital security and safety, by putting in place a classification system for boxed video games that meets the needs of parents and children... protecting children by making age ratings compulsory for all boxed games designed for those aged 12 or above."

Excuse me if my brain is farting out soup again, But don't we already have two different systems of ratings? Isn't the BBFC system, at least, already enforced by statute? I am so pissing sick of hearing about how the gaming industry needs regulation and we're selling violent games to children. I remember (but again, this is just my flawed, personal recollection) working at a branch of Game and being told by the manager that the flaming mount of shit the store would be in if we sold games to underage kids would see us out of a job the second we were found out. Parents who will stand there and bleat about their right to make decisions for themselves, and how dare some shop monkey tell them what they can and can't buy for their family; when all the frustrated minimum-wager is doing (between grinding their teeth into a fine powder) is explaining that they're not even supposed to sell the game to someone if they suspect it's being bought on behalf of a minor. It's fairly obvious you're not buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II for yourself when your son is standing beside you making sure you buy the right one, you asked for the Sony Wiibox 360 thing and he's telling you how he can't wait to play it when he gets home. Imagine doing this with alcohol or cigarettes and then tell me it's not retarded. There clearly are some games that are completely unsuitable for children. That's because they are designed, marketed and statuted to be sold to adults. And some fucking retards can't get their weird, smug, punchable heads round the idea. Lazy parents and Daily Mail readers want acts like these so they can sit their kid in front of the idiot box and never have to deal with the actual meat and two veg of parenting: guiding your child through life experiences by talking to and spending time with them, instead of wrapping them in cotton wool and trying to keep the wolves from the door. Preparing them for the adult world, instead of trying to destroy the adult world for your child's 'safety.' It's also going to stifle the slowly growing sector of mature, well scripted games that make full use of a storytelling pallette. I'm not talking about things like Manhunt or Mad World, the modern equivalent of 80s video nasties; I'm talking about games like Borderlands where the adult content is so subtly woven into the audio logs and enemy responses, removing it would completely strip the realism from the lawless borderworld setting. Or the Modern Warfare series' single player campaigns, which (in bizarre contrast to the multiplayer content) try to show the full gravity of war and death by facing incredibly dark themes in an incredibly dark way. More importantly, these games have the freedom to do so under current statute, and saying there is no protection for children is a bare-faced lie. But if we let the Alan Titchmarshes and Claire Rayners of the world hop onto a new censorship bill, will companies be willing to let designers make games like these in an ever more 'financially aware' climate (by which I mean publishers and producers shitting themselves over every minor factor that could contribute to a project's failure)? The issue isn't stores selling unsuitable games to kids, it's the stores selling them to protesting parents who have no idea what the hell they're passing on to their kids. But unfortunately, the one thing the government won't try and regulate is stupid and negligent parents.