Censorship & Age rating in the games, animation and VFX industry

In this blog post i will be talking about how age ratings and censorship affects the industry as well as identifying the risks and considerations.

Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or "inconvenient" -Wikipedia

Specifically in the animation industry if TV shows or films want to include sensitive material in their content they have to obligate to the law and either remove the content or water down what they're showing. Using profanity in shows that want to be shown results in the words being bleeped out. Shows and films using adult material and intend to keep it that way can have their work shown on television provided it is on at 21:00 as in the UK that is the watershed.

The same guidelines also apply towards the VFX and games industry as what the developers do is send it off to a committee (an example of which for the games industry is PEGI). From there the product will be reviewed and given a rating. From there the producers will see the criteria and choose what to censor. As well as this even adult games can be censored. A prominent example is 'south park: the stick of truth' where Europeans have a specific level cut due to the inappropriateness of the level.

Age rating
The company responsible for age rating in the games industry is PEGI and they review the product and instruct the developers on what they can do to change as well as assign them an age rating of; 3,7,12,16 and 18. each rating has their own standards with 18 being the most mature and traditionally violent games with 3 being the least harmful.