moviebob makes a number of very clear analogies between the two industries, very few of which I would find fault in aside from a few:
1. The large market of licenced-title games:
While I'm painfully aware that most of the culprits of this category fall into the realm of Nintendo products, such as d3's Ben10: Protector of Earth for the Wii and countless Bratz titles for the DS (or, for the most hardcore of gamers, the Barbie Horse Adventures series, luckily a PS2 example), most children aren't 1080 dpi whores like the rest of the hardcore gaming contingent. While this is not an excuse for game manufacturers to create poor titles and further spit out piles of shovelware, it is possible to make a merely GOOD children's game that will sell well enough.
Possibly the best example of this, which has come from merely cel-shaded graphics to higher budgets and months of hype are the Naruto brand of fighting games. Kids these days love the anime and Cartoon Network has become a serious contender for the hearts and wallets of our youth as one of the most prominent licensees of some of today's most popular anime series. The games are usually well received and sell to the point where they keep pushing out sequels hyped by the appearance of whichever new ninja has become the new villain of the week.
2. Some more mature titles have moderate to heavy appeal to children:
Halo may be the best example of how you can have a fairly graphic first person shooter that is attractive to kids outside of the crazy violence- Halo is a fairly simple title, as most first person shooters are, in surroundings that are usually very colorful, vibrant and attractive to kids (inside of spaceships, alien worlds, canyons, etc) with a variety of similarly colored weapons and goofy aliens speaking backwards.
Halo is possibly the perfect storm of demographic appeal, as it is easily grasped and contains bright stimuli for younger players with co-op options to play with a friend, while online gaming and tournament modes attract older casual and tournament-minded players to the series.Finally, the violence isn't as over-the-top as it is in series like Gears or GTA; aliens spew the same neon-colored blood as they run around flailing their arms screaming in an incoherent tongue. Which brings me to my next point-...
3. Violence in video games, in general, is a lot harder to track than in mediums like comic books and, also in general, is mostly more accepted:
This may just be from personal experience, but as a child of the 90's, I happened to be a collector during the "Knightfall" arc of Batman, when Bruce Wayne and his caped alter-ego were assaulted and "broken" by the drug-fueled villain Bane. One of the covers from the series
depicted a sadistically gleeful Batman preparing to strike a villain of some sort with a board with a nail through it. As X-TREME as the 90s were, this didn't sit well as casual reading material for an impressionable youth in the minds of my parents and I was told to lay off the Batman comics after issue 500, when Batman got his CYBERNETIC INSANE 90'S POUCHES MAKEOVER (and subsequently beat Bane within an inch of his life with extreme [not XTREME, mind you] violence).While it's no surprise that the cover of a Halo game implies you're going to be shooting things, what with a futuristic robotic super soldier poised with future-guns in the future, there's no Technicolor-blood spattered aliens askew or energy-sword impaled SPACE MARINES layering the ground in some kind of blood-meat sod. To be brief, it's no Animal Crossing.
While I don't expect parents to be so naive as to expect those guns to be used to hug enemies into submission, a cover like that is much less telling than 90's RIP AND TEAR IMPOSSIBLE MUSCULATURE AND MACHISMO comic books. And since it's equally difficult to discern the contents of the game (both on and offline), you won't know about your son calling some guy he's never met a homosexual and informing him that his mother is a woman of ill repute until well after the game has been purchased. Game ratings are there for a reason, but say a lot less to a general audience that doesn't play or have in-game experience with a title.
I will try and throw my two cents in on what the video game industry is doing wrong in part two.
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