A question regarding dst's age rating

[jpmrocks]

16 hours ago, gaymime said:

can wormwood be the one to say it?

Has to be Wendy to say it.

[Brago-sama]

13 minutes ago, jpmrocks said:

Has to be Wendy to say it.

Impossible. According to the vast majority of her quotes, she has none to give

[Monkey Cups]

18 hours ago, gaymime said:

a child could be mentally harmed by something like that if they have a less solid grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality(or are afraid of the dark as many children are)

I don't know, this was considered entertainment for young children when I was growing up and I turned out fine.

Age ratings have changed over the years but this movie has a G rating.

This too, also a G rated movie.

 

[Mike23Ua]

I am past my 20’s and “curse words” and “gore just for the sake of gore” is not what makes a game feel mature to me.. in fact those things seem to have the EXACT opposite effect for me, the more cursing, the more over the top and gore filled, the more IMMATURE it ends up feeling.

I never could get into the Gears of War Franchise when it first started because of all the excessive unrequired swearing and violence, like for example killing an already downed enemy in extremely gruesome fashion.. this is Gore just for the sake of being Gore and it makes the game Stupid..

Lets fast forward a few years to Gears of War 3 (my personal favorite in the franchise) excessive swearing has been cut down drastically but more importantly.. downed enemies are no longer HELPLESS while you kill them in over the top violent fashion, because NOW they will crawl to their buddies and be revived, giving those violent extra killings legitimate reasoning to be part of the game.

no longer just “Gore for the sake of being Gore..” if you DON’T finish these enemies off they’re going to recover and your going to regret it..

That is the difference between Mature game, and Immature game that tries to be cool by using over the top violence and extreme excessive swearing.

I wouldn’t want to see DST with excessive swearing or gore just for the sake of gore.. the same things that turned me away from gears of war until they later toned it down, would also turn me away from DS.

I would like to see blood in DST, but not over the top violence.. small things like a gothic skin for the moon dial fountain so I can role play at Halloween that I’m Dracula, A blood covered Machete (aka Jason Vorhee’s) 

But NOT “Smack a pigman with a spear and large amounts of gears of war or Mortal Kombat Style blood splatters everywhere..”

This comes from the WENDY MAIN who has a quote for looking at pig heads on a stick that reads as “Kill the pig spill it’s blood.”

[wigfrids hat]

6 hours ago, Monkey Cups said:

snip

children are capable of seeing all sorts of things that aren't made for them. the ubiquity of it is entirely incontestable given how much evidence that the greater majority of persons have done is available to see

also, you do understand you are not the sole representative for the human experience, right? you having seen some messed up stuff as a child and not (presumably) having any lingering fears or preferences because of it does not mean that children do not see frightening things that they internalize.  the ease of access they have to scary material is also not really relevant to whether or not that material is capable of causing fear in them.

though if you want empirical evidence based on personal experience you can have mine; i watched friday the 13th at age 7 and watership down at age 6. i was not scared of friday the 13th and have no lingering damage from it but watership down shook me so hard that even now i am uncomfortable when rabbits are harmed(both real and cartoon) to the point of becoming ill. friday the 13th clearly wasn't for me but watership down was considered appropriate for me, a small child, to watch. the gore and mild torture in one had no lingering effect while the gore and mild torture in the other gave me a long-lingering fear. all other things being equal my viewing history is just as valid as yours and it is very different from yours. this is something that does happen and will continue to happen. some things children will take in stride some they won't but all of it needs to be considered when talking about how best to do well by them

 

 

tldr, if the conversation is about age ratings and what would be the cut-off if children hypothetically could be then one must, of course, account for what content could affect children in a negative way and understanding how young the demographic may skew. saying that one child was not fearful does not mean that all children are capable of taking disturbing(mild though it be) content well

[TemporaryMan]

17 hours ago, Sunset Skye said:

This doesn't really mean anything, the visuals are too cartoony. Even Mario can rip a giant blooper's tentacles off one by one, as they wiggle around and the blooper struggles, and still get an E rating.

That seems like something that belongs in Limbo, not a Mario game.

11 hours ago, CameoAppearance said:

I think it's mostly preschoolers who have genuine and pervasive difficulty distinguishing between things that happen in cartoons or fantasy stories and things that can happen in the real world; I recall reading that by age 7 most kids understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

It's not just them, judging by all the tinfoil conspiracy theorists out there.  Some people think Satanists harvesting adrenocrhome is a real thing and not just something Hunter S. Thompson made up.  Elon Musk seems to think the pyramids were built by aliens.  There wasn't enough done to teach critical thinking and media literacy skills in schools before, but now in the internet & social media age it's reached a crisis.

[CameoAppearance]

DS doesn't have any blood and gore in it and probably never will so I don't see any point in you guys arguing here about whether seeing fictional/animated blood and gore is psychologically scarring for children. The Charlie shadow hand attack animation that started that tangent, aside from being unlikely to witness in the first place since it's only supposed to happen to players who are in complete darkness and thus to see it you need moggles, were-vision or someone running towards a light source, is completely bloodless and obviously, indistinguishably supernatural rather than looking anything like a real injury that could possibly happen to a real person in a world where magic doesn't exist, by accident or by deliberate violence.

Like, "Fantasy Violence" - defined as "Violent actions of a fantasy nature, involving human or non-human characters in situations easily distinguishable from real life" - and "Cartoon Violence" have a lower minimum age rating than "Violence", according to the ESRB, and I don't think they pulled that distinction out of nowhere. DS/DST has an ESRB warning for "Fantasy Violence" and that genuinely seems like what most of the scariest things in the game would fall under, including Horror Hounds bursting out of hound corpses or Charlie using shadow magic to murder Wilson painfully in the ANR cinematic. In the canonical art style, anyway, it might be different if this was a photorealistic 3D game.

As for the tinfoil conspiracy theorists, I was talking about stuff that's presented as fiction, not presented as real events that were covered up, although I guess works of fiction that are written and sold as fiction but which use "this happened in the real world, where you the viewer live, but it was kept secret so that outsiders wouldn't know vampires/alien invaders/wizards/whatever exist!" as a framing device blur the line a little. Though that also isn't super relevant to DS, since it doesn't make any special effort to convince players that they too could get trapped in the Constant if they find the right evil book or old radio.

[Mike23Ua]

Friendly reminder- If you play this game as Wurt or Wilba you will walk around seeing your dead kinfolks heads hanging off a stick in the middle of nowhere.

DS/and DST DOES have content that can be mentally scaring for a younger audience, but that does not change the facts that DS is rated 13+ MINECRAFT is Rated E..

Minecraft has cultists, portals to hell, villagers with their flesh and bone ripping off their skin, And while I realize that DS is NOT Minecraft let’s use the LEGO games or Roblox as another example those games BOTH involve running people over with cars and shooting them with guns (LEGO FREAKIN BATMAN LETS YOU DO THIS!!) so then, should LEGO Batman not have the same ratings as GTA?

The TL:DR- There’s a problem with our ESRB Rating system and I’ve always disagreed with it entirely ever since I was like 7 years old.... 

But parents shouldn’t rely entirely on Ratings to determine what their children should be allowed to play anyway... 

Many parents I’ve talked to end up shocked to discover how “dark” Minecraft actually is- With the final boss battle of that game even having you 

Spoiler

Fight an innocent dragon that’s minding its own business in its own Realm and is chained up to pillars and UNLIKE Skyrim.. isn’t freely roaming around burning down entire villages..

Skyrim’s aggressive dragons made me WANT to go kill them.

Minecrafts chained down helpless dragon you have to go out of your way to kill was something I as a grown adult... HIGHLY Disliked.

 

[wigfrids hat]

6 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

snip

 

that isn't surprising. the esrb is the games industry. they are rating themselves in the most favorable light possible the majority of the time

[Cheggf]

On 8/1/2020 at 7:11 PM, Sunset Skye said:

This doesn't really mean anything, the visuals are too cartoony. Even Mario can rip a giant blooper's tentacles off one by one, as they wiggle around and the blooper struggles, and still get an E rating.

The tentacles simply disappear off of his body with no visual difference either at the end of the tentacle or his body where it was, there's no real impact to the attack. He then regrows them to start the second phase of the fight, showing he wasn't really harmed, and then retreats into the ocean when you defeat him with the implication that he'll regrow all his tentacles again. While the Don't Starve tentacles aren't exactly a gorefest you still do see the insides of it, and it never comes back. Character examination quotes imply that the tentacle is alive, too.

[lemon demon]

You can definetly see klei has been toning the game down, omitting the Wilson bloodletting, for example. Hell, they even sponsored a Roblox YouTuber, so it's safe to say they have been aiming for the younger audience, and I can see why. DST nowadays is way less somber than what it used to be. The forums also tamed down quite a bit. Just ask a veteran forum regular about the long pig discussions. Scary stuff. I'm happy it's toned down so everyone can enjoy, but sometimes I miss the dark hint of the game. 2013 don't starve was really scary to child me, it always made me have this... Hopeless feel? Maybe I grew up, but this feel isn't around anymore on DST. I'm guessing because of the more lighthearted tone and the whole multiplayer thing.

[MagicalSkies]

On 8/2/2020 at 10:01 AM, jpmrocks said:

Has to be Wendy to say it.

"Abigail you absolute piece of-"

 

I think that younger audience could enjoy the game too (not that it's aimed at them, but with Gacha life kids nowadays....) and I do agree that it is less violent, but I don't really know what to say about it, they removed long meat but still added horror hounds and the penguin demon thing for example, something that even I was scared to see at first. So I guess 13+? Around teens and older maybe?

[Canis]

Fun fact, Steam has a rule in place stating that you must be 13 years or older to use the service, so if we wanted to look at DST with a literal lens, that would be the base.

Who am I kidding, nobody ever abides by that rule, and Valve never enforces it.

[Monkey Cups]

On 8/2/2020 at 1:30 PM, gaymime said:

children are capable of seeing all sorts of things that aren't made for them.

Those videos were made for them. That was part of my point. Both of those are kids movies. These days most companies are afraid of going with imagery that dark, but standards change over time.

Part of decent parenting is keeping your kids away from things that will affect them in a bad way. No, supervision and parental controls aren't perfect, but you can't expose your children to things you know they shouldn't be watching/playing and then be shocked when it has a bad effect.

[Scrimbles]

Oh, I forgot about maxwell going ghost as well

You watch a man disintegrate into bones. Ouch, that's a T.

[Owlrust]

I think the rating is so that Klei can do more with less restrictions. The game looks and acts cartoony in many aspects, but this hasn't stopped Klei from making the things they have planned. If anything, I think this is more of a label given to the game rather than what they are aiming for

[Mike23Ua]

I just wanted to say this completely off topic thing- I am in LOVE with all the New forum reactions, I’ve been pasting them all day everywhere I can.. I mean, I have no idea what a “Shop Cat” is but it’s a CAT Icon and I’m gonna use it.

These things are super fun! 

on-topic though... I would like to see Klei get AT LEAST as Dark with DST as Minecraft. (Maybe not exactly portals you build into hell and playable characters with their flesh and bone Visually hanging out.. but still a tad bit more towards-

“This games 13+ not Rated E for Everyone.”

[noeticmoose]

Pardon the bump, but I am really enjoying this conversation.

I'll be honest: part of the reason why I found this game interesting was because there was a darker tone to the game which I felt worked in its favor and gave it depth, even if it wasn't immediately apparent, but just under the seemingly benign front of the game, kinda like an HP Lovecraft story.  The change in tone to me feels a bit shallow [especially since almost all of the characters seem totally fine with being in the Constant.], even though some of the less kid friendly material still remains, like Webber's quote for flint, which is sad and concerning, to say the least:

Not to mention we have the all but suicidal child, Wendy.

That being said, I can see why they backed off a bit on stuff like this, and not just for business reasons. As @Mike23Ua pointed out, darkness for the sake of itself is just as shallow as happy-go-lucky-sunshine-and-rainbows characters and plots.  Neither feels genuine or substantial.

That being said I still enjoy the game and love the characters, but I do wish we could see a bit more depth with regards to character development and story, even if it means returning [at least in part] to DST's darker roots.