Monday, December 24, 2018

software engineering - What are the legal considerations about making a game with a dynamic age restricted content?


What I mean by this is - is it legal to make a game which asks (or proves) your age during install or on initial load, and then dynamically sets the content to the players age.
For example if the players is under-age then all swear word assets are replaced with there PG13 equivalents.
Or the same with blood and gore.


Does this make sense?
Also what are the communities opinions or feelings about this?
(note for locality I am referring to UK law but laws and opinions for any other country is encouraged!)



(ps i can't create tags)



Answer



IANAL but you can certainly ask the player to enter their age and set up some options as a result, or just give the players options for gore & language that they can manually set. Several games do this already allowing you to turn off, or at least tone down blood.


However if you are asking if you can get a lower rating from PEGI/ESRB for this I'm going to make an educated guess of "No". They are going to rate you based on the fully enabled gore/language version of your game. If you look at it from their perspective, even if your game does really tone down elements when given the correct information, there is no way to be sure that players will be honest. So if they put a lower restriction on the title and then little Jimmy says he's an adult and gets full gore, parents will not be happy.


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