This is the ESRB warning box that accompanies recent ads for Rift (now F2P! Oh, you’ve heard). There is talk of alcohol, other harsh language, mild naughty themes, imaginary consumption of alcohol, and — oh yes — the game is all about murdering sentient beings to death so you can loot their corpses and feed your soul(s) with power harvested from your victims.
Pink body parts will not be more than mildly suggested because we would not want to offend anyone.
: Zubon
It’s a pretty weird standard in games that depicting acts of violent murder/manslaughter are ok but procreation is a no-no, falling into the naughty-sleaze department.
Context is important: we’re murdering people we disagree with. No one is advocating or in any way promoting or glorifying murdering your friends. That would be bad.
Also, many of them are strange creatures which, even if human-like, aren’t much like us or our characters, and human beings have been murdering things that are different to us for millenia! It’s a fine tradition, why start questioning it now?
Well if it didn’t list all of those things how else would I shelter my child and prepare them for the real world?
Besides, it’s not like parents are paying attention to the ratings anyways. I taught a class of seven year olds, and they said they play M-rated games, which their parents buy for them.
As entertaining as it is to laugh at the Americans considering alcohol worse than murderrrrr!, the list is in that order because it is in alphabetical order. “Violence”, as opposed to “cartoon violence”, pushes a game pretty reliably into the T rating area, while “Alcohol Reference” and “Mild Suggestive Themes” can squeak into an E rating.
((It probably should be set as “Fantasy Violence”, given the relative rarity of drive-by soul-consumption in the real world, but they’re always been slow to apply that one correctly.))