This week TIGA, the trade association that represents UK and EU video game developers said that more work was needed to make the new PEGI game rating logos more recognizable.
Icon design is incredibly difficult, when done well it can transcend language barriers and culture issues, but when done badly, it results in delays, confusion and wasted mental effort.
These new warning icons are designed to guide parents when choosing a game to buy for their kids. I decided to do my own evaluation of the icons and so yesterday I took to the streets to ask the good people of Brighton what these icons meant. Here are some of the responses.
Guesses “Don’t know, worldwide, more than one person, needs access to computers” Actual meaning, online.
Guesses “Violence, fighting, breakable (as in Wiimote danger)”. Actual meaning, violence.
Guesses “Swearing”. Actual meaning, swearing.
Guesses “Phobia warning, caution, don’t know, would put me off buying it, contains spiders”. Actual meaning, fear.
Guesses “For boys and girls, suitable for all sexes”. Actual meaning, contains sexual content.
Guesses “Drugs, hospital”. Actual meaning, scenes of drug use.
Guesses “Don’t know, doesn’t mean anything, socializing, parent caution, multiplayer”. Actual meaning, scenes of discrimination.
Guesses “Game of chance, competition, gambling, entertaining”. Actual meaning, gambling.
Overall, only the swearing icon was interpreted the same by everyone, the next clearest were violence and drug use, followed by gambling. Worryingly, 4 of the 8 icons completely confused the people I asked, no one understood what they were trying to convey. Everyone I asked were UK nationals, I would be keen to see how these are interpreted in the rest of the EU.
In my admittedly rather limited tests, the PEGI ratings scored 29% accuracy, so I fully support the TIGA recommendation to make these icons more recognizable.
2 responses so far ↓
Radek // June 21, 2009 at 4:00 pm |
If you are interested in those EU nationals, I could ask a few Czech people (hoping to not find we are dumb as hell).
garethrwhite // June 21, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
Did you explain to participants the context in which these icons would be found, or show them examples of real boxes that use them?
If I’m standing in a game shop and looking at a copy of, say, Virtua Tennis, then I’d say that guessing “worldwide, more than one person, needs access to computers” would actually be pretty accurate; none of them are incorrect, though they could be more specific. I’d score this icon at about 50% accuracy.
I’m actually pretty impressed with how good their guesses were and would argue that you need a more relaxed measure of accuracy.
Something like:
0% : No idea
50% : General concept
100% : Exactly correct
By this scheme I’d say that the only icons to fail would be Discrimination and Sexual content. Similarly for usability evaluation you might also consider a severity score for these issues. A failure of the sexual content icon might be a very significant failure for some countries (though I’m thinking more of the US where they use the ESRB rather than PEGI in Europe.) By contrast it wouldn’t be so serious to misinterpret the “Online” icon.
I’d also be a little bit critical of the validity of the response “contains spiders” – did the respondent really think there’d be a different icon for each type of animal in the game? Either way, spiders are generally considered to be scary, so this might be enough to make a parent have second thoughts about buying this sort of game for their fearful kids. I’d be interested to hear why it would put off one of the other respondents (presumably because they’d be concerned about their kids playing a game with scary spiders in it?)
A better test might be to run scenarios by them with real boxes that show the name of the game, real box art, and accompanying PEGI icons. Ask the parents how old their children are, and ask them whether they’d buy this game if their kids asked for it. As a follow up ask what factors influenced their decision (did they notice the icons? what do they think they mean? do they think that their interpretation and / or the actual meaning would be suitable for their children?)
In general I’m in favour of PEGI over BBFC as now there’s a proper way to handle adult content, which I consider vital to the maturation of the industry. See the controversy around Manhunt 2 for example. Hopefully other countries like Australia will follow suit, and lift their ban on games that don’t fit into the 15+ rating (i.e., anything that would normally be rated as suitable for 18 year olds.) I consider this to be one of the major impediments to the public’s perception of games as a mature medium. If developers are legally only allowed to make games that are suitable for children, then is it any wonder that the public have the mistaken impression that gaming is something for kids (and a bad influence at that)? And this despite the evidence that most gamers are in their 30s.
Rant over.
The icons do still need more work though, and your point was that they can be misinterpreted which I agree with. Would you rather favour something more explicit like a short line of text describing the content?
e.g., “Contains bad language; depictions of violence; refers to or depicts the use of drugs; depicts nudity and/or sexual behaviour or sexual references”
These phrases are PEGI’s official meanings and seem to me to be clear and concise.
http://www.pegi.info/en/index/id/33/