An Introduction

An Introduction

Hello all of you wonderful people out there. I am Shara Maude and I will be trying to explain the ratings of games and why games are rated as they are, mostly for the education of parents who often forget to check, or casual gamers who might not know where to find them or what they mean. So this is actually a crash course in game ratings. I am doing this because I have worked in stores like Game Crazy and have been to GameStop and other retail stores that sell games and sometimes games that have inappropriate content fall into the hands of little ones. This is mostly because they want their parents to buy them the game that everyone else is playing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the content in that game is meant for them. Then there are the parents who finally notice what the game is about, bring it back and say, "this game is not appropriate for my child". The only thing we can do is either take it back and say nothing, or take it back and hint at the fact that the game has a rating right there on either the front of the box and further information about that rating on the back. I understand that these days that people download more often than they actually buy discs and hard copies of things, so I will go to the websites for games like The Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft where I will point out where the ratings for the games are located. I will also check out some websites like Steam and maybe X-Box live and a couple of other places as well so that I can identify the locations of ratings. Also I hope to share some videos as examples and some pictures as well, and have a post about how parents cannot control what is being said in online games. Anyway, thank you for reading this introduction, and hopefully this blog will be useful to you!! Thank you and cheers!!