Video games and their primary demographics and ethical issues

Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2

Rainbow Islands is an incredibly adorable little arcade game where you have the power to create rainbows and must avoid the caterpillars and climb your way up to the top before time runs out. A fairly standard kiddy arcade game.

As I mentioned briefly, it’s aimed at young children. It’s very bright, cheerful, and easy to understand and play, with practically no goal or story, just the one to reach the top. This makes it a perfect game for children.

As for its ethics, there is almost no clear presence of any ethical issues here. The character appears gender neutral making them game available to boys or girls. The only real ethical issue to raise, if one must be, is that you kill caterpillars. You kill little insects that get angry, attack you on sight, and are knocked off the screen when you hit them with a rainbow, you even gain vegetables for using your rainbow powers and eating them gives you points.

It couldn’t be more kid friendly.

Point Blank

Point Blank is a very bright, bold, and random game. You have a gun and a series of mini games and challenges to play through, by yourself or with a friend. You get a target and certain quota of shots to hit in an allotted time, it’s pretty basic in the way of multiplayer arcade shooters.

I believe a game like this is generally aimed at teenagers and young adults, because although the arcade nature of it would make it more of a childs game, the height of the booth and the fact you use a gun, indicates a more adult choice.

Ethically this game isn’t too bad. Although it does involve handling a weapon which does have kickback and can be seen as a severe ethical drop, you mainly only shoot at inanimate objects in the game such as: cardboard targets, empty vehicles, and cards. However there is a small number of occurrences where you shoot at sheep, and planes.

It’s a pretty generic, but well rounded game.

Legend of Zelda

Legend of Zelda is one of the most classic video games of all time. You play elf boy, Link, in his pursuit to find the princess Zelda after she is kidnapped by Ganandorf; an evil gerudo demon. You gain a fairy, called Navi; she gives you advice and follows you around to keep you on track. You go on to learn to use a sword, slingshot, and shield to go through the land and save the princess.

This game is generally aimed at kids, it involves a young protagonist, very cute, bright colours, and no gore. These generally make a very stereotypical childrens game.

By way of ethics, The Legend of Zelda is a very clean game. You rarely attack humans, you rarely see any death or gore, and they don’t face any morally terrible issues directly. The only problem is probably a young kid handling a weapon, even though it’s a sword, it can still be clased as an ethical error.

Final Fantasy

A very long winded series, Final Fantasy is a legendary Japanese RPG, turned based combat game. You play as a different main character each game and procure a crew of people to fight alongside you as you go against a different threat every game. As far as I can tell, the plot rarely follows through game to game, but individually these games are brilliant.

The target audience for this game is generally teenagers, but its fanbase does border over into young adults as well. Overall its age range is between 14-28 years. Its largely aimed at this age range because it deals with darker themes but presented in a brighter manner.

This game isn’t too terrible ethically; It does deal with large looming threats, explosives, characters of a relatively young age handling weapons such as: guns, swords, grenades, and destructive magic; it also has the destruction of entire cities and having the main character be thrown into the future where everyone he knows is now dead except for the guy who helped him escape. But all these themes are, as I mentioned, presented in a cute, bright, well designed, package; this generally makes them easier to deal with.

Street Fighter

Another blinding classic, Street Fighter was one of the first fighting games to come to the market. Made in Japan, it’s a game about a massive tournament set up by M.Bison where the contestants fight against each other. This plot I largely lost throughout the games, but instead we are given interesting character conflicts and conspiracies that have now fuelled the series.

It’s a game aimed at teenagers to adults (18-28) for obvious reasons; it’s a fighting game. There is violence abound, and some characters have been scrutinized over for their designs.

This ties into the ethics of the game. Apart from the obvious issues of the fact you are fighting teenagers to incredibly old men; which doesn’t exactly send of a golden message when you are pitting a 17 year old school girl against a 32 year old martial artist. There is instances of steroids in a certain character, a character that uses a triple bladed glove to slash at the other characters; there is also uses of destructive magic, gangs, and organized crime, and then there are some of the characters to boot. We have seen female characters get scrutinized for being unrealistic, and over sexualised, and the mistreatment of a transsexual character when the western culture disagreed with the companies choice to involve her, even though she was fantastic.

Golden Eye

Golden Eye is a game that was part of the legendary Bond franchise where you play as the secret agent himself in a series of mission to restore the world back to safety, fairly typical James Bond activities.

This game is aimed at a wide range of ages as James Bond has become a global figure for men. Generally its teenagers to adults who are the primary demographic, but kids have become just as infatuated with the character as he’s become so well known for his incredible stunts and bad-assery.

Obviously though, he has some really big ethical problems. They can go from: the use of guns, grenades, remote mines, and killing innocent people in the wake of his exploits, to: nuclear war, torture, and obviously, the over sexualisation of the women in the franchise.

Mario Kart

Mario Kart is a very cute addition to the behemoth that is the Mario franchise. You just race against your friends in various race tracks with interchangeable characters and vehicles while using certain pickups to aid your racing.

Obviously as this is a Mario game, it’s aimed at very young kids; you can even use baby characters in prams to race with. That, and having the colours being very bright, with very round, happy shapes, would never be a game aimed at an age group over 12.

In the way of ethics, Mario is practically perfect. No gore, your character only gets stunned every so often, and obviously there are no deaths. If people wanted to get really picky they could argue over the pickups encourage violence to get ahead as you throw projectiles and trip up fellow gamers, but without these the game would be incredibly dull. So it’s all good for most families.

Grand Theft Auto V

Infamous serious, Grand Theft Auto, was bound to be included here as the incredibly controversial 5^th game in the serious has been realeased. GTA has always been at the forefront of gaming news for being able to kill innocent people, gun down anyone you please, and drive however you want with a very easy to avoid police force.

Its aimed at over 18s but it’s become well known for adults to buy this for their kids not knowing what it contains and then complaining to the company for what it involves and how it affects their kids. But for responsible adults, it’s an over 18 game.

Now, the ethics for this game are endlessly bad, it has very few redeeming moments and has driven people to literally murder with the messages it has sent across; and as it would take too much time to describe why it’s bad in detail, here is a list of the various mistakes GTA5 commits:

-Theft

-Drug abuse

-Weapons Violence

-Sexism

-Racism

-Ableism

-Alcohol Abuse

-Prostitution

-Torture

-Bank Heists

-Rape and sexual violence

-Kidnapping

-Confidence Trickery

-Animal Abuse

-Arson

-Nudity

-Misuse of Military Vehicles

-Treason

- Mass Genocide

Are the ones I can name off the top of my head, it’s incredibly controversial and has triggered many arguments online for making the characters realistically bad, unlawful people instead of just mislead protagonists.

Overall, no game is without fault but the varying degrees of fault can cause significant psychological issues for people, and that is what we must consider in our own work.