Last week, we posted about a new Ubisoft game called We Dare, showing you a trailer that may or may not still exist anywhere on the Internet, because Ubisoft is apparently as embarrassed about the game as everyone else and is actively trying to erase every online mention of its existence. Thankfully, though the original trailer may be hard to find, plenty of other fan-made trailers are trying to bring sexy back, such as this Dead Island-inspired remix:
However, that’s not the latest haps. The game has recently been rated in Europe by PEGI, their equivalent of the ESRB, and the rating they’ve assigned is “PEGI 12.” For those of you unfamiliar with the European videogame ratings system, this rating means that if you’re anywhere near the age of 12, you should not be playing this game, because it’s basically an orgy enabler.
Hah! That’s not true at all. Actually, the rating means that the game is appropriate for anyone 12 and up, meaning that parents—who are notorious for expecting any random off-the-shelf game to be completely OK for their kids—will have no reason not to pick up We Dare for little Herkimer.
According to a recent post on Joystiq, PEGI notes that We Dare “contains mild swearing, minor assault on a human-like character and words/activities that amount to obvious sexual innuendo, explicit sexual descriptions or images and sexual posturing”; however, that’s apparently not bad enough to say this game isn’t meant for kids. Apparently, the board is only considering the literal content of the game, not the context in which you play it; i.e., since the game doesn’t actually show people having anal sex, it doesn’t matter if it hilariously suggests that you perform anal sex on someone, and then your 14 year old actually does it.
For their part, Ubisoft has come out and said that the game is “intended for mature audiences,” even going so far as to place a “parental discretion is advised”-style sticker on the box, to make up for PEGI’s epic failure. But PEGI is sticking to their guns, which makes me wonder how many of them would be OK with their children playing We Dare.
Discussion topic: Isn’t this sort of thing the reason Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to ban videogames forever? Why are we helping him?
