Twice in the past month I have been approached about "appropriateness rating" of posts. This has started me thinking (always dangerous).
For those of you OUTSIDE the US this link may help with MPAA ratings:
http://www.mpaa.org/movieratings/
This is the US Television Ratings System:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/6578/ratings.htm
I am opening discussion on this topic:
Should we dispense with the 'PG-13' restraint and go instead for the overall rating of PG-13 but allowing posts labled "TV-M (FV,S,L,D)".
Item 1) We intitially had a PG-13 (as defined by MPAA) rating for LABN. But back then we had 13 year old members.
Item 2) Our youngest member currently is (I beleive) 15. And while we discuss mature themes we aren't quite as hard as the MPAA 'R rated' but they are definately above the 13 year old threshold too. Especially this season which had taken some dark turns.
Item 3) We have been much more selective in allowing new members so I think we can be assured we aren't going to have any younger players being exposed to this sort of writing in collabs. If they read it, that is a different matter, but if they were in a collab and exposed to it, it is a lot more personal (and therefore dangerous to us as a potential child-porn issue). So this has been rendered moot by attrition and selectivity.
Item 4) A 'loosening' of restraint isn't the same as a licence to go nuts. Don't start including erotica and gore just becasue it is now okay. But if it is included for valid plot reasons, just mark it as "(MATURE)" in the subject. That same designation would need to be included in the timeline.
These are my points, and I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks.
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Ratings for LABN
Personally I think we should keep the PG-13 rating. My reasoning (such as it is ) is as follows.
Prior to this season it's worked. We've bumped the boundary, maybe even crossed it on occasion but in general we've managed to remain within the standards we've imposed and I've not heard any real complaints.
This season it's been harder, as Dave has said some of the issues we've been exploring and the way we've explored them have probably crossed the line, not by much but they've been on the 'wrong' side. I don't think, however that that's a good reason to change our standards
The limits we've imposed on ourselves force us to come at things a little obliquely, it forces us to be more creative in our approach and I think that more than offsets any detrimental effects the limits may have.
I'd also like to avoid accelerating any standards creep. While I think we're mature enough to not take advantage of a change of rating, eventually there'll come a point when for perfectly legitimate story reasons we're going to bump the new standard somehow at which point we very well could be having this conversation all over again.
One final note Dave suggests marking the mature posts as such, giving players the option not to read but since we are a mature set of writers who would include such things only for story reasons where does this leave the players/readers who aren't comfortable with such mature themes in their reading material? Sure they can read the synopsis on the timeline but they'll lose the nuances of the post as well as some minor but potentially important details. Which was pretty much the reason why we decided to disallow Mainline characters in the Adult Forum (And yes we ignored that rule too didn't we...)
Ratings for LABN
Ok...so considering that I for one have probably been one of the players most guilty this season of "crossing the line" it may come as something of a shock, but I also think we should keep the rating as we currently have it. I don't think it's a good idea to start mucking around with something that works for us most of the time. This season has been darker and grittier than previous seasons, but I like the challenge of walking that line and trying my darndest not to stumble over it.
Ratings for LABN
Well the "no mainline charecters in the adult forum" rule is one that I've never really agreed with the argument for, but didn't see it as important enough to argue about at any length.
My main problem with a "ratings" system also is a simple fact: it works as a general heuristic, but not in the concrete. In general, "PG-13" is not a good designation to apply to us - then again, neither is R. I really have no problem lots of bloodshed, violence, or sex in posts, provided that the story calls for it. And really, we can very well in the adult form produce a non-censored version of a scene.
Especially when it might be required for. Sorry, but there are certain times when a story may demand a certain level of explicitness - a censored "backbone" that isn't a good read, with the real version somewhere else, seems a rather acceptable alternative.
One thing a remark on "Standards creep." I fully expect us, as writers, to end up with our standards loosening over time, as recent posts have shown. The explicitness may be an issue, but we can rest assured that due to our genre a certain amount of "darkness" is to be entailed. If as storytellers the muses pull us in this direction, fine. If they draw us to a more cheerfull world, fine.
What I guess I'm saying is that explicitness should be subject to restriction of only what the story requires to be told well. And you all are writers, whether you admit to it or not. :)
Ratings for LABN
Just as a point of clarification...I don't mind mainline characters in the adult forum provided that:
1) Nothing happens there that is required reading to understand a characters actions or motivations in the main storyline.
2) It does not upset the events of the main plotline.
In a post I made about Oz, I referred to the events in my adult post, but it wasn't neccessary to have seen them to understand what had happened. Ally and I just thought it would be amusing to incorporate them into a real post. I really just wrote it as a joke. Then it sort of creapt into the real post.