ImpSpace Warped; Abnormal and Mature content in DreamsPS4
It’s been great seeing more people joining the community and we are getting all kinds of personas along with them! DreamsPS4 will have a lot of interesting and different experiences. One thing that has been brought up is how Dreams will handle mature content. Although there isn’t exact concrete examples revealed, we’d like to talk about it here at ImpSpace for a moment.
A guide to the ESRB
First of all, gaming has a content rating system by the ESRB and that’s whats in place as far as specific categorization. While games are rated that way for its standard shipped content, it changes into a non classified rating for a game’s online component if a game has that functionality to it.
A History of Little Big Planet’s content and ratings
The Little Big Planet franchise is a wonderful family friendly game that is rated E for everyone. All of the games in the series were in fact rated E. Descriptions for LBP and LBP2 were “Mild Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief”. LBP3 kept both but also added “Tobacco Reference”. Little Big Planet Karting went straight to “Cartoon Violence” along with “Comic Mischief”. Finally LBP on PSP and PSVita have “Comic Mischief” but all of a sudden added “Language” yet there was no profanity that we know of.
With a series like LBP, the content and vision of the game can said to be focused on everyone from the start but making sure its content kept the younger audience in mind first and foremost. Although that may be the case, when it came to the online portion, some levels could definitely be said to be rated at least T for Teen (not by ESRB of course). Even during the LBP2 Beta the minds went array with ideas such as the Justin Beiber violence level.
There are also levels that have distinct themes such as violence. Enough themes and references can push what be a games offline rating up a notch.
Content in Dreams
Dreams will be more broad but it’s still crafted to be a general all around title for the likes of everyone. In a rapid 229 Q&A session with GameInformer, Alex Evens was asked can we post M-Rated gaming levels. While you could created them, he advised not to publish them. That’s fine and dandy, however we would like to allow posting of SOME non excessive M-Rated content to share and discuss with other mature users. So we are now revealing how this will work today.
ImpSpace Content and ImpSpace Warped
For abnormal or off-beat content such as the DreamsPS4 – Toto Africa parody, we will share it with the ImpSpace Warped channel (previously called Dreams Mash). M-rated content that cannot be published to dreams, within reason, will also be shared on the ImpSpace Warped channel. Users in the community will also be able to share and chat about content rated up to the ESRB M (PEGI18 for Europeans) level on the ImpSpace Dreams forums in the appropriate section. This also applies to the M-Rated section on the Dreams Discord Server for those 17+ of age.
