Sweden Giving Sexist Games Special Ratings

This is probably gonna piss more than a few people off, but nothing could be more topical in the wake of Gamergate.

Sweden has been one of the most active proponents of gender equality, both in society and in pop culture.  It’s commitment to empowering women has gone so far as to demand that toy catalogs label their products with categories other than simple “boy” or “girl”.  TV and Movies, too, get a separate rating independent from the standard rating system that can inform people if the movie has a strong female presence and if it passes the “Bechdel Test”.  With a country that devoted to gender equality, it was only a matter of time before it turned its eyes to Video Games.

Dataspelsbranchen, a Swedish games industry organization, has been given a 272,000 kronor (about $36,672) grant by the Swedish government to study and create an independent rating system for games: something that would identify and tag games depending on the amount of sexist content and if the game supports gender equality.  As of right now, exactly how this rating and labeling system would work isn’t known, but one thing is sure: it would be an independent body from the ESRB, and it would have no impact on how purchasable a game would be.  It would merely be a way to inform the consumer, nothing more.

Project manager of the initiative, Anton Albiin, had this to say:

"Of course games can be about fantasy but they can be so much more than this. They can also be a form of cultural expression - reflecting society or the society we are hoping for. Games can help us to create more diverse workplaces and can even change the way we think about things."

This… is certainly interesting, and comes with a whole plethora of implications.  While it’s not going so far as to keep people from playing or enjoying games with ‘sexist’ themes, it’ll certainly invite the cowl of “Political Correctness gone too far” from critics.  And perhaps not undeservedly: what’s “sexist” and what’s not is very often subjective, it wouldn’t be impossible for his board to go a little too gusto and label things in the periphery as “sexist” when really it’s just questionable.

But that’s all speculation.  There’s more that we don’t know than we do know right now, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye on this as it develops.