Yeah, I know. It is nothing but crap, isn’t it? I mean, I have heard of people wanting to restrict certain games to adults – those who are 18 years old and above. There are games which have an even lower age restriction. You know, just like the movies.
But have you ever heard of a maximum age limit for playing video games? It just doesn’t make sense to me! Apparently, though, Amazon has this weird and twisted way of looking at the situation. I ran across an article at Gaming Target which made me aware of this “recommended age” thing by Amazon:
Amazon has begun tagging video games with a “recommended age”, based on their content. As you can also see, the age range tops out at 20. The company provides a similar service for the items listed in their Toys and Games department.
In other words, Amazon believes that video games are toys and that people over the 20 shouldn’t be interested in them.
Of course, in still other words, the new “recommended age” field was likely added to video game listings as a service for parents who may not be aware of the adult content some games possess. And rather than creating a new field in their product creation database, Amazon likely reused the one from the Toys and Games department.
One, that is just plain lazy. If they wanted to serve their customers for real, then they should have come up with a totally new system to label their products.
Two, that is just plain useless. We already have a very specific rating system – ESRB, hello? That isn’t perfect, either, but hey, so far it has worked.
Amazon, maybe you need to rethink things?