Industry Practice - Team Meeting + Age Rating in Legal and Economic Frameworks (31/01/25)

Team Meeting

Date: 31/01/25

In Attendance: Me, Sam and Faye

Meeting Agenda & My Role: To discuss the script and backstories

Decisions and/or Actions & Deadlines: We made the decision to make sure we finish our individual patient backstories by next week so we will be able to finalise the script. Since Jake and Katie are not in attendance, we will let them know via discord. Sam suggested that in the bad ending, the patients could become more monstrous to show how much they're struggling. Discussed having a pop up trigger warning as this topic is heavy and could upset some players.

Reflections: Overall, this meeting went pretty well, I have a pretty good idea of my patient story already so I know that I'll be able to make the deadline. I plan to figure out how to make a splash screen in Ren'py so I can add in a functional trigger warning screen.

Age Ratings

Our target audience for this game, is young teens aged 14+. For this, I looked up the PEGI ratings to see what we are able to include.

Unfortunately, there are no PEGI ratings for 14+. The closest are 12+ and 16+. I decided to include both of these in my research.

PEGI 12

• Mild forms of swearing.
• May contain more detailed and realistic looking violence towards fantasy characters. Human characters may experience violence, there must be no sight of blood, injures or emphasis of pain during the violence.
• Sex may not be shown but sexual innuendo's and sexual activity can be implied.
• Can contain in game-purchases. 

PEGI 16

• Contains more realistic violence and sustained violence against hum characters, including sight of blood and injuries. Torture and focus on pain/ injuries will only be allowed against fantasy characters.
• Strong language can occur.
• Sexual activity can be shown provided there is no sight of genitals.
• There may be depictions of illegal drug use, as well as prominent use of tobacco and alcohol.
• Can contain in-game purchases.

How will this affect our decision making?

Majority of the age restricted topics, don't apply to our game. The main things that we could have an issue with, is depictions of violence. We want to make sure that all our character assets don't feature graphic and detailed gore. My character, The Doctor, has a see through chest so I need to make sure that I style it in a way to fit in with this PEGI rating. For this, I have decided against using a design of a realistic heart and went for the more friendly heart shape seen in emojis. Some characters may feature scars or evidence of safe harm. These won't be very graphic. We plan to make sure non of the character flashbacks show violence towards the patient. They may not be human, but they are very close to it.

Reference List

Anon, n.d. PEGI Ratings. Ask About Games. Available at: https://www.askaboutgames.com/need-to-know/pegi-ratings [Accessed January 31 2025].