Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

- Games where you learn something or which intend to teach you something... thats what the genre "educational" would be for. A game that prepares you for your driver's license for example would be driving + educational. Other standard driving and racing games may be "realistic" today, but in the end is nothing to prepare you or help you in your real life.

- Rating standard games like this would be very very vague. How can an editor check the work of another editor? That would mean you know the game and its content very precisely and if content is "helpful", "educational" or has "negative influences" is very subjective. The only thing I'm going to continously check is standard info like year, genre, title, publisher etc, especially for games that I own.

In the end its one of these topics I must write my often used comment: "If there are enough people and manpower who fill it with content then its ok. If it remains an empty shell, then better don't do it. Over 95% of the games don't even have a description yet. So why going more into detail when the most basic information is often missing?!"

I'm not adding new genres beside the available game types, the problem here is that things like ESRB are used to depict the worst of every game, while you still do not know about the good parts.
A Dragon Ball game is rated "Cartoon Violence" while if you follow the storyline you see arguments like loyalty, faith, friendship, respect, sacrifice...

Yes, having played the games for many hours should be required before rating. And not by watching a demo-tape :-)

Sure, in fact I'm looking for useful game elements that can chosen objectively.
The ratings by each editor are visible, you could choose to see just the rating of your trusted raters, for example.

I don't agree here, you are right that the 52000 games still lack many info (but look in the platforms page how many have a "complete status" above 60%), yet I'm always looking at ways to enhance UVL, and to win we have to risk.

As a side note, this feature is not difficult to setup, and will allow to vote the common tech specs like "graphic,gameplay,sound" that UVL is still missing.

For the things that appear in the games, like friendship, foreign languages, etc., simple yes or no should be enough. The star system would work as well, but I'm not sure how you would decide which game deserves the highest score and which the lowest, or would that just be decided by the average of the ratings?


Perhaps better to not allow people to rate things by default. Some half-way thing between generic user and editor, but "rater" sounds a bit odd.


This might work for some, but I think most people who actively use the internet (or a number of other qualifying factors, like living in a place with high number of immigrants) are less likely to fall under their own country's views. At least if they are open-minded :) The age of the person making those ratings (and their status in the society) has about as high impact in this, I think.


a.k.a. Edutainment, which we already have in game types. This could be expanded a bit into what kind of education it contains.


Graphics, sound, voice-overs (voice acting), gameplay, replayability, story, characters, fun-factor (entertainment/enjoyment/something), etc. perhaps 'value' as well, but that might be a bit too vague without attached explanation. Since voice-overs should be separate from sound, maybe separate music as well?


Limiting the options of people doesn't help those games get their descriptions or screenshots any faster, you know :) People contribute where they can or want to, and if they don't want to contribute descriptions to those games, then I doubt providing alternative ways to contribute will hamper that possibility any more than before. It'll just increase the amount of information each game can hold.


"Promotes frienship among players" sound a bit more meaningful :) Though the friendship there could easily be replaced with "cooperation" but the meaning would change a bit, perhaps more than intended.


Skills... also, dangerous implies they're negative. Learning self-defence would also imply learning dangerous things, but is that really negative?


Could be bundled with more generic term: disinformation.

Ah, forgot to add. Information on the intended target audience (age and such) might be good, too, if known.

I'm not sure that the average is the right choice here, but I haven't thought about it yet.

Exactly. Every used can be enabled to edit games, delete games and write in the forum.
Only the last is "on" by default. Being able to rate games will be optional.

Yes, all of them.
Problem: Voice-overs quality is not always the same with multi-language games... FarCry in italian is quite horrible.

As you know, my english sometimes is bad, sometimes is even worse ;-)

If known, it's already stated in the ESRB (or other rating I'll add).
This is not for reporting official data.

re: re:

Hehe, that reminds me of the the early CD-ROM game Inca 2 from French company Coktel Vision. German voices with a strong French accent... and all this in an Inca setting. That sounded soooo bad and displaced.

re: re:

I prefer to have the original voice-overs in use if I can either understand them myself or the game provides subtitling. So if you aren't going to include multi-language VO rating, then the rating should either only be made of the original language or not included at all. Third option would be simply to rate the one you personally used (without actually identifying which), but that isn't very good option and I'd rather not see it happen. Implementing multi-language rating might be a bit more difficult, though.

This actually reminds me of games that have had their graphics changed with different languages or release locations. Giants: Citizen Kabuto, for example, didn't have nudity in North American release but the European release did (I don't remember why they removed it for the NA release, though - the people there wouldn't have approved?). But then, the changes are usually minor, and most often just graphics involving text are changed (translated), so it's not really an issue.


Mine might not be as bad, but the numerous typoes and inherent confusion make up for it.


ESRB and the like are only recommendations (which sometimes limit sales, especially in the Mature/18+ cases), but are no definite way of saying which age-group is the target audience. A game that's deemed suitable for 3-year-olds (because of game content) might actually be aimed for adults instead :) The opposite is never true, though. I can't think of any examples right now, though. Nowadays, developers seem to intentionally drop things out of their games just to get "suitable" rating (I really hate them for it), so it might not be that important thing.

Anyway, target audience besides age-group is NOT stated by any of the ratings there are. But I'm not sure how to express those groups, and how many of them to include. Tags seem to be used for mostly religious and sports related things so far :) And genres/types do a lot of work for that, too.

I guess the target audience thing wasn't such a good idea.. unless someone comes up with something brilliant to make it work without too much redundancy :)

Yikes, things may be going in a not so helpful direction. I think people have enough intelligence that we don't need to explain to them what is positive and what is negative. Listing the content so visitors can discern its meaning on their own would be better than "We Say So ." Labeling positive or negative could be especially troublesome when dealing with cultural descriptors. But even less volatile subjects can present a quandary.
Spoiler's follow
In Baldur's Gate there is at least one event, that might be labeled Whether this is a negative or a positive is based entirely on the player's philosophical views. Personally I believe this to be positive content. I know there many who would disagree, as they have told me so when I relate this event to them. Please participate in the demonstration below by first deciding now, if you believe this content in BG to be negative or a positive.









Now, imagine this descriptor applied to Lemmings 2. Does this change your opinion if the descriptor is negative or a positive?

Again, consider this descriptor applied to Ultima VI: which is it now?

Maybe those examples are just too black and white, or not black and white enough, by your world view. What does applying it to Ultima VII: do for your opinion?

Have any of the of the above caused you to recant? Try applying it to Ultima VIII: Hmm...

I submit that since everyone would classify a 'sacrifice' descriptor differently in the above examples, then it is imperative that the 'sacrifice' descriptor not be classified as either by raters.

That list was just off the top of my head. Hopefully the community can help with a better thought-out list.


Absolutely. Also native cultural, non-native cultural experice, regionality, religion, politics, education level, theology, marital status, and if they have children. Maybe even alignment:) Also a list of one or more of their favorite games based on content. All a _highly_suggested_ volunteer bases. Raters should be strongly encouraged to give a completely thorough statement on their world-view, personal biases, and cultural qualifications. Whatever information helps visitors trust and raters be responsible should be asked of the raters and their voluntary answers published. I was just kidding about the alignment.
A far off in the future feature to consider adding:
An 'ask this rater a relevant question' feature would be nice with both sides cautioned that the feature is to improve rater-visitor trust, not to make trouble. Raters are free to answer anyway they wish, including 'no comment', 'decline to answer', or similar disclaimer. They are also free to delete questions and answers. We could also encourage raters to copy 'really good questions' to their own page and provide answers to those questions posed to another rater. As in, someone asks a rater who identifies himself as Jewish, "do you keep kosher?". User Ned Flanders who identifies himself as Christian of the The Western Branch of American Reformed Presbylutheranism sees the question, adds it to his own page, and provides the answer "Yes. Just to be safe."


Humans can always be counted on to fail. If we do this, we are going to lose a lot of good work when a good rater makes a mistake. I believe that if rater 'goes of the deep end' and must be banned, it would be better to leave the majority of their work intact and only revert the banworthy mistake(s). An exposed lie can be just as informative as the truth. Let people see the ban and the former rater's history so they can form their own opinions. That fact that he had to be banned can offer a valuable tool in considering his ratings. I'd like to know which games have been given bad ratings by The Church Lady. Those games are probably the most fun. Also, you might want to post statements from the community in support of the ban. If you ban a vandal then erase the evidence against him, you'd appear dictorial and have no proof that your are the benevolent leader that UVL regulars know you to be. We don't want anyone at UVL to be accused of acting like the leaders of [one of those other videogame databases] now do we? (As always, feel free to censor by libelous comments;)

Child murder, the possibility of that should be listed.. majority of games don't have it, but the ones that do, are likely to be highly controversial because of it. BioShock will have it, although it happens only "off-screen" but is still player initiated. Actually, to avoid this, most games don't have children at all or they're protected from combat related things completely.

(all content identifiers mentioned in this post are hypothetical at this point. Completely subject to suggestions)
(despite some self-censorship, there is strong language and mature themes in the following post, you've been advised)
(I take full responsibility for the follow content, UVL management is not to blame.)

I purpose a forum thread suggesting categories that games can be 'content descriptored' with. similar to the too do list threads. Some categories would be multi level with descriptions for each. At the forum, content identifiers would have detailed descriptions and indicators if the descriptor is purposed, pending, rejected or accepted. Changes to the descriptions and purposing new descriptors would take place here. Games could be marked with these. Then users and visitors would rate each 'content identifier' that a game had, with agreement level. I like the yes/no idea, but its a little to harsh. The 5 star is a little to vague. Is one sat a slight approval or the strongest disapproval? I purpose 4 levels of yes/no, no neutrality unless you count not voting.
Example:
UVL content raters/Visitors
playercan_charity_2 98%[A] 2%[a]/89%[A] 5%[a] 3%[d] 3%[D]
playercan_dishonesty_2 98%[A] 2%[a]/89%[A] 5%[a] 3%[d] 3%[D]
playermust_honesty_2 98%[A] 2%[a]/91%[A] 7%[a] 1%[d] 1%[D]
[A], [a], [d], [D] would be bright green, dull green, dull red, and bright red icons representing Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. In this way, each descriptor would not be the sole opinion of a single rater, but also be a consensus of the community along with a profession consensus. If a discriptor was overwhelmingly disagreed with, say 9 of ten [D], by raters, then it would be removed hidden until the rating increased or 6 months had past. At which time it would be removed.
Plus there would be added a content article for every game, besides the comment, main description, and review articles. This area would provide more detail and the reason for adding the descriptor.
For our above example:
The player is presented with numerous opportunities where is easy to lie to people, steal from them or be charitable. Such as when he pays for 10 garlic cloves and is then invited to take them from the bin himself by the blind shopkeeper. He can take less or more than 10 cloves without the shopkeeper knowing. Such actions proportionally affect the player's advancement or lack of it, to the point of accomplishing his mission in full or to the point accomplishing nothing at all. Thus the player is accountable for his actions even when it appears that no one saw.
Perhaps it would be helpful if any registered user could edit this field. It would be necessary to have this description under restrictable viewing (but not in the same way as safe description), so editors can be completely truthful about the content. For restricted entries, visitors would be made aware before viewing that 'the following article discusses the content descriptors in frank and honest terms and may not be appropriate for all visitors. And probably contains spoilers'. Or a similar notification. This article's content must match the content of the game. To put is more bluntly, if the game says s*** then the word s*** has to be in the article. Also if the game does not contain the word damn then the article should not say 'Unlike the movie this game is based on, the villain does not say "damn"'. This last example may be true, but would unnecessarily restrict the content entry.


I think it would be helpful to at least split popular opinion (ratings from visitors and normal registered users) from 'trained raters' (registered users with additional permission to rate content). Sort of a separate 'professional opinion'. Someone given permission to add content descriptors and 'professionally' rate them should understand they need an intimate understanding of the game even beyond having beat it once. Since a content descriptor provoking incident in the game may lead to a situation in a different part of the game that modifies the level, nature or class of the said descriptor. As an example, the player can steal constantly in Ultima IV and there appears to be no consistences, but _eventually_ the player will discover that their character is not worthy to meditate at the shrine of honesty. While the first situation frames the content in a way that appears negative, the second situation completes the understanding of the content and redefines it. Raters should acknowledge that they are a poor but available substitute for one of the games developers. Raters should be cautioned to be careful about rating content that is culture specific. I, for instance, would not be comfortable tagging something with "islamic_blasphemy", therefore other raters should question me if I attempt it. Even if the game commits a one as obvious as showing the face of the Prophet Muhammad. I simply lack a complete understanding of the severity or exact statutes that surround this. In fact, I don't know if this taboo is in the Qur'an or developed as a later tradition. I would surmise one origin would hold more weight than the other, but again, I don't know. At the same time it would concern me to have a non-Christian tagging Christian games as "humansacrifice_2" because the game features the death of a martyr when "sacrifice_3" is a more accurate label (unless the martyr was killed on alter during a ceremony or something, then it would get both). All these descriptors might come across as hostility on the part of the rater if used inaccurately, in fact they could be intended as hostile. Something else to caution the raters with and keep an eye on them.

I have some suggestions on what title users with content descriptor privileges can go by: Professionals, Proraters (PRs), Rate Mates, WeSaySos, Raters of the Lost Content, Illuminati, Raters of the Round Table, Herberts, New World Order, Grups, Heavies, Made Guys/Made Gals, The Company, CIA (Complex Interface Adapter/Censors of Intense Art/Cumulative Impact Assessment/Certified Internal Auditor), Langoliers, Majic 12, Reality Filters, Project Bluebook, Freemasons, Masons, The 4400, The Syndicate, Tal Shiar, Obsidian Order, Section 31, TPS Reporters
But I think my favorite by far is:
Sinners, (S)uperb (I)nformation (N)ot (N)amed in (E)ntertainers' (R)ating (S)ystems.
A reminder that the information they deal with is valuable yet inexact. They must rely more on their cultural training, judgment and their own discernment than they would need for more exact information and sciences. Each rater is imperfect and they must depend on each others to help them more fully define the content of each game. And finally, it is their job to shine light on the content of the games, not to throw stones.

Also, I think this is very important, the descriptors that raters add and ratings (agree or disagree) that they give should be public knowledge. Even for registered users and not just raters. This way everyone can deduce what biases a rater has and how in-line with their own biases the rater is. It should be acknowledged that all raters will have biases. Culture, religion, nationality and personal preference will affect their ratings. If a person had no biases whatsoever, they could not distinguish content at all (I will hold my tongue and not name names here. But you know who you are. Then again, maybe you don't). Naturally, visitors and users would eventually develop a favorite set of raters. This is good because it takes a level of trust to accept these ratings which may even make the difference in the games that people purchase. Rates could potentially effect the finances of a game company. Raters should feel obligated to live up to that trust by continuing to providing honest and consistent ratings. Also this development of favored raters solves a lot of cultural problems that all but nullify traditional rating systems. If a rater tends to mark and rate games having to do with 'kosher', people interested in how videogames handle kosher and/or have ratings in line with his, will probably be checking out all his other ratings too. Many rating systems are flawed in the way the raters have very little in common with the people who asked for the ratings, and in turn the people relying on those ratings. I'll use an example having to do with cultures I have some familiarity with. Here in the US, there has been pressure from Christian groups to have an occult category in the movie, videogame, and comic book ratings. Not since the inquisition has there been such a stupid idea (though in turn, this idea was recently surpassed by an even stupider idea, but that's way off topic). Occult, unfortunately in this case is a code word for Christian-hostile content as defined by ultraconservatives. People among them think it should include, among other things, any religious content "that doesn't acknowledge the Trinity". While the Christians making the proposal want to include broad range of both well-known and obscure content, the public at large will assume it means overt occult rituals, voodoo dolls, ouija boards, handsome immortal vampires, and generally made-up or greatly exaggerated things from Hollywood movies; a far narrower definition. They will likely not imagine a standard nearly as strict as the Bible; while the Christians instigating the ratings will imagine one stricter than the Bible. The ratings boards are not populated with Christians, and they will most definitely will have a 3rd definition of what constitutes occult. Consider; non-Christians in charge of deciding what offends Christians on behalf of everyone else. The result can already be seen. Informally published occult ratings exist for some movies. The result is Harry Potter, based partially on rituals the Bible forbids, receives the same 'high occult content' rating as Lord of the Rings and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The later two examples are by Christian authors and are based on Christian themes, values, allegories and/or rituals. Also, Left Behind, The Passion, End of the Spear get unfavorable occult ratings, these are overtly Christian movies. History proves all dumb ideas in the name of Christianity will soon be used against Christians. Which brings me to my final point in the responsibility of raters. NO CRUSADING! Raters should be strongly cautioned not to add additional negative indicators to a game that offends them. Example, a game includes playercan_spouseabuse, doesn't allow the automatic inclusion of playermust_kill, playermust_animalcruelty, playermust_rape. Actually, I doubt any raters will be so blatant (but it does happen, one game magazine said Kingpin included an X-rated rape scene and bestiality just because the magazine editor objected to perceived racism of the game, the later which they did not voice at first. And they even managed to weasel their lie into 'letters to the editor' of other game magazines to perpetrate it). More likely they will exaggerate 'playercan_spouseabuse' to 'playermust_spouseabuse'. Or more subtly, 'playercan_spouseabuse_1' to 'playercan_spouseabuse_2'. By the same token, raters can't add or exaggerate so called positive indicators because they think the game betters mankind, leads to enlightenment, agrees with their politics, or glorifies their faith. I personally believe all rating systems that track positive content are currently heavily engaged 'positive padding' while some also perpetrate 'negative padding'. This must not be tolerated. They also tend to ignore negative aspects of something they rate good, and positive aspects in something they rate bad. But these last two problems will be virtually eliminated if we let multiple raters add descriptors to the same game and then allow everyone to rate them. Finally the raters should be strongly encouraged to rate everything they know about the game, not just add their favorite descriptor and skip the rest. While it may be tolerable for an editor to add a game and fill in the information later. Raters should be reminded that full content already has numerous problems being inexact and that partial content can be a lot more damaging to a games reputation and the visitor's trust than partial technical information. No one should be banned over this one, its entirely possible a person has received a list of game from the human society that required the cruel treatment of real animals in their manufacture, sale, or even game play (yes, they exist). In which case they only know one thing about many games instead of many things about one game. I only bring up this hypothetical bizarre off-the-wall example because I'm expecting such a list in my inbox any moment now.


I think tags are atiquate for more exacting information, such as arithmatic, spelling, vocabularity, history. Content rating is better suited for less exact concepts like Love, Hate,


Personally, i find often myself cooperating with people who arn't my friends.



New features can attract new users. New users will likely add additional information beyond the info for the feature that brought them to UVL. The maximum number of bits of informations that can be added and numbers of titles grows slower than the number of potential users to add that information. Looking at this as economic problem of information (both product and advertising), and people (both employees and customers). The quality of our product affects advertising, attracts customers and attracts employees. We can afford to restrict purchases and sales in order to uphold the quality of our product as long as we have steady supply of new employees and customers. This is the opposite of diminishing returns. Eventually, in-order to preserve quality we will need as many restrictions as features. However, I'm sure at that point UVL will still be the least restricted specialized videogame database.


They are also likely to increase sales. It all depends on how well game authors can match the demands of the target audience and still stay within the the target rating. So toning it down or amping it up all centers around negative content.

Surely there are better ways to tell people about content than to reduce it to something a arbitrary as years spent living life. For a large part of this post I'm about to center the debate on _educational_content_. The goal of an age appropriate label is an honorable one, to answer important questions on behalf of parents _and_children_. Will a child understand the content? Will it only confuse them? Will a child find the content appealing, challenging, boring? Do they even care? Will this game encourage them to care? Will the content actually help a child live up their full potential? Could the content potentially damage them, being too much to handle and leaving them with a life long bias about the subject that they have no interest in improving? Are they just incapable of dealing with it at this time. Oh horror of shackling these answers to age alone with no consideration for who the child is, what the child's interest are, or what the child's real potential might be!

So, let us come up with alternatives to 'age appropriate' labeling. How's this to start with, in the content description article, we include one or more of the easiest concepts plucked right out of the game. Just put it out there for parents to see so they can discuss with their children decide for themselves. In cases where the game provides questions and answers, post some together. Spoilers might be included, but we have already warned the visitor. Then show the hardest content, the maximum they can expect. Present the content reduced to its basics. In a few cases words may be inadequate, an occasional picture may be necessary, just don't go overboard. We should tell the parent to get involve in their children's life to know what their current interests and limits are. Begin discussing this content with them to see if you believe they are ready for it. You may have your own bias against the content. At some point you may even decide your child should never see the content until they move out of your house and decide for themselves; not recommended, but it is your right as a parent. After discussion, parents may find their child is not ready for it. They might find their kids already know it, or worse, have the wrong idea about it.
_Educational_content_ solved. Now read the post again from the beginning, only this time pretend I was lying when I said _educational_content_. What I meant to say was _sex_. Try reading it again with religion, nudity, war, friendship, genocide, death, patriotism, hate, and so on.

About the target audience...
In regards to the age: I was more into the fact that a game could be "too childish" for older players, which is why it would be marged as "for children" or something, which the current official rating doesn't say, only that it's "appropriate" for ages of this and above, which usually means the content isn't too mature for them, not that it's actually targeted for so young people.

There's also games targeted at (young) women (it's usually young men), and such which isn't stated in the ratings either. And I'm sure people can think of a lot more target demographies than those.

Ahh, but this rating system seems to be aiming for a bit different content, and deducing the gender bias in game's audience isn't that easy sometimes, and it could very well end up being completely different from what the developers intended anyways.

You have an excellent point, I apologize for missing it the first time.



I would hope that samples of the content in the purposed content article would be sufficient for the viewer to decide for themselves it's appropriateness for the target audience they personally have in mind (themselves, a child, or someone else). In blunt terms; describing how the main character wears flowery face paint (tattoo_0) and puts sparkly stickers on everything in the game world (vandalism_0) kinda gives away the intended audience. In blunter terms; describing how the game features closeups of tightly clothed jiggling digital breasts (nudity_0) is equally effective at establishing the intended audience. But the how well the content rating establishes the intended audience shouldn't even be an issue. I'm saying that the developer's opinion as well as the rater's opinion should be ignored in content rating. It is the opinion of the target audience that really matters. In my view, the content areas should remain neutral. But all these opinions should be allowed, in fact, encouraged, maybe even mandatory, in review articles.


Another excellent point. There is an unavoidable divide between those who make entertainment and the majority those that buy it. Usually unnoticeable mild but sometimes very prominent. Consider these two bits of entertainment, Legend and Wizards. The directors of these films both intended them to be for little kids and as family entertainment. Where do I begin? Nudity, underage extreme cleavage, sexuality, child-adult sexuality, big scary demons, cute innocent fairytale creatures killing and being killed in bloody and graphic ways, mockery of religion (a pair of dwarves who venerate Pepsi, among other things, are shot to death while praying), language exceeding the mild variety (sob, slut, cunt, f*** is present but obscured), the holocaust complete with swastikas, Hitler himself (not an actor) has a speaking roll in the file (read the credits). The funny thing is when you hear the directors talk about their movies, they are oblivious to the idea that their's anything in these movies that would not be for little kids. I think Ralph Bakshi may have finally come around to accepting the possibility that some parents *think* this. But this didn't cause him hesitate to put together a directors cut DVD with behind scenes material that was forced out of the movie including full frontal nudity. His comments on the DVD, some are about the DVD, indicates he still thinks his movie and the DVD is for kids. I gather from posts on this forum that some of these subjects are unequally controversial across the different cultures represented here. How accepted or not they are in your culture is not why I bring it up. The point is, these are USA directors who are parents themselves. They are making movies for USA kids. But somehow they have a vastly distorted view of what their target audience deem appropriate. And its not like they couldn't have made movies in this style that would have been accepted. To illustrate how the content should be neutral, I'll use two other movies that share nearly all of the same content. Between the movies Dark Crystal and Labyrinth the same serious subject matters are covered, plus a few more. Nudity, sexuality, child-adult sexuality, underage girl grouped by hundreds of hands, big scary demons, cute fairytale creatures killing and being killed, shooting and getting shot, fairies being killed with insecticide, language, a holocaust, kidnapped baby, fairytale creatures losing body parts, cannibalism (the bad guys are actually show eating pieces of flesh of their dead leader), and the first time we see a dwarf, he's got his pants open with a full stream of pee being let lose. In fact the later two films can almost look 'worse' if judging by the content alone. But USA audiences were much more accepting of them. UVL content rating should provide enough information for the audience to decide, without telling them what they should decide, even if the creator has attempted to already decide for them. Keep in mind that game authors get their very own article to tell people what to think if they so choose. And I reiterate, reviews can also tell people what to think.

re: UVL Rating System (URS) ???

Sorry, I still like SINNERS best (see my earlier post)



Actually many proposals are originating in Asia for a new way of rating entertainment. They have many of the same motives that our purposed system has. A lot of the proposals include a few 'positive' ratings. The main concern they all seem to emphasize is the game industry's ratings are by outsiders who don't consider their culture. For instance, in Laos some people are asking for a rudeness rating for games where characters are loud, kiss or hold hands in public, put their feet above their head (outside of a sporting event), touch another characters head, dress poorly, or enter a person's home without taking off their shoes. A system in China called "e-game" adds a politeness, kindness, teamwork and a 'scenarios' rating. But for the most part, they are all age and 'we say so' based. Many of them are heavy into censorship as well. It is very common that a committee member demands 'remove this or we'll rate you red striker pornography enemy of the state'. Or as member Chen Dong put it, "we delete political and pornographic content." The e-game system go so far as to critique the content. The e-game committee has decided that the mere presence of corpses and vampires denote harmful violence, unless they are reasonable to the plot of the game, such as in Diablo (which was such a big seller in China, it was resonable to the economy as well). Which brings me to their common flaw, none of them are democratic. Most of them are struggling to get started because nobody likes the people sitting on the committees. They accuse the potential members of being just as detached as the game creators. I think UVL's system will be mentioned on the local news in Peoria, Illinois long before any of these other 'positive' systems.

A lot of the groundwork for the system can be done with theme tags, you know. The only thing missing with them is that you can't attach a value with them in sense of "How much" of it is there (weak bitch-slapping violence versus all-out homicide, although you _could_ add bitch-slapping and homicide separately.. they're enough different to warrant it, I think :P), unless you wish to insert some odd symbols or adjectives into them, creating multiple theme tags for the same thing.

We could just use some §urs-pride kind of tags or something to see how all that can be added. Maybe append each with a number 1-3 (1-5 goes into too much detail I think, and makes it harder to decide which is the correct for each case), like §urs-hate-2 to denote strong hate (1 for weak-ish, 3 for extreme/blind.. the max value _should_ be rare). The bad side of that is that it would bog down the tag system even more, but would save some effort later (if values were going to be included). Pointless really, so it should be used without a value.

Side note: In case the theme of the tag occurs only in one scene for a moment or two, I don't think it would be valid for inclusion.

Side note 2: If the values _are_ included, then there should be some indeterminate value as well, so people could add the theme regardless of their understanding on how strong it is, either because they don't know or they can't decide properly.

Edit: The URS _is_ much like a detailed theme system, which is why I proposed the use of theme tags.

re: re:

Ha-ha-ha! I never thought of them that way. They were awesome when I was a kid, though :D And still are for the most part. You could think of Teletubbies here. _THAT_ was aimed at children of ages less than 7 I think, but it was the parents who loved the show. Too much idealistic crap of how the "perfect (loved) child" should behave and the like. Luckily no games were made out of that (I hope, at least).

While tags could help, using a custom syntax to store the numerical value will make troubles when have to crunch numbers to show statistics or the list of the most (add your tag here) games.

I would say that Lack of understanding or indecision would disqualify a person from adding the theme. I believe the themes and different levels thereof should be discussed on the forums and a consensuses be well defined. If someone has a question after reading the definition, it would probably be because the current definition is lacking. They can join the discussion and help improve it. Or perhaps the community will decide on a new theme. After the undecided editor has gained and perhaps helped create this new wisdom, it will be an easier decision. If its the content in the game itself that editor is not understanding then he should discuss the content in the forums. I'll use some Labyrinth examples again. There are few female characters in the movie and only two are significant ones. They are Sarah and her step mom, whom Sarah does not regard significantly. (DVD commentary: the Junk Lady was meant to be Jareth's puppet and a mere parody of Sarah). There is an adult female that wispers to Jareth, "She's to young for you." (DVD). All the main male characters are willing to submit to Sarah's authority to one degree or another. The main male characters demonstrate mostly good, but also bad qualities, that women are often attracted too when looking for a mate. Hoggle is ugly, disgusting, cowardly, his loyalty strays easily, and wants little to do with Sarah until she gives him jewelery (which she knows is fake). Hoggle and Jareth are the only males that have a genuine romantic attraction to Sarah. Hoggle is the only character Sarah kisses, or even tries to kiss (My memories fuzzy on that one, I could be wrong). And at Jareth's order, Hoggle betrays Sarah with an apple then says "Damn you Jareth! ...and damn me too". Were I rating just the things mentioned with the purposed system, there would be some obvious ones Language_1, Lies_3, child-adult_sexuality_0, loyalty_3, betrayal_1. But there are important details than mean something! I'm actually clueless as to what that would be. All males? Buys affection from ugliest romantic choice with fake jewelery? Forbidden fruit? Is it some kind of feminist or dominatrix thing? Its a weird, 'what does it all mean' mystery that I'm sure is important to content but I juust can't figure it out. So I would ask in the forum. If no-one can figure it out, then it can be briefly mentioned in the content article and no themes added.


Agreed. I think a lot of stuff completely bypasses kids minds. I rewatch movies I havn't seen since I was a kid. Sometimes I think simultaneously 'this is so much cooler than I remember' and 'what where my parents thinking!? these things could have warped my mind! They probably did!'


Bevis and Butthead had more mind developing content that these drooling idiots. The old wives tale the TV will rot your brain was finally proven. It makes me think of Dummi Bears only much more evil. The creators pretty much said Teletubbies were designed to replace the love of humans in the lives of toddlers so that they would trust technology instead. I've heard that the 'inserts' where different depending on where it aired so perhaps these where better elsewhere. But it still it had the Teletubbies themselves.

Enjoy. Play with the Teletubbies.
Luckily no screenshots, no description, none. I can still hope that this game doesn't exists :-)

NTSC
PAL

Sorry...

No Way! the BBC refuse to have their logo on Monty Python but allow it on this ****?!

I sincerely hope we'll be able to search games based on the ratings. This would deprecate (probably not, I seem to recall it being used to remove some adult content from showing in wrong pages) the current "sexy" descriptor, I think, which I haven't really understood why it's even there. But since it really is related to adult content, it should be renamed to "adult", even if it would make its use broader.

Still.. search for the URS, please? (honestly, if this wasn't already planned, I'd be stunned)

Exactly, while there are things still not searchable, like languages and many flags, they are going to be searchable very soon, along with URS.

re: re:
I too objected to the 'sexy' label, as it is not accurate. but is the current solution.

Sexy doesn't refer to adult content but to erotic content. It's used like the genres "fantasy", "humorous", "horror" and has nothing to do with age restrictions.

Then it should be named erotic. Simple as that.

That is slightly better, but the problem is some cultures make no distinction between Erotic and Nudity.

Most erotic games have nudity of course; it's like most horror games contain blood. There are a few games that I would call "erotic" which have no nudity (Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball) and there are games that contain nudity but are not "erotic" (Ultima 7/2 Serpent Isle comes to my mind here) and have it just to make the world more "realistic". I like the idea to change sexy to erotic but not to name it adult or remove it as a genre.

This could sound silly to some of you, but I choose "sexy" because I needed a lite word to depict the theme without using the so-called "stop-words", words that when found (by search robots or hypocritical people) would automatically mark the site as "adult".

Nowadays search engines are smarter (not sure about people, eh) so I think that erotic can now used safely.

(added)
This is a good opportunity to translate the gametypes in the various languages available.
If you know other languages other than english or italian, you can contribute. :-)

I can't find info on what's needed to create translations.

Sorry, it is somewhat hidden in the WIP page...
This is the list of translated text for each language (label:translation)
www.uvlist.net/uvl_translation.php

Just report back the lines you wish to change.

Ah! Of course, this is very relevant concern. For search engines especially, but also certian people. I recently came to a similar realization when contemplating the SINNERS rating system (I haven't forgot about it, still working on it). Descriptors should not be words (well use "GARGLEBLASTER" for an example) that send overly sensitive people running in terror from a game before they have had a chance to read the SINNERS article that in all likelihood states that the game presents "GARGLEBLASTER" as bad, condemns "GARGLEBLASTER", and encourages the player to fight "GARGLEBLASTER" both in the game and real life. As for defeating search engines (and p.a-r=e+n/t?a>l c:o{n_t|r]o~l s*o#f@t%w$a`r,e for that matter, hence called CPS). They are pretty dumb. Wait, I don't want to group all those together. Instead I'll say that search engine stop-words are easily averted. But, CPSs are the most idiotic, ignorant, cretinic, absurd, foolish, Congressional, senseless, and imbecilic bits of computer code ever devised. (I apologists to all English speakers, and especially English teachers, for degrading the meaning of those words by associating them with CPS. But accurate and strong enough words just don't exist anymore). You can do things like adding a spaces between each letter of the stop-word then using css to reduce the width of these spaces to zero. There are other techniques as well. This is perfectly ethical because these words as they are being used on UVL are actually being taken as advisories and warnings to the very individuals who wish to make the effort to avoid these games (regardless of how they are intended to be taken by you, and the UVL community). I ran into this problem on my church's website that I coded for (I did NOT design it, I just created the source code). We couldn't have any serious spiritual discussions about anything on our message board without, 1. being categorized as 'mature content' by search engines and SCPs and 2. The board and posters on in being targeted with inappropriate spam based on keywords. I had never coded a webpage before then, but in about 10 minutes I had found ways to eliminate both problems. Talking about SCPs and what I'm attempting to do about them will actually create flags that CPSs will notice so further details are best kept to private email discussions. And you've already provided for overly sensitive people who actually come to the website and managed to be offended by the sight of certain words with the safe description option. So @^%'em. Actually no, that's the right thing to do. Dare them to stop UVL by complaining to these numbers 1-757-226-7000, 1-800-759-0700, and at these websites www.cbn.com/contact/feedback-cbnnewswatch.aspx, http://www.cbn.com/contact/feedback-cwn.aspx. Tell them to start a "uvlist.net is evil" website or just a blog. Suggest to them they wear "uvlist.net is evil" T-shirts. There's no such thing as bad publicity. And whatever you do, don't mention the safe image and safe description options until you on international TV.

re: re:

Which all make the text also (partially) unreadable to everyone who isn't too used to reading it (like me), completely unreadable for text-to-speech systems (not that many blind gamers, but...), text-only browsers (I don't think they process spacing differences in formatting), and people who have CSS disabled (for whatever reason). Also, the most obvious, it makes searching difficult.

Most search engines, and especially those babysitter software, provide methods for lifting inapproriate flags set to your site by some automatic scanning, so I don't see the point in all this evasion of.. something. It just makes things difficult for us and our userbase.

(I have no idea what this is all about, so ignore me if I didn't quite follow you)

re: re: re:

If done properly, and the user has a CSS compliant browser (thats nearly all of them, even elinks is partially compliant), it looks exatly the same on the screen. But if you copy paste from the page, or use a more primitave text only browser, it is rendered unreadable to some. I'm susceptible to this myself, I have dyslexia.

CSS provides ways to reveal 'scrambled' text to audio browsers (text-to-speech) and braille readouts. SCPs usually ignore these because censoring information intended for people with disables will provoke a series of multi-million dollar lawsuits lasting years in under 15 minutes from the first publishing of the software (google "olympic.org" blind lawsuit).
This bit of code is to avoid unfortunate situations for people with that condition that causes fainting with certain trigger words (I forget the name).<span style="visibility:hidden; pause-after: 1min; pitch: x-low; richness: 100; speak: normal; stress: 100; voice-family: male; volume: x-loud; ">WARNING! If you faint at the sound of certain words, don't listen to this web page while driving or operating machinery.</style>


The method mentioned is only one option. But, if someone disables everything then yes, virtually any method will look bad to their browser. But so will the rest of the site.


UVL internal searches can be modified to compensate. As for external search engines, well, thats the point, the different methods are trying to make searching for certain words more difficult.


Search engines, yes. SCPs, not really. Some do have systems in place to be unflagged. But many SCPs cannot even get their own homepages unflagged (as in Neddoodly SCP bans neddoodlyscp.com because some the words it blocks are listed on the site).
Besides, getting unflagged means collaborating with the SCPs. That's a slippery slop.

re: re: re: re:

It would be mildly amusing if the warning itself causes it to trigger :p


Then we shouldn't care about getting banned by them at all if collaborating with them is so bad :)

re: re: re: re: re:

Generally, if a person has this condition they know which 'anxiety words' and therefore sites to avoid and know when to never listen to any media (no PBS radio, or Rush Limbaugh while driving). This would actually be a warning incase they were in a less dangerous situation and just wanted to avoid fainting anyway. The trigger words are usually not common to most videogames except in more recent games. Swear words, "sex", anatomy, speech (as in public speaking), sleep (some toddlers become so anxious at the thought, that they actually faint. this is not as convenient as it sounds). This thread has long since covered enough of these words so we can pretty much say whatever without increasing the risk:)

I would say forget the SINNERS numbers when calculating the stats. Either that or just round them off. If there is 50% or more agreement on a SINNERS tag, then it counts in the stats as 1 occurrence of that tag (just as if it was a normal tag). I realize that reducing it this much may still mean revisiting the if-then condition about 300,000 times (if games average 3 or 4 SINNERS tags each). If this is still a problem, then I'd go with my original thought, ignore the SINNERS numbers. After all, the SINNERS tags are basically abstract concepts to begin with. Computing abstractions is like asking an computer if it dreams of electric sheep, what the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is. (play BAD_MACHINE for more insight on this concept.)

The numbers could be accomplished by having a generic tag and a tag with the number. This would be quite spammy since we'd get twice as many tags this way.

The following is a bad idea = requires a special case tag counting:[[spoiler:I'm not really sure how the tag counting goes, but I don't think it's beyond SQL syntax to search for part of the tag name only..
We'll use § as the rating tag symbol for this exercise.
There could be rating tags in a manner of the following two:
§naughtybehaviour_0
§naughtybehaviour_3

They would easily be found by just looking for s/^§naughtybehaviour_\d$/ if using Perl RegExp, and the plain old LIKE "§naughtybehaviour_" SQL syntax (= just leave the number out when searching for the tags). I honestly don't see the problem with this not being countable. On the other hand, if exact tag name matching is used, then this will certainly fail. I have no idea how the tags are stored in the database, so I'm not too sure how well this would work, and I hear LIKE is slow.]]But then, I don't see the point in listing _ratings_ alongside regular tags.

Edit: Tags could practically have rating integrated in them. Many of the tags could benefit from telling how strongly the tag's described content actually fits the game they're attached to, and when browsing games with certain tag, we could use this as sorting order since people are likely be interested in games where the tag has more importance than the ones where it's less pronounced. Some tags wouldn't really benefit from this at all, though. Like game series tags, or sport tags, unless they're applied to games where the sport isn't the main thing. So the cases which don't benefit from it much should get full rating by default.

If a §naughtybehavior_0 and §naughtybehavior_3 descriptors counted as a naughtybehavior tag. Then these descriptors were overwhelmingly disagreed with; we'd be counting a tag that doesn't actually apply to the game. Unless we do a conditional 'don't count tag if disagreement is over %50'. Which leads back to a number crunching problem. Although it seems to me that this would be lessened because descriptors that are disagreed with would be far less common than descriptors that are agreed with. My thought on keeping descriptors that are disagreed with was only intended when a public or persistent false accusation is made about a game or some version of the game include it and some don't. [[spoiler:spoiler|Note that if we count descriptors in any way, this could be exploited for sabotages of the rating system and UVL. Not that UVL cannot be sabotaged now. But having a content rating system is going to inevitably attract the attention of some of the more annoying people on the planet who tend to think their personally invented definition of right and wrong should apply to everyone and are willing to sabotage anything that does not 100% agree with them.]]

[[spoiler:off subject|Btw, I wouldn't expect to have a lot of multiple levels of a tag per game. For example if the game has many occurrences of alcohol. Ranging from Level 0 (alcohol is merely present) to level 3 (alcohol is or can be abused to the point of permanently debilitating effects), then only §alcohol_3 need apply. Lets discuss Captian Jack Sparrow for this example. He abuses alcohol and seems to have mild Korsakoff's Syndrome. Obviously this character would have consumed (level 0), been impaired at some point (Level 1), and gotten drunk (Level 2). So we needed include these even if he specifically is shown meeting the requirements during the course of the game (he gets drunk). But there is a dispute in the forums over this. Some people say the character is not diagnosed and his symptoms are not entirely constant with Korsakoff's Syndrome. The dispute goes unresolved. So §alcohol_2 is added and a statement in the S.I.N.N.E.R.S. article is added to say "Captian Jack Sparrow drinks alcohol, is impaired, and also drunk at times; so the §alcohol_2 descriptor applies. And he exhibits symptoms that may or may not be a result of a permanently debilitating condition known as Korsakoff's Syndrome; so the §alcohol_3 descriptor may apply also."]]

This is all question of how they're stored of which we currently have no word on.

If the tags are stored in the game entries themselves, getting more than 1 instance per rating tag (§foo_*) is impossible without actually running the search multiple times or using some SQL magic that actually counts them in the tag string rather than just counting the game entries that matched the query, both of which can be avoided easily.

The other alternative is that SQL provides GROUP BY command for which you can use the game ID, this will throw away any duplicates for the same game if one entry per tag is used in the DB (separate tag table), so the argument is useless here as well.

Sabotage can be partially eliminated by limiting access, there's no other way around it. Removing tags (and ratings with that) probably should be limited to editors or others with suitable rights rather than all anyway. This will make cleanup easier if only addition is kept public, especially if the addition requires login (do they? I forgot), so the offending users can be banned (disable login + ban IP for ~3 days, etc. IP ban is quite inefficient, though)

Worst case scenario. We implement the system and after several years we have 2000 members allowed to add descriptors. An influential leader who has no idea what a computer is, or how they work, and has never played a videogame, is informed by a follower that uvlist.net has done something bad against their organization. So he announces in a video, "all our able members should defend our organization by attempting to hack uvlist.net and shut it down.". The video gets uploaded to youtube.com, 100,000 people see it. Some of the skilled and able of this organization are already amongst our 2000 raters. It should not be made easy for these people to act on these orders.
This is not as far fetched as it sounds. Recently a pastor of a church of 6000 members was angry at something he saw on christianitytoday.com. He told his church from the pulpit, "I know some of you are geeks, if you can take it down, do!" A video of it was uploaded to many different sites. christianitytoday.com does not emphasize where or how to 'become a member' of their site, there is no 'join' or 'new member' buttons. The don't seem to be in the market for any new members. Its a very obscure process. Despite this, some members of the church were already members of the site before this pastor issued his order. It could have a disaster for them. Fortunately, none found any loopholes to exploit to harm the site.

Not much we can do about that kind of stuff (than, again, limiting access to certain features :p), and I highly doubt the join process for this site will be made obscure. Kinda counter-intuitive for what the site is partially about, right?

Having one of those goofy graphical character recognition registeration guards might help at least remove any chances people would make spam bots join the site (I'm actually amazed we don't seem to have any here, despite the join process being so simple). Or just mail them some registration _code_ (URL might be too easy for a bot to use to activate their account) they need to use to activate their account, but I don't know how effective that is. I can't even remember if I had to do something like that when I joined, and that was quite recently. Having a time-limited join "ban" might also prevent automated joins a bit (someone joins from address A, and that address is banned for joins for the next few hours... easy-ish to counteract, so maybe not). Time-limited edits and such might also reduce this, but I seem to have a habit of triggering these everywhere, so use some verification (character recognition, again) in these cases so the work is not lost.

There's loads of other things we could do, but since we currently have no problems with it, I don't see the point in developing them much yet. Andrea should have some quick way of making the site read-only for everyone else but himself (and anyone he deems not part of the incursion) so he can implement them while the site is still running if we ever do encounter such problems.

Eh, I kinda made the wrong point. The point was discouraging potential saboteurs who are already members and perhaps already know how to sabotage the site. For a single 'incident' like the above example, temporary suspension of new membership or even game editing is a drastic but catchall solution until the urge passes. But if we have easy exploits that an editor could take advantage of, they could begin sabotaging the site days before the 'incident' was known to the rest of the UVL community. I'm suggesting we not put in place any system that could damage the site in a matter of minutes if used for that purpose by a current member.

I'm not sure which suggested(?) thing you're referring by this. Deleting (and editing) game entries can be far more destructive than any features recently suggested as I can see.

Edit: If this is about the tags being manually added in other than game entries, then the limiting access to editors is still the only solution we can really use. The special tag article achieves the same thing except in a convoluted and harder to implement manner.
Edit2: Actually, that can't really damage the site, so I assume it was something else.

I was thinking about this few months ago, a "panic" button to disable editings on the fly, available to some of you.
This would be even more dangerous if the "bad guy" access it ;-)
Anyway I have something like this ready somewhere, just not easy to reach.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that people have to ask me directly to become editor, so I can keep on eye on them and eventually removing their abilities if something goes wrong. (never happened yet).

New editors usually don't get access to delete games (I know that editing a game with bad data is almost the same, but at least is more boring).

I don't backup the (ever growing) 101Mb database daily, but backups are regularly done anyway.

It's also good to have when you're doing some heavy maintenance or some such that might cause problems if people tried to store data during it, though locking database tables is usually enough for that, doesn't hurt to lock people out from modifying during them with a big warnig label saying that "the site is currently in read-only mode for maintenance".

Back to the old subject of multiple people doing the reviews. I'm still against it, and should be only in cases where people think the ratings are "wrong", in which case a full review by number of people can be used (unless the original rater admits and corrects the mistake, and no, no bending to the public opinion of what's moral and what's not, we're not moral authority like some religious groups are) if we can find as many people with access to the game as required by the review process (minimum of three was suggested, I recall... or was that we needed at least three people who agree on it? this would effectively require at least twice as many raters, which would lead to majority vote being better choice than "at least three" thinking it correct).

And for the purpose of rating and discussing the ratings, a thread in the game itself clearly named as such should be used, so people can see _why_ something was chosen and if there was a conflict in what it should be (and the rating won't get lost in the depths of forum history instead of being readily available with the game itself).

I'm also against calling these "ratings". Categorization would be more accurate, which we're already doing with tags (e.g. drug abuse, which I've taken the liberty to expand to be applicable for all games = we should ignore external ratings, we're not here to complement or correct them), except they don't have any numerical data associated with them or anything such. Without the numerical data, they definitely won't be ratings but just categorizations, and would not need review.

If tags are given strength values as I've suggested already in a few places (some tag types should be devoid of this, like the game series tags - only the default 'null' value for them), the rating process could be just limited to deciding on what their values should be. The presence of the "rating" categories should not be an issue in any case.

Since hastily typing a rant, I've given something a lot more thought. I attacked the idea of having anonymous raters. Sanguine made a good point about rater anonymity, it has its advantages. Raters could get harassed by people who disagree with them. But, I still think the gamers and consumers should be allowed to know who is rating the games. For UVL's system, I propose that a filtering system be in place. Content rating could be done under an unchanging pseudonym. People wishing to confront the person behind it would have to step through short a process ensured they had a complaint with the rater and not the game, the rating system, or something else that they objected too beside the rater. Then they would be told that their message was going to a different rater than the one they were complaining about. And that it will be entirely up to this other rater to decide if their complaint against the targeted rater is valid or not. And the rater they want to complain too may never see their complaint if the other rater decides it is invalid. In other words, if they just want to flame the rater, they are wasting their time (I'm sure someone besides me can think up a more polite way to say all this to them). If they agree to all this, there is a secret series of steps taken to ensure that valid complaints nearly always make it to the rater and appropriate action is taken. This method of course, can not be disclosed in the forums :) But all UVL raters would know about this secret process. And their would be a limit on how many times the visitor could complain.

Difficult to implement, since it requires a number of whole new systems for UVL, though part of it could be accomplished by implementing (notifications and) private & public messaging (which I've considered suggesting, but it never seemed very important, since you'd need to implement features that make it possible to notify someone in charge of its abuse and harassment of users by it - quite literally making _all_ conversations between two users completely available for reading to the one set to right the wrong, simply because single post can't tell you which of the two started the thing and there needs to be access to the original posts rather than trusting the quotations of the other user - etc. etc. gets difficult like everything else). And I mean messages directed at certain user rather than something posted in the forum (I find forum sectioning to me more useful than this: announcements/news, bugs/errors, development/suggestions, games/gametalk [=game articles and their replies], and general/off-topic - this would require capability for moving articles between the sections as well).

We're quite anonymous as it is, and since (private) messaging is not implemented, there's not much reason for it. I'm not against this, except in the fashion that it makes the process a bit more difficult for everyone else involved but the users. And I'm not sure it matters if the process is known to end-users or not. If they know it, they might have some insights on how it could be improved. When implementing the thing, the rationale needs to be clear and weighty enough and available to users who try to use it so they're aware why it is so, especially if it's made into some secret process, for public one there's little.

The least this needs is a method for hiding the discussions from users who're not involved, and of course hiding who did the edits, but this will make edit logs somewhat pointless (unless they gain some form or report functionality). And since this hiding the editor thing is likely voluntary in edits, to keep rest of the logs readable, how would it be prevented from being abused since it isn't logged properly?

To summarize:
* (Private/)public messaging directed at user, so users may spout crap about ratings.
* Notificatios of private messages, so people can take action in timely fashion.
* Hiding of threads from uninvolved users, to keep the raters anonymous.
* Make edits that involve the rating process anonymous in the logs.

We shouldn't be too anonymous. Viewers (the uninvolved) won't be able to find raters they trust if it is totally anonymous. Actually a number may be better than a pseudonym (kinda like "Inspected by #6", "Agreed with by #215" or "Disagreed with by #215") this would be a way for a view to identify their favorite raters. There's always going to be people who decide 'I don't care what content the majority thinks is in a game, 'What does a _parent_ think'. Substitute other things for _parent_; _rater_who_usually_agrees_with_me_, _rater_from_the_same_country_as_me_, _rater_with_the_same_religion_as_me_.
This is number could help in keeping attempted harassment out of the forums.

This is all going on the assumption that we will have descriptors that everyone can agree or disagree with and rater's agreements are separated from everyone else's. And that viewers could lookup the agree/disagree logs of a rater. If he disagrees with the §assault_4 descriptor (which includes less than lethal violence) for the game where no characters are the victum of life-threatening assaults; and instead agrees with §assault_5 (deadly violence). Then this kinda implies he might be a little bit wrong from time to time. If the logs show he routinely agrees with one level more than the §assault descriptor that the majority agrees with; then the viewers might see that he has a bias. In fact it would be appropriate for the view to complain about such a rater at this point. It would seem he's got a slightly skewed definition of the §assault descriptor or is crusading against violent games. A possible explanation could be that he thinks the level definitions are above the level title, when they are actually below them. No malice in this second example. So its probably even more helpful to have more eyes to spot this mistake.

As for who actually adds the descriptors in the first place. I think this is important to be disclosed to the viewers also. If a rater, we'll call him #1001107, is descripting games with §cannibalism. And it turns out he doesn't add any other descriptors except §cannibalism. In fact, 95% of all §cannibalism descriptors on UVL were added by #1001107. I think viewers should be allowed to know who 1001107 is. He might belong to some weird cult. Or he might be and anthropologist. Personally I've never trusted anthropologists that much.

I'd just assume he has some interest in it or has found a resource for it, or has done some researching. The example tag is of a kind that not many might not want to associate with it and so, not use it, even if it is there. So one person having most instances of it is quite likely, even if he's not somehow mentally disturbed or whatever. Also there's a minor chance that he had already tagged most or all instances of it before anyone else could contribute to the descriptor, so there's no room to get his percentage any lower by any means than waiting for new games that the descriptor applies to.


Requires we have a user flag that marks them as a parent. I don't think that's going to happen.


As likely as the parent thing.

Actually, now that I think of it. If tags (... "everything taggable") could be added to users as well, these could be used to identify such users (religions, parents, infidels, ...). Of course, they should be modifiable only by the user and not by others, and be as optional as anything else (people love their anonymous paperbag heads). There are numerous problems with this, though.


Works only if the users themselves can participate in rating, so the anonymity becomes pointless since it's "free for all".

This actually removes any need for any review process and such, it just becomes quite democratic process, with its inherent flaws. Unless we really impose that special raters have much more in say in this than regular users, which again defeats any use the free for all method would have - their ratings would become invisible, and since they wouldn't affect much, it wouldn't find any popularity among users and would become an unused feature, both by users and by UVL itself.


I'm not much into finding raters who I trust or who I agree with, their task is to rate _accurately_, not how I desire them to rate them (well, I desire for accuracy, so... :P).


If the ratings provided do allow too much sway in opinion, then the descriptions for them are likely quite inadequate or just too ambiguous. Draw a clear line and they can't honestly say it's their _interpretion_ of the rating, and there's no need to go overly wordy with this like lawyers are infamous for, if they can't understand simple English, then they shouldn't be allowed to rate at all (says I).


I wonder how this could really happen unless we allow morality to become too prevalent topic for the ratings. Anything I can think of just gives more descriptors for the games and makes the ratings more worthy and, well, descriptive. The only way I can see people abusing this is by applying ratings to games that they don't apply to, and I don't see how you could slander violent games by them anyhow. If you can, you have to reconsider the rating itself, since that is likely more slanderous than the way it is used. And people who do this are likely spotted soon enough that their rating rights can revised, the offender notified and the problem discussed unless it's too obvious it isn't just some mistake.

Unfortunately we only have the "am playing" and "have completed" markers.. no "have played" (which could be accomplished by turning "am playing" into tristate value -> unmarking the game would only turn it into this third state and would never return to the "not playing/never played" state, just switch between "am playing" and "have played"). We then could require that raters have either "am playing", "have played" or "have completed" set before they may set any ratings. I'm not sure what we'd accomplish with this in the end, so I'm not too keen on getting this kind of limiter in. The tristate is nice off-shoot idea though :)