Including content ratings in games

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

Hi,

Sorry for the potentially off-topic posting. I've been working on a
new content rating system called OARS. I wrote up some notes on my
blog[1] but I've been asked to post to this list by multiple people.

The content rating system I'm going to be proposing has aspects of
privacy and has the potential to cause all kind of politics, and I
thought here might be a useful place to discuss this as gnome-software
should have the information for all games in GNOME 3.22. We've not yet
talked with the designers about how (or if...) this is going to be
shown in the GNOME Software UI. Unless some consensus is reached and
applications actually add the missing data there would be no point
doing anything any further.

I'm kinda hoping the people on this list might have a more balanced
view of child protection and privacy than the internet at large,
cough, reddit. It's probably also worth stating that I think this kind
of content rating should be informational-only, i.e. we're never going
to be stopping people installing applications.

I've uploaded my prototype generator here:
http://apps-xdgapp.rhcloud.com/oars and I'd appreciate any feedback on
that. Some of the categories may be difficult to translate or may need
further (or better) examples, and so any comments on or off-list are
very welcome. Also, don't actually add anything to AppData files yet,
as the categories are nowhere close to being finalised. Thanks!

Richard

[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2016/03/07/age-ratings-in-gnome-software-introducing-oars/