According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the National Institute on Media and the Family is claiming that Nintendo has abandoned its family friendly focus on Wii.

The fuss is over Sega’s latest creation, MadWorld, which is gory game where players fight like gladiators using vicious and improvised weapons. Obviously, the game is rated M, but there’s still the problem that video games are still played by young children and that Nintendo’s kiddy image is being tarnished.

Unfortunately, these watch dog groups think that the family is always the happy mother, hardworking father, and young impressionable son and innocent daughter. As time progresses, the son and daughter grow up and move on to different things (like the son will go out and skateboard and the daughter will hang at the mall and discuss the latest purse fads or whatever). The groups want to keep the family together and as young and innocent as possible from all the evils and trends in today’s society. And outside of the family are violent movies, vulgar music, bloody games, and so on which have become main stream in Western culture.

Many parents are uninformed over video games and what they should let their kids play (comes back to my experience where I saw a mom buy a copy of Conkers Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64 because it had a cuddly squirrel on the box). But what gets me is that families and watchdog groups start going ballistic when an M rated game is released for a Nintendo system because of the company’s perception of being more family oriented. Well, a DVD player is family oriented as well isn’t it? I don’t see why people are freaking out over this because the son could pop in his father’s copy of 300 into the DVD player and spend all afternoon screaming “Tonight we dine in hell!” instead of watching his educational Barney episodes.

Here’s something: if it doesn’t suit your family values: don’t buy it, don’t play it, and don’t whine about it. There are thousands of other games available if you’re not comfortable with one. Responsible gaming is in the hand of the parent. Read the box first before opening your wallet.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times