SOURCE: The Times

DATE: 25 June 1993



PAGE: 31 Judging a game by its rating; Infotech Steve May

Sega's decision to submit its latest offering, Night Trap, to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is powerful evidence of the growing sophistication of video game technology.

That the board should have recently deemed it unsuitable for youngsters under 15 is an indication of the conundrum now facing both Britain's entertainment software industry and the overseers of film and video.

Night Trap is different from other Sega games in that it features moving video footage rather than computer-generated sprites an advance made possible because the game comes on a compact disc rather than a conventional cartridge.

Unlike a cartridge, which can store only about two megabytes of data code,
 a CD can carry 500 megabytes. Using clever compression techniques, CD-based games can exploit this capacity and mix video material with computer graphics to dramatically heighten the realism of any computer game.

Night Trap actually contains nothing that much more explicit than can be seen on Star Trek. The rating it has received is more of an admonishment for its subject matter young girls threatened by slavering alien abductors rather than any graphic bloodletting. Toys 'R' Us has refused to stock it.

It does, however, serve as a crude indication of what is to come. Compact disc games herald the long-anticipated coming of mass-market multimedia, a multi-billion dollar game that all the Hollywood studios want to play and in which every major consumer electronics company now has a stake.

But has Sega's early submission to the BBFC, driven by the Video Recordings Act, created a precedent that the software industry will find difficult to live with?

Unlike films, which are a linear viewing experience, a CD-based game or interactive film can have countless branches to explore, infinite outcomes, and umpteen secret compartments.

An experienced games player can take weeks to explore a two-megabyte game. A 500-megabyte CD-game could take that same adventurer a year. It is difficult to believe that those presently employed by the BBFC will be able to manage to reach level two of Sonic The Hedgehog, let alone convincingly vet a sophisticated role-playing CD game.

Given that the BBFC charge by the hour, the cost of certifying huge CD games could prove prohibitive for all but the world's largest software developers.

The video footage for Night Trap was actually shot several years ago by Hasbro for a game machine called the Nemo which was never to see the light of day. It is hardly state of the art.

That honour presently falls to Virgin Games' The 7th Guest, a newly-released, interactive haunted house mystery supplied on two CD ROM discs for IBM personal computers and compatibles. Comprising more than 1, 000 megabytes of code the equivalent of 3,000 floppies it is the best example yet of the way video games technology and multimedia techniques are colliding.

Set in an archetypal old house, the story centres around the dreadful fate of six guests drawn by the promise of wealth and power. The player guides an on-screen persona through the house with the help of a mouse controller.

Unlike lesser games, however, the house does not simply scroll past like a redundant cartoon; instead you move three dimensionally through photo-realistic rooms. The house is populated by digitised actors.

The production employed seven principals and 15 extras, all of whom were shot against a blue screen. This footage was then digitised and mixed against the computer-generated backgrounds.

It is virtual reality without the headset, so should it be classified?

``That has been under discussion internally,'' says Steve Clark, Virgin's media manager, ``but is the BBFC really qualified to judge it? We'll be looking at guidelines to be issued by the European Leisure Software Publishers Association before any moves are made.''

This trade body is widely expected to advocate self-regulation for the computer software industry, although Sega has pre-empted it by announcing its own classification system for both CD ROM and cartridge games. The Sega system will mirror the BBFC's ratings of U, PG, 15 and 18.

But is self-regulation an option available by law? James Ferman, the BBFC director, has his doubts. ``Games must be certified if they contain scenes of torture, sex or gross violence toward humans or animals, whether in film form or computer graphics. They should also be certified if they contain video footage or footage from a feature film already certificated.'' Given this definition, it would seem that most video games which feature scenes of outrageous, albeit cartoon, violence may contravene the Act.

Philips is at the forefront of this emerging multimedia technology. Its CD-I interactive system will be bolstered this autumn with a full motion video upgrade, allowing a new generation of fully interactive CD software to be produced, much of which will contain full-screen, full-motion video sequences.

One such title is an interactive version of The Joy of Sex. ``Philips's intention is to offer all CD-I titles containing full screen, full-motion video to the BBFC for certification,'' the company says. ``The problem comes with CD titles that are neither video nor computer graphics, but a mix of both.''

If Britain's Video Recordings Act is not to go the way of the Hays Code in America, the BBFC chiefs will need to go on a new technology crash course.

(c) Times Newspapers Ltd. 1993
