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I figure with what I want to ask here there may be a generation gap.
The question that came to mind for me was how did your parents treat you with regards to age restrictions. For example some parents are known for not given a toss and buying their kids any 18 certificate thing they want whereas on the other end of the scale there are some who won't even let their 11 year old see an obviously OK 12 certificate film.

Considering certification is largely a product of the 1980s and the rise of VHS tapes, and they didn't really come into their own until the 90s or even the 2000s with games and cheap videos, many of us may not have experience with dealing with them as a kid...most of those people however do have experience of dealing with them as parents I would imagine.
So if you wish, then invert the question, how do you treat age certs with your kids.

Poll broken. But hopefully discussion less so.


This question came on after seeing an old documentary about violent video games damaging our yoof and yelling at the screen that all the games they were mentioned are 18 certs...Except of course my parents had no problem letting me play them.

I. I don't know.

I haven't had to cross that particular bridge yet but I seriously don't know.

Computer games: wasn't supervised much, but that was back in the C64 days, when most software came from floppy copying sessions with friends. I was 16-18 when I had my SNES, and I while some games go censored (e.g. the heroes in the German version of Contra 3 are robots, and the game was called "Super Probotector". By the time I had a PC I was 18.

Movies: little supervision for TV. I had a little black and white TV in my room where I would sometimes stay up late and watch stuff like Christopher Lee's Dracula. When I was 9 or so I decided to watch Poltergeist, but I kept switching back and forth because I was scared. I still haven't watched the movie in its entirety. :blush: Aliens which I watched around the same age wasn't an issue. The TV in the bedroom was very useful around 1990 when I was ca. 14, when the young commercial TV stations started to show skin flix (soft porn movies, and a lot of 1970s German sex comedies - nothing of that was hardcore) on Friday and Saturday nights. :perv:

On VHS, my parents let us watch most stuff with them, even if movies were rated age 16 (like James Bond, or Iron Cross) but I think we didn't get to watch any 18+ stuff (which would have been the splatter/gore genre, mostly, at the time, and porn).

I still can't watch The Exorcist all the way through.  :ph34r:

My parents were totally by the book with me but totally lax with my siblings.

Really depends on the country. Germany and his ridiculous certification laws which bans for people under 18 or even puts to the index some movies which get no special treatment elsewhere e.g Warrior of the Lost World (MST3K material).

Lots of games probably played by Syt were in this index:
Ikari Warriors, Commando, Golden Axe etc.

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/bpjs-bpjm-indexed-games/offset,350/so,1d/ (http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/bpjs-bpjm-indexed-games/offset,350/so,1d/)

I can't see myself doing that but then I was not supervised. The only time I got a remark was when my father commented on the cutesy nature of a Japanese RPG and said I should play better games as before such as the one with the G.I (Guile).
Of course, nowadays are much more realistic in appearance (the un-games/interactive movies such as Call of are but their self-regenerating and scripted nature more than compensate for it).

Are they laws now? The ratings used to be just voluntarily followed by movie theaters, video game stores, and video rental places.

Either way, I watch the movie first, then decide if my kid(s) are able to watch it. Can they watch it with their friends, or do they need an adult present to talk it through after? With video games, I tried to do the same thing, though most of the time it was more of the "talking it through after/during" with most of those.

Me: "You know that shit's not real, right?"
Kids: "Of course, Mom. It's a cartoon!"
Me: "Okay. Have some cookies."

I'm old enough that though there were movie restrictions when I was a kid, none of the theaters were hard-core about it.

I was terrified of most movies when I was a kid so this was not an issue for my parents  :blush:

As a teen they could not have cared less.  I pretty much watched whatever I wanted but since I was usually playing computer games or watching/playing sports this was not really an issue then either.

I had to read the second paragraph to understand what you were talking about.

I have used the age certifications as a rough guide as to how vigilent I need to be.  In a world where the boys could access anything they want to what via the internet it is a lot better to teach them to have good judgment about what they should be watching then to have rules that require no judgment.

Speaking of age restrictions when growing up in Germany.

German kids in the 80s/90s never had the games arcade experience. Coin fed entertainment boxes were restricted to 18+ only venues (together with the machines where you could gamble for money). The government didn't trust kids with their money on this. There were no compunctions about cigarette vending machines on almost every street corner, though.

Also, going to a video store was not possible. Because of the bad, bad movies that might be on display there, video stores were only open to adults.

How old did you have to be to go to a brothel?

Could one slip in at 16?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 19, 2013, 10:35:38 AM
I still can't watch The Exorcist all the way through.  :ph34r:

Yi can no longer stand the sight of a Jesuit priest.

Raz is just phoning it in now.  :(

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 19, 2013, 01:59:56 PM
Raz is just phoning it in now.  :(

C'mon, hit your self.  Do the face palm, I live for the face palm.

Completely by-the-book regarding movies; I didn't see Basic Instinct until I caught it in the telly in my 20s, and I had to lie and tell them I was going to watch some PG stuff the night I went to Terminator 2, as examples.

Videogames they weren't too fussed about, as in the 1980s they weren't too explicit (as the graphics were crap, anyway). They wouldn't buy me anything that had a too explicit cover, however (hello Alfonso Azpiri).

As for music with explicit lyrics, etc... I listened to a crapload of music that glorified drugs, encouraged violence/suicide, talked openly about sex... but it was all in English and neither me or my parents understood a single word of it.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 19, 2013, 01:44:03 PM
How old did you have to be to go to a brothel?

Could one slip in at 16?

18.

I don't know - I have no experience with prostitutes.

You could buy beer and wine with 16, though. Hard liquor with 18.

Quote from: Razgovory on December 19, 2013, 01:57:00 PM
Yi can no longer stand the sight of a Jesuit priest.

Who can blame him?

Which law is the poll about?

My parents were generally pretty easy-going by the time I came around.  As long as I wasn't flaunting it in front of them, I could generally watch and listen to what I wanted.  Games weren't an issue then.  Only time they got on me about being home by a certain time was in high school when I was dating a girl a couple years younger, and I think that was more of a concern about her (or how her family perceived me/my family) than anything else.

My mother thought Final Fantasy was Satanic, so she threw away my cartridge. So I bought it again. She threw it away again. This continued until I had blown through all my paper route money. And then I took what I could find from around the house. Finally she gave up after I bought it the seventh time.

She was trying to save you from shitty japanese games.

Quote from: merithyn on December 19, 2013, 11:24:13 AM
Are they laws now? The ratings used to be just voluntarily followed by movie theaters, video game stores, and video rental places.

Except for out-and-out porn, they're just voluntary restrictions in the US, at least in most jurisdictions.

QuoteI'm old enough that though there were movie restrictions when I was a kid, none of the theaters were hard-core about it.

Same here, but my parents were fairly asinine about it.  They didn't knowingly let me go see PG rated movies until I was 17, but let my younger brother go see Alien (rated R) when he was 10.  Note that this was like 3 months before they let me see a film that they knew was rated PG.  Fortunately, they usually didn't realize what any given movie was rated, so in practice, I had been seeing PG rated films for years.  Actually, some of the movies I saw before the ratings system was adopted would have probably been rated PG if they had been released later (and in fact some of them were when re-released later on).

As in most things as a kid I was generally pretty good at self regulatoin at home, e.g. My parents never set me a bed time because I liked to go to bed at a reasonable time anyway.
They largely left me to myself with what games and movies I enjoyed. For most people I knew it was the same. I recall when I was 8 or so I had one friend obsessed with the aliens films, I really liked Terminator 2 several years before I was old enough to have properly watched it. I saw Starship Troopers at my friends house when I was in primary school, with his mother in the next room knowing what we were watching (I was very annoyed when they kept rewinding at the shower scene. Didn't get why). For christmas they bought me the films I wanted, which were usually age-appropriate or Asian (hello double entendre), which doesn't count or something.
Generally I had no interest in horror films and was as interested in violence as a grown up would be so...all was good.
There was one exception I remember however, they really wouldn't let me watch Pulp Fiction. They borrowed it from someone to watch themselves and specifically told me it was forbidden for me to watch it because it was a bad film. Whether they knew anything about the film and if so which part they thought was so bad...I have no idea.
I do wonder whether they'd be the same these days given modern GTA vs the cartoony fun of the original.

QuoteAre they laws now? The ratings used to be just voluntarily followed by movie theaters, video game stores, and video rental places.

In the UK yes.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 19, 2013, 07:26:42 PM
My mother thought Final Fantasy was Satanic, so she threw away my cartridge. So I bought it again. She threw it away again. This continued until I had blown through all my paper route money. And then I took what I could find from around the house. Finally she gave up after I bought it the seventh time.

:o
Wow.
You
1: Loved Final Fantasy to a crazy degree
2: Were very rich

My parents' stance on gambling is very odd.  My father gambles on horse races twice every week.  He spent a lot of time glued to the TV and the horse books.  So there is no way they can hide it from me, and they didn't try.  What is interesting is that he also occasionally played a computer game on poker gambling, with no real money involved (there was no internet at that time).  Somehow they felt adament that my father needed to lock himself up behind closed doors every time he played that game with monopoly money, but no problem with me watching him spend an entire afternoon gambling on horses with real money.  Every week. 

Their solution to the problem of porn, computer games and movies is not to give me any money under all circumstances.  That worked, I guess.  They didn't get any arguments from me, even though I was the laughing stock in my class for being the only person in high school without any money.  I didn't say a word during all those years.  It was their money, not mine.  I told myself I would never forget that, though. 

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 19, 2013, 07:26:42 PM
My mother thought Final Fantasy was Satanic, so she threw away my cartridge. So I bought it again. She threw it away again. This continued until I had blown through all my paper route money. And then I took what I could find from around the house. Finally she gave up after I bought it the seventh time.

:bleeding: I went through some of that shit too.  I had a bunch of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks taken from me for the same reason.  The weird thing is that my mother is not now, and has never really been, religious.  I think she was influenced by the LOL SATANISM!!!!! craze in the US during the 1980s.

My parents were AWESOME.

I feel sorry for you guys who've been ID'd all your young adult lives. All we had to do to get into X-rated films or buy cider was calculate what year we were supposed to have been born in.

ID'ed at stores, sure, but parents really didn't give two shits.  My dad was letting me stay up to watch stuff like Cheech & Chong by myself around age 9.  Probably explains a little bit about me, actually. :P

I'm with B, young people had sucky lives - no wonder you are all stunted.

In elementary school I used to get annoyed that I was about the only kid who watched Saturday Night Live and nobody knew what I was talking about when I asked if anyone saw any of the funnier skits from the previous show.  Then I realized the opportunity plagiarize some of the SNL jokes and get away with it.  Had to dumb them down a little but it worked.

Quote from: derspiess on December 20, 2013, 09:40:40 AM
In elementary school I used to get annoyed that I was about the only kid who watched Saturday Night Live and nobody knew what I was talking about when I asked if anyone saw any of the funnier skits from the previous show.  Then I realized the opportunity plagiarize some of the SNL jokes and get away with it.  Had to dumb them down a little but it worked.

Same here with Monty Python   :lol: :bowler:

Quote from: Brazen on December 20, 2013, 06:26:29 AM
I feel sorry for you guys who've been ID'd all your young adult lives. All we had to do to get into X-rated films or buy cider was calculate what year we were supposed to have been born in.

Cider banned, even partially? Brits... LULZ

Quote from: Tyr on December 19, 2013, 06:11:16 AM
I figure with what I want to ask here there may be a generation gap.
The question that came to mind for me was how did your parents treat you with regards to age restrictions. For example some parents are known for not given a toss and buying their kids any 18 certificate thing they want whereas on the other end of the scale there are some who won't even let their 11 year old see an obviously OK 12 certificate film.

Considering certification is largely a product of the 1980s and the rise of VHS tapes, and they didn't really come into their own until the 90s or even the 2000s with games and cheap videos, many of us may not have experience with dealing with them as a kid...most of those people however do have experience of dealing with them as parents I would imagine.
So if you wish, then invert the question, how do you treat age certs with your kids.

Poll broken. But hopefully discussion less so.


This question came on after seeing an old documentary about violent video games damaging our yoof and yelling at the screen that all the games they were mentioned are 18 certs...Except of course my parents had no problem letting me play them.

porn was an obvious no-no.  But I was more technically versed than my parents, so for the times we have cable tv, I would record the porn after the beginning of a regular movie, than hide the tape, in case my mom would find it.
But if I was getting caught... it was the usual speech about the sins, the unreality, blah-blah.

Otherwise, regular movies, well, we didn't have cable & a vcr until I was in my early teens, so it wasn't really a problem.  My mom got concerned over the Rambos, after reading some newspaper articles, but she let it go quickly, there was no nudity.

Radio on the other hand...  There was this cool radio show called The Zoo, early morning on weekdays.  At first, my mom didn't mind.  Then she talked with other parents and realized exactly what it was (it was really thrash and pretty often adult oriented), so that got censored at home, and in the schoolbus too :(