British Mom Tussles with Publishers over Seizure-Inducing Games

You know those warnings that pop up before many console games and are on the first page of nearly every video game manual? It’s about four paragraphs long and talks about photosensitive seizures. The warning you have probably scanned once or twice and then decided it wasn’t interesting enough to actually read. Well, since last May, a mother in Britain has been going after the British Parliament to change the law to force manufacturers to test if their games induce seizures, as opposed to simply displaying this sort of “voluntary warning.”

Gaye Herford, a mother of four, began her quest after her 10-year old son had a seizure while playing Ubisoft’s Rayman Raving Rabbids on his Wii. She did not know that video games could cause epileptic seizures and that children and teenagers are especially susceptible to such fits.

Subsequent to this incident, Ubisoft began testing its games using a thorough screening process to help avoid future seizure-inducing game content.

Herford advises, “Parents should know that every time they buy their child a game, there is the potential for an epileptic seizure, unless we make a safety-testing law.” This is, of course, her ultimate goal. Doing so would bring video games under the same scrutiny as TV and movies, which are already screened for possible seizure-inducing fits. If this were to pass into law, Britain would be the first country to require video game manufacturers to incorporate this type of screening into the game-making process.

The question remains: how feasible is it for game makers to screen for seizure-inducing content, particularly in the realm of multi-player games? In a video game, no two fights are going to be exactly the same. The enemy might do something different. The player might do something different. You just can’t plan for every possible scenario. Clearly, there needs to be some sort of testing procedure, but the point is that it is more difficult to screen games for this problematic content than TV or movies.