Sweden Considers Adding "Sexism" Ratings To Video Games

An anonymous reader writes A government-funded agency in Sweden is considering creating special labels for video games based on whether or not the games' portrayals of women are sexist. From the article: "Avoiding sexism and gender stereotypes in video games produced in Sweden will become a key goal for the association, which has been given a 272,000 kronor ($36,672) grant by Sweden's government-funded innovation agency, Vinnova. Inspired by the Bechdel test, which looks at whether fictional films or books feature at least two women talking about a topic other than men, Dataspelsbranchen will work with several game developers to analyze how Swedish video games portray female characters and gender issues.

Comments

Re:More detailed ratings are a good thing

[Noah Haders]

But the problem is when it is coming from a government-funded agency. Is it appropriate for the government to determine what is considered sexist? Is the nature of sexism black and white, where it's easily to tell very easily if something is sexist or not? I'd rather have ratings done by a non-government funded agency.

Yeah, we need to back up on this. The /. headline was horribly misleading. A better way to put it, a private advocacy group won a one-time govt grant to explore this. Govts and universities and NSF give out all sorts of grants for all weird topics. So don't flip out about the guvt angle

Re: Sexism = Sexy these days

[Mr. Shotgun]

His friend that made the shirt tweeted about it soon after the controversy erupted:https://twitter.com/ellyprizeman/status/532927131098300416
Quite frankly I am pretty sure the guy did what every one else does when they get up in the morning to go to work, grab a shirt and some pants and go. He had more important things on his mind than a shirt like, I dunno, landing a probe on a comet.