The other prong to this problem is the way that the industry has from time to time treated violent subject matter. Wheras violent content is in no way inappopriate to our medium - in fact some stories and points cannot properly be made without it - from time to time it has been used gratuitously and seemingly with publicity and confrontation far more a priority than any constructive purpose in narrative or gameplay.

As far back as 16-bit fighting games we’ve seen average to poor titles achieve massive global success through attaching excessive and needless gore to otherwise unremarkable gameplay. This is excusable when there’s a good context for the content, but through beat ‘em ups, FPS and action games we’ve seen more than enough claret to drown an elephant thrown into games merely as a gimmick, with very little justification for it actually being there.

While developers and publishers are entirely within their rights to do this, – after all, the games industry is a business and companies need to make money – and as long as games are properly certificated it really shouldn’t be an issue, it has to be accepted that in order for our medium to be embraced as a mature one, it has to be seen behaving maturely as well as putting out adult content.

Mere sex and violence do not a grown-up industry make – in fact, taken on their own, they’re somewhat juvenile content. Developers need to realise that while no-one has any legitimate reason to censor their work, – there’s still no evidence to prove that violent games are damaging to the player, fifteen years after the release of Mortal Kombat – gratuitous and uncontextualised violence will only serve to ‘confirm’ allegations of videogames being an irresponsible and dangerous medium. It might be fun to stick two fingers up at the establishment, but working together through reasonable and reasoned understanding is far more productive.