I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. 
There is no uniform use of mature content which is why I ignore the tag. I think of mature content as having lots of pictures of naked people or graphic details of intercourse. I also consider having graphic violence ,like rape, for no other reason than a gimmick to be mature. A random and overuse of cursing could be mature.
Most people might just want to be sure they don’t accidentally offend anyone. Maybe there should be a family-friendly tag, so everyone knows that a game without that tag is PG-13 to M?
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I’d call these all bad or immature uses of ‘mature content.’ I think there are definitely stories that use graphic violence or a lot of cursing in a way that serves the story. Pan’s Labyrinth is rightly rated R, and probably couldn’t tell its story without the violence. Logan’s another movie I think uses ‘mature content’ in a constructive way.
The opposite of mature could be ‘innocent, benign’ OR ‘immature,’ and I don’t want to destroy that second usage. Adult and mature have come to mean something very specific when referring to media, neither of which is simply ‘intended for adults’ anymore. How do we describe something that would simply go over most children’s heads and bore them?
That might be a lot more effective at indicating what kind of content a game has, actually… But then we might have the reverse problem of no one using it because it makes your game sound too tame… Multiple tags, and a pinned post defining what they mean (if we don’t just steal G/PG/PG-13/R or something)?
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I think it was a game that let you fight as gods against gods and the countries are Malaysia and I think Singapore too.
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Yeah, I think there should be an established rating system that each WIP should have to use when the topic is made. Because with 50% of the WIPS here using the mature tag for a story that’s probably much closer to pg-13, it kind of makes the mature tag watered down and pointless.
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A new rating system would be better for the authors that feel that their game might be too mature for 13 years old, and we’d have to think about the different cultures and moral standards of authors/readers and try to differentiate between obscene and tactful mature content.
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Umm… ppl 
Why we don’t simply use a list of “warning” tags instead of this vague “Mature/18+”?
I mean, something like violence, gore+, nudity, tobacco, etc. etc.
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But one topic can contain max 5 tags so if we make a lot of tags then all of them aren’t going to fit in.
So maybe tags like 13+ and 18+ would be more suitable than one mature content tag or a lot of seprate content tags.
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Hmm… you got a point 
What about combination between the two?
“Mature” tag as the primary tag (the tag that shows up below a thread title),
and the “content” tags which will be displayed on the 1st post of the WIP thread.
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Like seprate tags. Hmmm.
Well but we would still require to make a list of what things are considered worth mentioning like should bullying be added, should moral questions be added ( like ironraptor’s what makes us human question ). As mature content doesn’t necessarily mean sexual or violent content or does this is what it means in general and other things should be discarded.
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Just wait for XoR, it deals with some very mature and disturbing subject matter that I wouldn’t really recommend to young teens, at least not without adult supervision being present.
Yep, maybe rate any such offerings that are definitely 18+ as “adult” or I guess (will be) rejected by Apple could work too.
Based on my experiences in gay advocacy almost nothing on this forum would be considered “family friendly”, particularly by the moral guardians in the US because most offerings here (fortunately) allow for gay relationships and protagonists. Something still considered by many to be by definition not “family friendly”. 
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I like the idea of having different sort of “levels” for how mature a mature content tag is. (13+, 16+, 18+, etc.) I think that I agree it isn’t entirely clear but I know from personal experience when I was figuring out how to tag my WiP I went around and looked at how others used the mature content tag.
I came to the general conclusion that the signs that would signal a mature content tag (based on how others used it) were:
Extended and/or less “cartoonish” scenes of Violence
Alcohol/Drug Reference or Mention
Heavier Romance Scenes (past the just “kiss and fade to black”) or references to sexual subjects
… I feel like I had more in my head but I’m blanking right now. Either way, those appeared to be the main three and if at least two were checked off then the WIP was almost always labeled as mature content.
I also think that a lot of authors might not seem like their WIPs should be labeled as such right now, but they’re planning for the future chapters.
I know I labeled mine own as such using this criteria. Because even as of right now there’s references to alcohol and drugs, and in the near future there are definitely going to be extended fight scenes that can get fairly intense.
And since I was able to easily check those off, I labeled it as mature content.
Now, if I take my other WIP, half of it is from the perspective of a child so half of it is already free from all those checks. The other half also passes by them pretty cleanly (maybe a little hesitant on the romance ones but the lines seemed still fairly blurry there on where it crosses into more “mature” territory. But I still didn’t think it’d veer into anything obviously adult). So I wouldn’t label that one as having mature content at all.
I think having an official checklist would be very helpful. But I have seen some unity throughout.
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I use “Mature Content” to mean “As a parent, I wouldn’t want my kid under age 16 reading this.” I agree that 13+, 16+, and 18+ would be a bit more specific.
CCH1 has drug use, including possible drug use (and passing out) by MC, characters getting drunk, references to a unicorn horn being used a a sex toy, a mild throwaway BDSM reference, MC reaching for a character’s zipper, death of a child, other children being threatened, etc. I feel it is 16+ at least, and would be a hard PG13 in a movie)
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You people say that certain WIPs around here are considered mature because they touch topics and / or include content unsuitable for young teens, such as violence, nudity, hints at sexual content, etc. I’d say if you want to write / read a CoG then its somewhat of a given. One of their main philosophies is about being as inclusive as possible, namely things related to gender identification and sexual orientation.
If there are millions of adults out there who still feel uncomfortable talking about such topics or even acknowledging them as a part of society, or even humanity, what does that say about those under their care, those whose internet browsing is still being monitored? I think games get tagged as mature out of principle at this point. Though maybe I’m just seeing too much into it…
On a side note, I tend to have a bit of a hard time telling apart what is suitable for 18+ that ins’t for someone aged 16 or above. Explicit sexual content? Extreme violence? Is there even such a thing? I think all violence is somewhat equal, be it physical or mental abuse. Beating someone stuck on a rack can be just as a bad as mentally pushing someone to depression and / or suicide over the span of several years.
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I’m never sure where the line of inappropriate for teens is supposed to be when it comes to violence and stuff, since I definitely watched some gory stuff when I was younger and my parents weren’t particularly bothered (if something really bothered me I’d just stop watching). And when it’s in text it’s less of an effect than watching a screen awash in blood.
See I would have said that was ok for 13+… probably the more mature stuff would have gone over the head of 13-year-old me.
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To note, I’m mostly hands off on tags except to occasionally purge redundant ones, useless ones, or to try and enforce some semblance of order by not letting people tag things like "high-fantasy && historical-fiction".
Outside of that, the only thing I’m really interested in seeking out is things which are clearly adult, which should go behind the Adult Content wall (which in practice mostly means erotica, but could conceivably include other things). To that extent we could do something like:
Adult-Fiction || Young-Adult-Fiction || All-Ages-Fiction
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Very true, in the Wizard of Oz the Tin Man murdered like 50 wolves or something that the witch sent, but putting that in the film would probably have scared the hell out of me as a kid.
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I wouldn’t go by the app store rating of what is mature for a guide. Wizardry got labled as “mature” and it has no explicit scenes, no bad language, no gambling, no drug use and the violence is what I’d consider pretty mild and non-graphic in nature. (I was deliberately trying for PG). Anyway, seems like mature doesn’t mean 18+ to the censors anymore so maybe that’s where the wider use of the tag is coming from.
For tagged threads around here, I get the feeling that anything that contains bad language, drugs, descriptive violence or non-detailed explicit scenes (or implied ones) seems to get the mature tag put on. So like Havenstone was saying, more not for 12 year olds rather than 18+
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I think this is a pretty good assessment of how most people are using the tag – and I can agree with the different tones of Rena’s two WIP’s meriting the tag difference. It’s hard to define by age group, because people tend to have pretty different ideas about when to show things to their kids, or how bad particular content even is. Personally, I find it a little silly that things get shifted into a higher age group because oh no someone is drinking alcohol!
But then rating games can give us another way of looking at content. Is this something the pc engages in, or just npcs in the background? There’s a huge difference, imo, between a game where you’re fleeing brutal assassins and one where you are a brutal assassin, even if the descriptions of violence are exactly the same.
Rating media is just hard. People have different standards, and stories address content in different ways. I guess it’s good to have something, even if the criteria is arbitrary, assuming that criteria is clear and consistent. And then everyone has to make their own decision about what they want to read/play, and know that sometimes you get burned. Real life doesn’t exactly come with warning labels…
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Here’s something that covers a few major genres along with sub-genres:
I’d also like to suggest that a Contemporary-Fiction tag might be less confusing than Adult-Fiction which may have some different connotations.
Edit: For that, you may as well have an Adult-Only-Fiction to cover things that should, as you mentioned before, go behind the “Adult” wall.