The Byron Review report was published today. I’ll let others express their opinions about new age ratings for video games and increased controls over children’s access to the internet. In fact, first glance, it all seems sensible, good stuff.
But.

Has anyone else seen the front cover of the report yet?

At first, what seem to be cute children’s drawings suddenly reveal themselves to be images straight out of Japanese horror. A murderous hand reaches for a child’s throat from the screen of a PSP; a monitor is emblazoned with the words “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! AND WHERE YOU LIVE!” while the stunned child user wonders to herself, “WHY DID I TELL HIM MY DETAILS!”; a man in spectacles stretches his arms out of a PC screen; a speech bubble emerges from a child’s head to say “OH NO! HE HARMED ME”; and the final image shows a video game box entitled Shoot Them All (if you squint, there is a warning written on it too, claiming that if you play this game “you will be harmed.” My god. Mercifully, it’s all lightened by the strapline at the bottom: “BE SAFE, BE AWARE, HAVE FUN!”

I kind of want the title not to be “Safer Children in a Digital World” but, to stay in keeping with the imagery, “Stephen King’s Windows to Hell,” or “Why the Entire Adult World (Especially Digital Media) is Sick and Creepy,” or “You Remember What They Said About TV.”

All that firmly with tongue in cheek, however, the report has emerged the same week we learned of the existence of Little Miss Bimbo, which I actually feel sick and creepy for including here as a hyperlink.

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