Yesterday, the Entertainment Software Rating Board announced that Manhunt 2, the brutal survival horror game from Rockstar Games, would receive an Adults Only rating. (This followed the British Board of Film Classification refusing to grant the game a rating in the U.K., effectively banning it; the game has since also been banned in Ireland.) On its Web site, the ESRB describes the rating as follows:

Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.

By comparison, a Mature-rated game is explained in the following manner:

Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

For publishers, this rating is considered a kiss of death, because many major retailers like Wal-Mart refuse to stock AO-rated games. It's especially problematic for console game publishers, because platform holders like Nintendo and Sony do not allow AO-rated games to be published on their machines. We reached out to Nintendo and Sony for comment; here's what they emailed back:

Sony Computer Entertainment America: Currently it's SCE's policy not to allow the playback of AO-rated content on our systems.

Nintendo of America: Games made for Nintendo systems enjoy a broad variety of styles, genres and ratings. These are some of the reasons our Wii and Nintendo DS systems appeal to such a broad range of people. But as with books, television and movies, different content is meant for different audiences. That's why the ESRB provides ratings to help consumers understand the content of a game before they purchase it. As stated on Nintendo.com, Nintendo does not allow any AO-rated content on its systems.

As confirmed by these statements, Manhunt 2--which was planned for the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation Portable, and, in what was a surprise at the time of the announcement, the Wii--cannot be shipped for any of its intended systems unless Rockstar either a) successfully appeals the AO rating and convinces the ESRB to change it to an M rating, or b) changes the content of the game, re-submits it to the ESRB and gets a M rating. Stay tuned.

Game journalist Doug Perry and his daughter Genevieve

Eight years into our coverage of the videogame industry, as the cumulative string conferences, demonstrations and parties blur together, it's often impossible to remember precisely when we met any one of our peers. So we'll just say that we've known former IGN Xbox editor Douglass C. Perry--currently working on an undisclosed new venture--for some time, and that the work that he and his colleagues did at IGN was invaluable in our development from videogame novices to, well, whatever we are nowadays.

In one of Perry's last pieces for IGN--a preview of the co-op mode in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2--we were taken with his interjections about the challenge of playing the game with his infant daughter on his lap. With this aspect of real life often going unmentioned in videogame writing, we emailed Perry to compliment him on doing so, whereupon we found out that his asides about his little girl had polarized IGN readers; some were gratified by the mentions, others detested them on the grounds that it interfered with their quest for more info about the game. Intrigued, we asked Perry to pen a essay specifically about the travails of the gamer dad. Here's what he wrote back:

I'd finished Guitar Hero II twice, once on easy and the second time on medium difficulty, when I realized I was on a serious rhythm run. Sometimes with Guitar Hero, you just get like that. One day you suck, the next, you're ripping everything to shreds. So I started my next run on Hard. I nailed three songs in a row and was onto my fourth. I wasn't thinking. I was doing; letting the fingers flow across the buttons, breathing slowly, adding tremolo extensions to everything. Then I heard that new sound; that piercing, familiar noise of my seven-month-old baby beginning to cry.

Should I quit or keep playing?

Playing Guitar Hero is different than other games. It's a sonic experience. When fighting the Kingpin in Spider-Man 3, for example, you don't need utter silence and complete concentration to hit the right keys at precision moments. No, with Kingpin, you must simply counter his every attack and hope the game doesn't freeze mid-move. With Guitar Hero, when someone comes in the room and asks a question, slightly distracting you from the upcoming licks, you may miss a note or two. When two people in the room start talking, or worse, start talking to you, keeping that razor-edge concentration becomes even more difficult. But when your daughter shrieks because she's tired or hungry, things accelerate. Two things happen. First, a jolt runs through your body: Child in danger! Rescue! Quick! The second reaction is less immediate. This voice says, "Wait! What kind of cry was that? Was that an 'I'm tired' cry? An 'I'm just rolling over' cry? Or an, "I'm hungry!' call?"

1. ARE...games like early movies or punk rock?
2. BOO...Manhunt 2 gets dreaded AO rating
3. PS3...operating system coders speak
4. RND...Arabic not required for Baghdad embassy?