Should Games Have Warnings About Things?

Should games have a warning label/tag? Yes, they should, for one reason: to warn the person that might be interested in playing that it contains spiders, clowns, zombies, dinosaurs, or anything else that someone could have a phobia about.

I am a huge fan of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. I played it a dozen times, and when I heard that there was another Tiny Tina game and it was free on Steam (at the time), I got excited. So, I installed Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure and gave it a go.

However, it DID NOT warn me that it had spiders in it! I wasn't happy about this, and I double-checked Steam's “About This Game” part, and there was no mention of these bloody creepy crawlies. If they did mention this, then I wouldn't be writing about this. Or even downloading the game and getting all excited over it…

So, how did the game itself make me feel? In some ways, I want to play it so badly because it's Tiny Tina, but seeing these things has got me so worked up that I don’t think I will ever play that game again, so for now, it will sit in my library. Maybe I will uninstall it eventually (if I need the space), but I don't think I will return to it anytime soon.

In the future, Steam should maybe put a trigger warning on their “About This Game” and how it might or does have triggers for people who have a common phobia. Things like spiders or clowns, or any other scary type of things that could trigger someone to where they will never want to touch the game again. Recently, games have been adding Mature Content Warnings to their descriptions, so it could go in the same place!

Another example, I recently played Ghostwire: Tokyo and enjoyed it very much, till the end, where to my surprise, it had a giant ass spider! Really, where was the warning about this? I don’t like to go and read up about games too much because everyone knows they might contain spoilers, is that my fault? Maybe, but I shouldn't have to go and read over a game and spoil it for myself just to find out if it contains something that I might have a phobia about.

However, I do play Dead by Daylight, which, yes, has a clown, and I have a phobia of clowns, but I rarely come across that killer in general. And when it happens, sometimes the person controlling him uses a skin that doesn’t show he is a clown because he can have a sort of stuffed elephant suit. And I already wrote about How Dredge in Dead by Daylight Causes Anxiety Issues.

In future, I will be asking friends or my husband if the game I am interested in might contain something that I have a phobia about because I don’t like the surprise. There's an anxiety flare-up because you have come across a phobia, and if you’ve never experienced it, you don’t understand, like my husband discovered a couple of years ago. There's a real difference between finding zombies scary because the horror game tried to scare you and finding them scary because you have a phobia of them.

I do have a long list of phobias myself, such as Acrophobia (Heights), Arachnophobia (Spiders), Claustrophobia (Tight Spaces), Coulrophobia (Clowns), Kinemortophobia (Zombies), Nyctophobia (Darkness) and Siderodromophobia (Trains)... While I know that some of them aren’t exactly common, I think it really would help if publishers started listing at least the common ones in store listings.

If you have a phobia that prevents you from enjoying or playing a game, then please feel free to comment below; phobia is a real issue, and I don’t think publishers understand this.