J is for Juice

When video games are translated into English and ported over from Japan, oftentimes they'll hide the fact that the characters are drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes to get a lower rating from the ESRB. Since cigarettes are mainly just unmentionables in cutscenes, they can be removed entirely. But alcohol has some import to the story, and gets mentioned in such a way that it can't be erased so easily. What, then, do they change to?

My favorite is juice. Rich with sugar, it surely explains the slurred speech and reactions of the people under its influence. Guild member fence guy, there's no harm in losing a drinking match to Kyle when you're drinking juice! And that time earlier when Kyle had slurred speech and everything? He's just resting off a bad break-up, possibly aided by juice! I bet that exotic tropical fruit berry beverage feels quite refreshing in between acts of air piracy, Vyse! It's cool how they made this cafe look just like a bar, complete with an evil hallucinatory device hiding in the back room!

I can halfway understand why they censor beer and liquor. In RPG settings the heroes and heroines are mainly 15, 16, 17, or 18 years old. (The one aged over twenty is an old fogey.) They can't be drinking that young. A common joke for the younger ones is them walking into a bar and being offered milk or juice because they're too young to drink ... coffee. (Remember, the bar's a cafe, a restaurant, a soda fountain, a watering hole, anything but a bar.) Sometimes though they get the real stuff... that is, the real juice... and it tastes great.

So we tend to censor alcohol use. The Japanese, however, don't. And as a culture, they aren't that lax. Why then are we so tense and uptight about it? I'm not sure about alcohol use in Japan, but here we turn it into a taboo, which transforms into a fetish, which becomes a forbidden concoction and unofficial rite of passage. Teens look up to it. We turn toward it unceasingly. It's the adult drink, the drink of choice at parties, dinners, and Emory University meetings. That's fine. I just wonder whether we would have less alcohol problems (overdrinking, alcoholics, etc.) if we stopped trying to edit alcohol out of everything children will touch. They will see it, whether it's in their parents drinking, their friends drinking, drinking in movies, beer commercials, or whatever. Video games don't warrant any special sort of censorship in that regard.

I don't care whether we drink less, but I want us to drink better. As for myself, I'm not a heavy drinker. Loving sugar more than alcohol (and arguably spazzing out with it more) I wouldn't mind having a party running on juice. Maybe those video game characters have something going there. Buster Bluth would be proud of me. Let's go for it.