Here we are on an adult website, playing adult games, where everyone knows what's inside the game.
And still we are putting disclaimers on it. It just never clicked with me.
Perhaps it's the law (dunno) or it just looks good. Maybe because of Patreon.
Two things:
1) The disclaimer is mandatory by law in many countries.
It come from the minor protection laws, that prohibits to expose minors to mature/sexual content.
It's like the age check for website, the interest isn't in the efficiency of the warning, but on the presence of a choice offered to the player. By itself, this yes/no option is enough for you to be legally clean. You warned the player, you offered him/her the possibility to quit, and (s)he lied when answering "yes I'm over the legal age".
2) Internet isn't limited to this forum.
The games you found here can be found in hundreds others place, that can possibly be less explicit regarding the nature of the shared content.
A lot of disclaimers are clearly versions of the adult video industry disclaimers, with only a slight nod to gaming. It's very much like some random person copy/pasted some text a long time ago just to be extra careful and everyone has been blindly creating variations on the same theme ever since.
Probably because they are the only disclaimers that can be found.
It can cost you a lot to have to face justice because you exposed minors to pornographic content. So, it's not really a surprise that few among the game authors copy/pasted a legal warning supposed to have been wrote by someone who know how to do it correctly.
It's like all the homemade, or small business, websites that copy/pasted the legal notice and/or Terms of Service notice from another one. This need to exist and to follow some rules, but you aren't a lawyer and don't really have the money to pay one for him to write it, therefore you copy/paste what others use.
"All characters are 18 years or over"... no they aren't... they're pixels. The adult industry has to have disclaimers that the performers are over the legal age of consent, but there's no specific restrictions about the age of the actual characters.
There's restrictions about the age of the characters.
In Australia and France, among others I don't remember, the Law is relatively explicit. In short, is considered as exploitation of minor any content where an adult is depicted as being minor, or looks like a minor and isn't explicitly stated as being adult. This came as answer to a part of the industry that used petite model to explicitly overpass the laws against p*d*shit. The actress were adults, so it was legal, but they were explicitly playing minors, what should have been illegal.
The legal formulation should be more on the side of "all characters depicted in this game are over 18 years".
And this also apply to pixels since it's not the characters themselves that are addressed here, but what they represent. This way you are covered for countries that don't make difference between reality and fiction when it come to children (sexual) exploitation.
My disclaimer would probably feature something like "This is a fantasy, no more real than any other entertainment media. If you believe events in this game or aliens destroying the White House or men shooting a hand gun 75 times without reloading might be real - close this game now and seek professional advice."
What matter in the "this is a fictional work, any resemblance with real facts would be pure coincidence" disclaimer, is not that it's fictional, but that it's not a true story. The difference can seem insignificant, but wait for an US player to sue you because he recognized himself in your NTR story, believing that you are mocking him, and you'll understand why it's not the same.
Like for the age check, it's the legal way to cover your ass. The disclaimer is not here to state that aliens don't exist, but to explicitly state that everything come from your own imagination ; "I'm sorry that you've been abducted and anally probed for two weeks, Joe Parker, but no, I'm not Pete Milighan, this neighbor of yours that never cease to mock you since you told him your sad story, and my game is not about you".
After are all this needed, it's something else.
Strictly speaking, the risks are really low, the scene is too confidential. But it only takes one Karen who found your game on her son's computer, to ruin your life for years. So, it's like safety belt, it's useless until this moment it saved your life.
