A few weeks ago, I e-mailed John Davison, a games journalism friend, who runs the parental-guide video game site WhatTheyPlay.com. I'd been playing Infamous and was surprised by the amount of cursing in it. The game is rated T, a rating category I previously thought was safe to purchase for teenage relatives whose parents are unlikely to want them to hear cursing in their entertainment.

Sure, "shit" is a word you can hear in PG-13 movies, but given its absence from network TV I had incorrectly assumed it wasn't in T-rated games.

Davison said he was working on a story about profanity in Teen games and published the results this week.

What Davison found:

If you're sensitive to profanity, and to words like "s**t" specifically, then Teen-rated games are not going to be safe territory. While you won't ever hear "f**k" (or any variations of it) in a Teen game, unless it's bleeped-out as it is in UFC Undisputed, you will hear plenty of words like "a**," "b*tch," "p**s," "d**n," body part terms like "d**k," and "t*ts", and variations on cuss words that include "hell" or references to god.

Check out the rest of the What They Play article for comments from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board which labels such content. This one isn't so much a question of labeling, as it is of what kind of content warrants what kind of rating.

Teen Ratings and the S-word

As with Blood in the Sand, Rogue Warrior is chock full of four-letter words and profane trash talking. But unlike 50 Cent, Richard Marcinko's character is on auto pilot when he cuts loose with colorful phrases.

I asked Aeron Guy, senior producer at Rebellion for the game, if they planned on kicking the cussing up a notch and, as with Blood on the Sand, allow it to not only spice up the conversations, but impact score.

No, not really.

"We tried to keep them triggered to what's going on in the game," he said. "It always raises a smile when he does one of his lines. He has some fantastic sayings."

It's too bad, because I think the ability to earn cash by taunting your opponents during a kill is highly under-utilized.

Weighing in with 189 uses of the F-bomb is The House of the Dead: Overkill. That works out to more than one rhymes with duck per a minute, or three percent of all words spoken in the game.

"This record category pre-existed for movies, music and television, but The House of the Dead: OVERKILL is the first video game to be awarded the title in the Gamer's Edition," said Video Games Records Manager for Guinness World Records, Gaz Deaves. "It's a mark of the times."

Jonathan Burroughs, writer of The House of the Dead: OVERKILL, sounds proud.

"It is a dubious honour to receive such an accolade working in an industry where so often the fruits of your labours are derided and dismissed for being puerile or irresponsible, but in the case of The House of the Dead: OVERKILL a little puerility was the order of business," he said. "Parodying the profane excess of grindhouse cinema was Headstrong Games' objective and I am flattered that this record acknowledges that we not only rose to that challenge, but entirely exceeded it."

Let's face it: we've all typed 'suck it' into a text-entry adventure game from time to time. For some of us, it's the end result of hours of frustration trying to figure out the stupid Babelfish puzzle. For others of us, it's the first thing we try.

Sometimes the game just does a doubletake and says 'Say wha'?' Other times, the designer tried it himself and programmed in a suitable response. So how to tell what games will give you a hysterical response without trying them, one by one? Luckily, this site has a library of images detailing what happens when you curse in an adventure game, saving you the bother of running your potty mouth. Florian Eckhardt

Profanity Adventures [Site]