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Do Game Ratings Really Do Their Job?
Thanks to CNN Money for its article exploring whether videogame ratings are as relevant as they need to be, with particular reference to Manhunt, the gory Rockstar-developed stealth action game which sparked similar discussions at Slashdot earlier this week over its M (Mature), but not AO (Adults Only) rating. The ESRB ratings board officially commented: "The ratings and content descriptors printed on all game boxes, including Manhunt, tell consumers what to expect from the game and provide the detail parents need to make informed purchasing decisions", but the CNN writer argues: "By way of comparison, 'Deus Ex: Invisible War', which hits streets next week, is also rated M... it's a game I wouldn't mind seeing a 15-year old play, whereas any responsible adult would cringe if they saw a child or young teen playing 'Manhunt'."
Nope.
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You were once kids too. Games aren't going to warp their minds if their minds aren't already warped by you, their parents.
I have been pwned because my
OK, I'll admit it, it seems slightly harder to get into an R-rated movie like T3 today than it did 10 years ago, to get into, say T2. In some ways they actually seem to be checking IDs.
But videogames are another story. Sure, Target asked me for ID when I purchased GTA3, but what about ordering from amazon.com or even renting from blockbuster? Those are simple enough to avoid the ID checks (and yes, credit cards are for those 18+, but you can always purchase temporary amex cards, webcertificates, etc).
The problem with video game ratings is that they are extremely difficult to enforce. With a movie, it's pretty easy to stick a drone at the entrance of the auditorium to ensure no one under 17 gets into an R rated movie. With games though, while they may restrict the sales to minors, all it takes is an older friend or clueless parent to pick up the latest Grand Theft Auto and hand it to a 7 year old.
Sure, the ratings may help for more conscious parents whom read the box before they buy, but for the majority of people out there, the ratings are useless. Same goes for ratings on DVD/videos- people either just don't look or don't care.
Manhunt is causing a flap. How predictable. Can we get over ourselves and please give the responsibility for parenting children back to parents? That would be nice.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I mean, your kid comes running and says "dad, dad, I want this new game, it's awesome".
Do you just buy it by looking at the E-something rating, or do you at least have the decency to read the darn package first?
And anyway... as a previous poster said: there is no "irreparable damage" dealt to any kid for seing something... the damage comes if you LET him play that game for too long and have no ideea later why he starts poking people's eyes out or something like that.
Hey, it's not *that* long ago since I was a kid (I'm 26 now), I have a pretty clear recollection of what I have played and when (*cough* agreed, the violence level of PacMan, Nether Earth and Chuckie Egg I was subjected to at a pretty young age doesn't scale to today's titles *cough*).
Still, I DID have younger friends meddling with Doom when it came out (the kids I was talking about were 7-9 years old then), playing it like crazy... still, they *COULD* make a difference between real-life and a computer game, and even very well.
In pre-conclusion: buy your kid just about anything he can play... but look at him the first times he plays it... then again in about one week, etc (ok, I'm *NOT* going to start a child-psychology lecture here).
And (finally...) in conclusion: don't judge a book by its cover, or a game by its rating. If your kid wants something and you can very well afford it, give it to him, NO FEAR of not being able to take it away later if he does stupid (not defining what stupid in this context means) things with it... (if you fear that you can't take it away later, you might have already a spoiled brat and it's too late for education anyway).
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
As is standard for this kind of discussion, I'll use a movie comparison. Both "Bound" and "The Matrix" were rated R by the MPAA. However, one (The Matrix) is far more likely to be acceptable to a parent for viewing by their 14-year-old than the other (Bound). The Matrix was rated R primarily for violence, secondarily for language with a relatively small amount of [non-sexual] nudity. Bound, on the other hand, was rated R primarily for violence and sexual content (specifically, the homosexual aspect) and secondarily for language. Thus we have two movies with the same rating that are going to be judged differently as to appropriateness by parents.
The same applies to the ESRB ratings. "Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball" was rated M primarily for its perceived sexual content/nudity while "Manhunt" received an M based on graphic violence. The former would be acceptable to any parent whose children would be permitted to peruse the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, while the latter would probably bother most parents of children under 16 (and probably many parents of children OVER 16).
I think the television ratings system is probably a better direction for video games in that it provides a much better breakdown of ratings (seven ratings plus descriptors) and it covers content which parents are less likely to view in full (few parents want to sit through a half-hour of Pokemon, and even fewer want to sit and watch their children play two hours of a video game).
So, I think the ESRB is doing its job within the framework that already exists (five ratings with only three that truly matter - E for Everyone, T for Teen and M for Mature). It's just that some people are expecting that simple framework to provide more information than it truly can. Adopting a system with a larger number of simple ratings based on a more complex decision-making process would probably provide the information in a way that would be more useful.
I disagree with the rating of a single [insert product category here], I therefore believe that the ratings systems for said product category are broken. Do you A: Agree with me or 2: Want to lose some Karma?
America can care less about the level of violence in something. America is more worried about sex than violence.
There comes a time when we have to stop lumping all games under the same category and that time is now. Manhunt is far from being comparable to "Forbidden Forest" (C64 game where your character could get his head chewed off by a spider, with blood spattering profusely everywhere--in 1 red color and big chunky pixels) or even Apple's "Bilestoad". We're at a sufficient level of reality now where some content in video games truly is not appropriate. You have to consider it the same as you would a gory slasher flick. Would you let a 10 year old watch "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"?
Listen folks, if it were not for game ratings, we'd probably all still be playing sanitized Nintendo games. The fact that there are ratings have opened the gates to developers to conciously create games that are intended for adult audiences.
And I doubt any game will ever get an AO rating. On cable tv, AO = porno.
As long as the government is not setting the rules for who and at what age people can buy games, then the ESRB (a self-governing industry regulatory body) is continuing to do its job; namely, that of keeping the government out of the business of legislating which games be sold to certain groups.
You might not believe me, but the ESRB is the best compromise between total censorship (ala SNES Mortal Kombat), and total outrage by the public enough to try and get things legislated (ala the outcry on Mortal Kombat 2 not being censored):
"The gaming industry set about creating a rating system for games in the early 1990's due to threatened federal intervention."
It's interesting to note that Sega started rating all games produced for the Genesis around the time of Mortal Kombat 1, rather than censor it like Nintendo did. Even so, there was enough outcry that everyone in the industry had to work together and forge a larger ratings board (the ESRB) to stop federal regulations from stepping in.
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Not, "Do game ratings really do their job?"
But, "Are game ratings doing your job?"
Don't let the answer to the second one be Yes.
America, and by extension the ESRB, has an odd relationship with violence and sex. Violence is, by and large, seen as a viable solution to the problems of the world (usually violence). Sex, on the other hand, is a morally corrupt abhorration. While videogames, movies, and television have no problems showing camera pans through the heads of suicide victims, women put onto meathooks, gun-toting henchmen having their heads severed in half, sex seems to put the industry in a tussle.
NYPD Blue, a show whose subject is violent homicide, caused quite an uproar when they showed a female breast for a fraction of a second. The violence equivalence of flashing a breast would be to show a quick clip of a knife under someone's jacket. How dare they! In a PG-13 movie, you are allowed to show a gun shooting and have someone falling over in death throes, though you cannot show the gun pointing at someone in the same frame. That's reserved for R. A sex equivalent would be to show someone pointing their "gun" at someone else, and the other person bouncing up and down in pleasure. Not something you could get away with in... For example... Pirates of the Carribbean.
Very few movies have ever received an X or MA for violence, and the few that did were re-cut. Paul Verhoeven is probably the only Hollywood director to achieve such a plateau, but even then the discrepancy shows through. Total Recall had a total of 3 shots altered to achieve an R rating, with no screentime lost. Verhoeven's Basic Instinct had to be re-submitted 7 times before it was accepted, and had 16 minutes altered. It made it to the European market intact. However, his movie RoboCop lost between 4 and 24 minutes depending upon the European market, yet hit the Americans largely unadulterated.
After watching the violence prevalent in, for example, Freddy vs. Jason, it becomes painfully obvious that no amount of videogame violence will draw an AO rating in this country. Not only is violence the core crutch for designers, but no amount of violence will truly exceed the threshold of the movie screen. And while we claim to worry about children's exposure to violence, parents get truly livid when the possibility of sex arises. Ever wonder why we see hostages take bullets to the head in the gritty, realistic world of Max Payne 2, but all sexual activity must be very generally implied?
Simple bloody violence is perfectly OK in this country. Despite most R-rated movies being violence pornography, there is little movement to stop them. When people talk of the sexualization of the youth, they usually point to Brittany Spears or some such. Sex is apparently such a horrific thing that we must protect our youth from the symbols that represent it. Brittany spears doesn't have sex on television. Brittany spears doesn't simulate having sex on television. Many people on MTV either kill or die in their videos.
Theories about the ramifications this prioritization has on international affairs are welcome. However, WRT the subject at hand, Manhunt doesn't achieve the level of violence required to be considered perverse because we have given up all concept that pure violence can be perverse: That there is anything at all wrong with watching a man use a lawnmower against a room full of the rotting undead, or melting a man's skin off his body then running him over with a car is a foreign concept to us Americans.
Show all of the pain you like. Just don't have any characters pleasure eachother.
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Grr, now REALLY I have to go to bed...
;)
But a small correction first... didn't you want to say instead: "I, for one, welcome our ESRB-ratED overlords!" ???
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Just this weekend my team met the boss's son, who is about 11. We were discussing the purchase of a new game console for the office. When the question came up of PS/2 versus X-Box, this 11yr old said "The PS/2 has mostly E for Everyone games. The X-Box is better, it has lots of M titles."
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Fisrt, as many of /.ers put it in previous posts, the rating system can only at best be a piece of advice, not a perfect rule. Parents remain, in the last times, the rulers of their offspring.
But beyond that, the rating system is flawed, because the raters take into account the amount of violence, but do not put it into perspective with the overall meaning of the game.
Let's take two games that have been rating similarly : Manhunt and Diablo II. Both received the M17+ rating from the ESRB. How can a common sense person imagine that those two games express an equivalent violent content ? Of course, the core of Diablo, and of Manhunt, is to slash people. One might even say that Diablo is the game which entices you into slashing as many people as you can. But what is the meaning of Diablo, and how violence is depicted ? Diablo's world is based on fantasy ; it is not meant to depict some real stuff. You slash monsters, in a fantasy-modeled world. Graphics are unrealistic, exactly as the plot is, exactly as the battles are, exactly as all the game is. Thus, it has nothing to do with the common representation of real violence. On the other hand, Manhunt makes its best to make you believe that you are in a real world. The basic priciple -man hunt- has been considered to be implemented in a real-TV show some years ago. The graphics are realistic. You shoot someone in the head, the head is gone. You shoot someone in the leg, the leg is gone. They emphasize the common feelings of fear, hatred, suffering, etc. This game *can* be obnoxious to some personalitites, of course. But the fact is that this game has been rated M17+, exactly as Diablo was.
From that point of view, how can you consider seriously an organism that does not make the difference between fantasy and reality ? Personnaly, I don't. It's exactly like GTA. GTA was about fun, not death. Resident Evil was about fear, and death. But GTA has been banned. More than the content of a game, I think that the ESRB should focus on the representation. It's much more of a trauma when you are violently killed in a realistic way by hunters, than when you crash your 120 pixel car against a tank...
That's my point. The ESRB should consider what the games are about. But judging on how many people you kill in a single game is not enough, for this is non-sense. Why not forbid Civilization ? It could be seen as an enticing to imperialism, too. The main thing is that those guys (and girls) from the ESRB did not play any games, and do not understand that the vast majority of games feeds the imagination of players, whereas others feed frustration. This is what it should be about...
Regards,
Jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
You seem to have quite a interesting range of ratings in the states.
In Australia, we have a standardized rating system (sorry its called a classification system here) for Games, Music, Movies and most of tv.
It goes like this:
G - General Exhibition
PG - Parental Guidance for those under 15
M15+ - Recommended for Mature Audiences 15 and over
MA15+ - Restricted to audienced 15 and over
R18+ - Restricted to adults 18+
X - Hard core porn
This is used across the board, however it is enforced unfairly. I can't get my friends 17 year old girlfriend into Kill Bill, however she can buy it when it comes out on DVD.
What is funny here is the R18+ category doesnt exist for games. Basically if the game is too violent and/or too much sex - it gets banned (ie GTA3, Postal).
The ratings system here has always been under controversy by one group or another. And the moment some other game gets banned (possibly Manhunt) there will be another gamer's uproar.
I agree with restricted classification for children (but not overkill), but I do not believe anyone has the right to BAN films or games and the such.
Human psych 101:
If something is Taboo, it is desired more
Example:
10 year old wants T or M rated game, say Half-Life. His parents deny it to him because of the rating, ergo he wants it even MORE, eventually getting it off an older friend or someone with more liberal parents.
Violence vs Sex:
American society was hugely victorian at the turn of the century, and with the outlawing of prostitution, sex, depicted in an form became taboo. Granted, society has made several leaps in the past few decades, but the conservatives seem to always prevail, thus the victorian mentality continues here in the US, anything of a sexual nature is restricted to 18+, even though we humans are aware of it's allure from age 12 or so, and because it's taboo, it is desired greatly, leading to misconceptions, and curiosity, and due to the taboos of discussing it in public, we have a massive teen pregnancy rate.
OK, back to the games, violence is more socially accepted than sex for no good reason. I have no qualms in seeing someone get shot up in a bloody mess (very violent), but a scene of a nude body is FORBIDDEN.
What a strange would we live in, eh?
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Psych 201
A Taboo is a specific no-no like Incest, or eating poo. Playing violent video games would not be "Taboo" unless society as a whole declares it a bad thing.
Kids play games they are not supposed to for the same reason they do all of the things that they are not supposed to:
1)it is an act of defiance against parents, guardians etc.
2)it is a way to fit in with peers
3)the activity itself may carry some reward
The American stance on sexuality is a bit more complicated than just the efforts of the "conservatives" and the religious reich. I dislike republicans as much as the next overeducated cynical little college prick but I am smart enough to realize that they are not at fault for every thing that is wrong in this country, at least not directly anyway.
I wouldn't let anybody watch the Texas chainsaw massacre because the movie fucking sucks.
It is important to protect our kids from bad movies, crappy video games and shitty music.
... Because I'm utterly sick of squeaky-voiced teamkillers ruining multiplayer games. I don't care what it takes, just keep these 'OMG OMG H4X!!!1 U = FAG0T'-talking minors out of the games. ;-)
Actually, i'd rather a kid watched (the original) Texas Chainsaw Massacre than played Man Hunt. TCM has very little blood (though half of the on-screen blood is actually real) and some very interesting themes about the end of the sixties generation, meat consumption, etc, etc.
I don't know if Man Hunt has any redeeming qualities or if it's just mindless carnage...
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They were a bad idea to begin with. Anytime you say no to a sentient being they're going to find a way around it regardless. Ratings just make parents and game buyers lazy. If you don't know what you're getting , you shouldn't get it. My recollection of the ratings thing anyway was that it was self-imposed by the gamemakers rather than an outside agency due to pressure from ridiculous extremists who believe that what someone does in a game , they'll do in real life.
I agree with the author in one sense: the infrequent application of an AO rating mirrors the reality of movie ratings, which is that the only thing we, as a culture, seem to think really justifies restriction for adults only is sexual content. And this is a sick, twisted reflection of modern society: that it is perceived as somehow healthier to see depictions of humans brutally killing one another than to see nudity or even the graphic depiction of sex.
Meanwhile mainstream pop culture is so saturated with sex in every kind of portrayal except an honest, direct and complex one that the sexual sophistication of modern humanity seems to be in the ballpark of a socially retarded fourteen-year-old.
Having said this, I don't really agree with the author. Personally I think rating levels are mostly pointless - they can serve a function as an arbitrary cut-off point for the restriction of sales based on age, but you can't expect a handfull of broad classifications to give you the information you need if you want to make an informed choice as a parent, which is the only rational function of ratings. A voluntary rating should, like a movie, accurately list the relevant components of a game. It should specify whether there is language, crime, drug use, violence (and whether the violence is prevalent, gory, and/or sadistic), sexuality and/or nudity. Maybe I'm missing some categories of vice. But this is basically the best that can be done. It's up to a parent to decide how involved they're going to be with the media their children consume.
I do question some of the ratings I see. Enter the Matrix is rated Teen. This is a game that could be called Let's Kill Some Cops. The violence isn't particularly bloody or gory but I question whether that should be the fundamental issue. You just blow away an awful lot of cops. This reflects the movies, of course, but then the movies are rated R. You can also blow away innocent bystanders if you feel like it. You can give random maintenance workers a rap on the head to get them to lie down and surrender... and then, if you feel like it, you can switch to sniper mode and put a cap in the back of their heads, execution style. Versatile. There is no punishment or disincentive for this behavior. Contrast, say, Eternal Darkness, where I recently got stuck for a while in a level and, in the spirit of trying everything, cut down an innocent monk. And boy did my character lose some serious sanity for that decision... I'm not saying video games should be obligated to impose some sort of moral code of behavior, just pointing out that the distinctions can get pretty subtle.
On the other hand, by the time I was seventeen my parents had pretty much stopped exercising control over the media I consumed and that seems appropriate to me. My folks actually paid attention to what I was consuming and gave their input, whether I wanted it or not, of what they thought of questionable components. I find it significant that the main, pretty much the only objection my dad ever voiced to the video games I played was the way my brother and I would get into loud, foul-mouthed arguments when we played against each other. Apparently he had this crazy idea that actual behavior towards actual human beings required the most active parenting.
I have very broad tastes and consume a lot of media I don't imagine my parents would enjoy or "approve" of. What I received as a child that made a difference was not some checklist of permitted and forbidden content, but rather parental engagement in how I spent my time, input on the kinds of things I was seeing or listening to, and a strong influence on my real behavior in the real world. I haven't had an uncontrollable urge to kill people so far.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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