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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'."
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
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).
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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.
America can care less about the level of violence in something. America is more worried about sex than violence.
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.
The ______ Agenda
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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