ESRB Demands Hidden Content Review

Gamasutra is reporting that the ESRB is now mandating an audit of hidden game content. The audit is retroactive to the 1st of this month. From the article: "Fully disclosing hidden content accessible as Easter eggs and via cheat codes has always been part of ESRB's explicitly stated requirements when submitting games to be rated. In the July 20 public announcement, which focused on the revocation of a specific game's rating assignment, we formally stated that any pertinent content shipped on the game disc that may be relevant to a rating must be disclosed to ESRB, even if it is not intended to ever be accessed during game play."

Comments

Re:Full Disclosure

[Surt]

Cheat code has a specific meaning in the industry. It's a series of key presses that causes the application to go down a non-standard code path. Neither of your examples would qualify, as the first would be considered a hack (changing color registers in a way unknown to the application), and the second would be considered normal game behavior (assuming you are allowed to move your characters to those positions in the normal game, and if not, you would simply document that there is a cheat code that allows you to rearrange the positions of the game objects).

The ESRB really wants very simple information:

1) are there hidden nudie pictures being shipped with the product
2) are there hidden sex animations being shipped with the product

Note that the GTA game causing this whole issue would have failed both of these.

Game companies shouldn't need to hire any new testers. Instead, this will all be taken care of contractually. The coders and artists will sign contracts promising under penalty of $$$ and firing not to include such content. The development house will promise under penalty of $$$ not to include such content to the publisher. The publisher will promise under penalty of $$$ and publicity nightmare to the ESRB that they have not included any undocumented content. When the shit hits the fan, the ESRB will say: the publisher lied to us, but now they have to pay up and fix things. The publisher will say they were hoodwinked by the dev house, will fine them, and maybe not publish any more games by them. The dev house will fine and fire the offending devs or artists, and promise to be good in the future.

Problem solved.

ESRB trying to ban all modding?

[Guspaz]

This statement worries me:

ESRB remains concerned about third party modifications that undermine the accuracy of the original rating, and we are exploring ways to maintain the credibility of the rating system with consumers in light of modifications of this nature.

Since the only way to prevent a mod from affecting the rating of a game is to ban modding altogether, it looks to me like the ESRB wants to prevent modding. They might do this by automatically rating any game that supports mods with an AO rating.

This would be a huge blow against mods, and let's face it, mods drive a large portion of the game industry. Would anybody still be playing Half-Life 1 were it not for a few of the more popular mods released for it? HLDM and HL2DM only get you so far before mods take over as the dominant multiplayer experience.