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

How are they going to enforce this?

[Malarame]

This is just a publicity stunt. They're doing it solely so they can look good and say that they've done something the politicians will like. There's no way they can actually enforce this.

Re:How are they going to enforce this?

[Pluvius]

Just like they enforce everything else; if your game doesn't have ESRB certification, then retailers won't sell it.

Rob

Re:How are they going to enforce this?

[tepples]

How much does it cost to get a game rated by ESRB?

Re:How are they going to enforce this?

[badasscat]

This is just a publicity stunt. They're doing it solely so they can look good and say that they've done something the politicians will like. There's no way they can actually enforce this.

They can and will enforce it. Do you know why? Because the ESRB is comprised of the game publishers. This is the fact that people sometimes seem to forget. It is not an agency outside the industry. It is the industry, literally. The ESRB was created because the industry wanted to self-police and avoid government intervention; the alternative to the ESRB is not nothing, it's a government agency like the FCC overseeing video games. Which would you rather have to deal with?

The ESRB can and does routinely hand out fines to member companies. From what I remember from my time in the industry, fines start at $10,000 and go up from there. Most of these fines are not publicized because they're for procedural things like answering ESRB requests later than promised. There's no question of whether or not the fines will be paid; the fines will be paid or the publisher loses membership in the ESRB. No membership, no ratings; no ratings, no sales at stores like Wal-Mart, Gamestop or EB.

Regardless, this is nothing different than what the ESRB's stated policy has always been. They're just reiterating it because obviously a few publishers didn't quite get it. Publishers are required to submit the most prurient content for review. There's no qualifier saying "the most prurient playable content". Whether it's supposed to be playable or not doesn't matter. The ESRB has been saying this all along through the whole Hot Coffee thing; it's not as if they don't know about easter eggs or hidden content. It's not as if the publishers can pull a fast one on their own industry group. The rules have always been pretty clear.

I guess what I'm saying is sheesh people, everybody calm down. This is what you want to have happen; the industry policing itself, and enforcing its own rules. This is the way you keep people like Hillary Clinton from writing laws saying the ESRB is ineffective and therefore the government needs to step in and assume its role.

New Cheat Code Scandal!

[popo]

It has recently been revealed that young users of the Internet can unlock "hidden" pornographic content by using the following cheat code:

w w w . p e n t h o u s e . c o m

The ESRB has demanded a full recall of all software which works with the above code.

ESRB dupe

[75th Trombone]

"Prior to July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff.

On July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff."

ESRB's been learning from Slashdot. Unfortunately, it's been from the editors, not the posters.

Re:ESRB dupe

[Aranth Brainfire]

"ESRB's been learning from Slashdot. Unfortunately, it's been from the editors, not the posters."

What, would you prefer the ERSB to change its name to the GNAA?

Re:ESRB dupe

[zvar]

"Prior to July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff.
On July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff."
ESRB's been learning from Slashdot. Unfortunately, it's been from the editors, not the posters.

Not really. It's more like:
"Prior to July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff that can be accessed."
"On July 20, we explicitly said you had to tell us about all hidden stuff. Period."

They're asking for trouble.

[KDR_11k]

Many games with female protagonists have nudeskins somewhere in their files, for example. There's a LOT of "hidden" content in many games, often merely because they forgot to remove it from the repository after throwing it out of the game or didn't want to break anything. What if some artist routinely put porn into the unused texture space of some assets (you laugh, that happens, just not with porn)? What if they decided to cull some features to lower the rating but didn't completely delete the stuff?

I know that a LOT of games would get rated 18 here in Germany should they do such a reevaluation here (often blood effects and stuff get disabled in the german version to avoid a ban from advertising and they can be enabled again by flipping a few bits). Obviously that's not really a problem for the US, the only country specific "taming" I heard of was Giants: Citizen Kabuto, where that Sea Reaper girl is topless in the international version. But cutting of content to get a lower rating happens in the US, too (just that it'll be removed from all versions, not just the US one). EA seems to do it a lot. Wouldn't surprise me if that was done sloppily after the months of 20 hour days leading up to a release. After all, you might have attempted to load that stuff somewhere and instead of going bug hunting you just kill the trigger.

Re:They're asking for trouble.

[Duelmaster2001]

I do not think you understand the problem. Here is an example of what the prblem is:

1. The developers put an edgy thing into their game (lets say blood from gunshots).

2. This game is now submitted to testers at the production end, who notice the blood.

3. The testers tell the production legal team about the blood.

4. The legal team decides that they want a "T" rating, so they tell the devolpers to take it out.

5. The developers, now in beta and nearing release date, decide to disable the blood (say, by turning it invisible) so as to not delete code which may cause problems other places in the game. (Which happens A LOT. A minor change in one part of a game can FUBAR a whole different part. I've seen it happen.)

6. Steps 1-5 repeated again when title is delivered to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo, only now development has only a few weeks to fix problems Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo told them to fix.

7. Game is released with all objectionable content deleted when possible, disabled when practiality and time demands.

8. Hacker comes along and decides to make a name for himself and re-enables the disabled content. (No doubt violating the EULA in the process)

9. Crack is distributed around the Internet

10. Well, you know the rest!

The point is that it is not that easy to "simply" delete the code for something and gamea are often on an EXTREMLY tight schedule. I work as a production tester for a major game company, and we hav to work 72 hour weeks! It is not laziness, not just poor planning, it's a reasonable response!

Farewell to quality?

[Oracle of Bandwidth]

Does this mean that games that do the whole "under render thing" rendering the body and then rendering the clothes on it, are suddenly AO games? Shame

Games w/o ratings

[lucky130]

Can games be released as "Unrated" in a similar way to movies? If so, I say down with ratings! :)

Re:Games w/o ratings

[Oracle of Bandwidth]

Yes they can, it's just some stors refuse to carry anything not rated by ESRB (Walmart)

Full Disclosure

[robbway]

From TFA: 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.

I wonder what "fully" means? I mean, every cheat code possibility? Like this: If you change color register 1-32, 79, and 101-120 to the color of "flesh," characters will appear naked, but not anatomically naked. How about: if left player LP_YPOS is changed to 0 and right player RP_YPOS is changed to 132, colliding characters will have LP face aligned with RP crotch.

This is a logistical nightmare. Instead, the ESRB will have to accept blanket statements about possible cheat code types. Things like pallette changes, animation reassignment, physics changes, collision detection, hard-drive content hacking, and so on.

On the bright side, it sounds like companies will need to hire new testers. Not to mention be nice to the cheat-device manufacturers.

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.

What game publishers don't want you to know...

[hunterx11]

One of the best-kept secrets in the video gaming industry is that video games use "binary code." I'm sure every parent will be shocked to learn that this "binary code" is the exact same medium by which electronic pornography is stored. Even a seemingly innocent game such as "Super Mario Bros. 3" contains pornography with the constituent bits and bytes incidentally being placed in another order. In fact it can be demonstrated that merely by rearranging these bits and bytes, that any video game can be found to contain pornography. I must therefore sincerely reccomend that this licentious and decidedly un-American industry be placed under the most scrutinous regulations lest they should continue to corrupt our youth.

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.