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Parents Agree With ESRB Ratings
Gamespot reports that a study funded by the ESRB found that parents generally agree with the ESRB's ratings. From the article: "The study was conducted over 11 days in October, and included more than 400 parents. Each participant was shown footage from eight random games out of a pool of 80 titles rated by the ESRB within the last year. Each parent was asked to rate the game, then told what the actual rating was and asked to rate the rating as 'about right,' 'too strict,' or 'too lenient.'"
Parents who don't involve themselves in their kids lives still attempting to blame society for not raising their kids properly. Lawyers are still fat and happy with irresponsible parents, no plans for change.
"Don't feel bad for me child; I'm the monster that hides under your bed."
I'm sure they showed GTA. Do you think they showed the mission where CJ was driving the tanker truck to the delivery drop? How about the pilot training missions? Or do you think they showed CJ gettin' his groove on with his girlfriend then promptly beating a hooker and a cop with a baseball bat?
It's hard to tell the content of a full game in one short sitting. Though I have to admit I am suprised that the surveyed parents "think the ratings are too strict another 5 percent of the time."
...to "Parents Agree With ESR Ratings".
Thanks God I can't read acronyms!
Not the solution either.
Seems mostly like people that the ratings are designed for, i.e. the ones that don't care to look into whether a game is appropriate for their kids or not, aren't looking at the ratings anyway.
I was talking to another parent about video games, and they were surprised by all the stuff that was in GTA. I asked them if they knew the game was rated M, and they said they didn't.
It seems to me that my kid looks at the ratings more than I do. He knows if he asks for a game that's rated M he's probably not going to get it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Wouldn't a more accurate headline read "ESRB say parents agree with them"? Is anybody shocked by this? Seems to be as obvious as Microsoft saying that Windows is better than Linux. Also:
Isn't this entirely dependent upon what footage from the games is shown? And isn't that choice made by the ESRB? So can't they produce whatever conclusions they like? Violent game rated as suitable for children? Show the parents footage from a particularly mundane part of the game.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Kids are going to play whatever video games/inbibe whatever intoxicants/experiment sexually as much as they damn well please, regardless of what the parents think.
Wouldn't a better test be one where the parents are asked to rate the games themselves (and later compared to the actual ratings), instead of asking them whether or not the parents agree with the rating? (AFAIK, this shouldn't be the same as "rating on a 1 to 10 scale) I mean, I personally know quite a few people who'd agree with anything that was thrown at them if the source seemed credible.
In my opinion Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of the better 'Mature' games released for the N64; do you want to know what the most common complaint about the game was at local retailers?
Every day (for months after it was released) parrents would come in and complain that they thought the game was appropriate for their 6-10 year old because of the 'cute' character; in many of these stores when a parent would come in and buy the game the sales people would even warn them that it was really not appropriate for younger children (hence the 'M' rating), and yet they still complained afterwords.
Now as I see it, it doesn't matter whether parents agree with the ratings (or not) the important thing is that parents actually inform themselves in order to make an informed decision. Being a videogame junkie myself, I have been asked often whether a game was appropriate for a given child; what I usually tell people is 'go to gamerankings.com, read a couple of reviews (they will give you an idea about what content and quality of the game), and check out the ESRB rating.' Do parents do it? For the most part no.
I recognize that parents are busy, and may not be interested in games, but if you want a game that they will enjoy (and at a level of content which is appropriate) then they have to do more than look at the games cover; the letter 'M' doesn't tell the whole story, neither does a fury character.
But... will that stop them from complaining about all the sex and violence in video games?
I doubt it. They'll still go after the game developers, even though it plainly says "M" on the box... when there's a simple solution: don't buy it for your kid if you think it's too violent. Just because it exists doesn't mean you need to buy it.
In short: Stop blaming others and start taking responsibility as a parent.
At any rate those are the very parents who've responded to this ESRB study. The point is that they're not tuned into what's in the games, so they're supposed to use the ratings as a shortcut.
This story is pretty telling. The "study" method they use is to show a parent a random selection of the "most extreme" moments from a given game, and then ask the parent to rate it her/himself, and then ask the parent to assess the real ESRB rating. It's very much a reacting-to-isolated-moments-out-of-context sort of a process, and meant to provoke a quick reaction rather than a thoughtful position on the games. They're all about that knee-jerk thing:
Funny how relativistic that is, isn't it? No absolute truths about what's in a game, to let me make my own parental choice -- just gut-level "attitudes" they need to agree with to be "effective." This is the Family Feud method of ratings, in which information can be true or false or whatever -- just as long as you agree with the most people, you're "effective." If Americans are terrified of civil rights, a game with black characters will become an M in this system.
For me, as a parent, "effective" means something that equips me to make choices. I absolutely need the list of reasons -- the laundry list from the little ratings box thing -- to even get a start on deciding, and even then I'm suspicious. The MPAA ratings for movies are sometimes so surreally idiotic, and things like "Whale Rider" being PG-13 seem to spring from the odd history of that institution so irrationally, that I almost have to have full reviews.
It seems to me that my kid looks at the ratings more than I do. He knows if he asks for a game that's rated M he's probably not going to get it.
You're so right. My 12-year-old kids know which games are rated what. I saw my son reading reviews of "Gun" -- an open-ended western thing that's just out -- and wondered if he wanted it. He dismissed it out of hand as "an M." A couple of reviews on the Web showed me why the rating was there, and because it had to do with brutal violence I'll say no. But he almost takes them more seriously, as a gauge of what I'll accept, than I do.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
No, parents are being paid probably like $10 to watch a few clips of a video game and say whether the rating is right.
Nowhere does the article say, or even imply, that these parents (or any others) then actually pay attention to the ratings when buying games for their kids. Actually maybe these 400 parents will be more likely to, having participated in this experiment. But I know from experience with my own mother and younger brother that even parents who wouldn't let their kid go to an R-rated movie don't even check the rating of the new Grand Theft Auto when they buy it for Christmas. It's a game, all games are fine for kids, right?
This study is great for the ESRB to say "Look, we're obviously doing our job," but it doesn't mean the parents are doing theirs.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
...and asked to rate the rating...
I belive the technical term is "meta-mod."
This sig rocks the casbah.
Every time someone approve M$, the Slashdot community always accuse of the report is rigged. Guess what? THIS REPORT IS COMMISSIONED BY ESRB!!! How can any of you possibily agree on ANY research that is as blatantly biased as any M$ vs Linux benchmark report that you people are accusing M$ has been doing? With double talk attitude like this, no wonder why people like Jackass Thompson are trying to take down ESRB, which is nothing but a video game promotion board.