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.'"

Comments

Wonder how the parents rated with their kids...

[ianscot]

...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.

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:

the ESRB's effectiveness depends largely on how accurately its ratings reflect the attitudes of American parents.

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.