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The ESRB Gets An 'F'
GamePolitics reports on a failing grade given to the ESRB by the National Institute on Media and the Family. The report card did not look good for the ratings board, which almost immediately fired back at the organization. From that article: "The reality is that publishers understand that retailers largely choose not to stock AO-rated games, and so in the interests of producing marketable games, publishers will oftentimes revise and resubmit a game that was initially assigned an AO by raters in an effort to produce an M-rated game. When this happens, the process starts again from the beginning, and each new version of a game is reviewed independently. The call to issue more AO ratings has little to do with rating accuracy, and more to do with NIMF's real agenda, which is to destroy the commercial viability of games it deems objectionable. Unlike NIMF, ESRB's job is to be a neutral rater, not a censor."
[open rant]
These ratings are no replacement for parenting. Instead of wasting time complaining, work a few more hours a week and donate the money to your church marketing fund.
Stop trying to make non-Christians become like you by using the force of government or nanny groups. Instead, work within your group of Christians to help keep those kids moral and loved and ethical. Christian kids are the worst because their parents are blind to reality.
I hate my label as I'd never tell a non-Christian to stop swearing or stop drinking or stop screwing around or stop watching porn. I'd never use government or a nanny group to further a Christian agenda.
My job as the Bible mandates is to enforce responsibility in my brothers and sisters in Christ, and be a model for non-believers. I can not control a non-believer and using Caesar to do so is wrong.
Your job as a parent is to be involved 100% in your child's life. If you want a good Christian child, be a good Christian parent. Try to live sin free, and stop forcing your child to be perfect if you are not perfect yourself.
I just gotta say, Mediawise's slogan ain't so bad:
"There's only one way to really know what video games your kids are playing
Be MediaWise®.
Watch what your kids watch. "
I don't understand... common sense?
Also, Mediawise's parent organiztion is the one that took extra pains to distance themselves from Jack, for the tactics he uses.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What are the odds?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I have no problems with replacing all the monsters in Doom 3 with that purple-loving freak named Barney. Pokemons will work just as well. That should changed the M rating into a T rating. :P
Ratings Education: C+
Retailers' Policies: B
Retailers' Enforcement: D-
Ratings Accuracy: F
Arcade Survey: B-
Industry's 10-year cumulative grade: D+
To begin, most parents I know don't enforce video game ratings in the same manner they do movie ratings. Most of us grew up with games unrated and turned out fine. The fact that retailers don't heavily enforce the policies goes to show how many people think the game rating system is silly in the first place.
As for the rating accuracy getting a failing grade, I whole heartedly agree that given the organization handing out these grades is politically motivated, they just want to push violet games out of the market by making as many as possible Adult Only. If this were a real issue, we'd have droves of pissed off parents with 16 year olds they thought were playing a different game. In reality, AO has the stigma of being equivalent to hard core porn. These games aren't the equivalent, and this really is more a political group crying they aren't getting their way. Uh oh, we've got a baby down. I repeat, baby down! Someone call the wah-bulance!!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I worked at Target last year during the holiday season, in the electronics section. We carded every M-rated game we sold, as standard policy. I carded grandmas. (Partly so that they knew the game they were buying was M-rated, in case they were just working off a shopping list given them by some 8 year old...)
In many places this is policy. Where have you seen that it isn't?
(Of course, not all of my co-workers would card everyone. They'd let you slide if you looked old enough. But everyone carded anyone who we were in doubt about.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It's only censorship when the government does it.
When
- the municipal government's zoning board denies the right to use land for a video game store that sells AO games,
- the government denies the right to advertise that a publisher publishes or that a store sells AO games (as happens widely in Europe), or
- the government's patent office denies the right to make a console specifically for AO games,
then "the government does it". Now what point are you going to make in order to avoid the term "censorship"?I don't really see anything the original post doesn't cover.
A more or less neutral rater(ESRB), pretty much the gaming version of the MPAA, gives games ratings. Just like the 'NC-17' or the old X ratings, Movies intending to have a presence on the mass market theaters will work with the board to get a better rating. They'll edit the movie to get down to an R or PG-13. A PG-13 movie has a much wider viewing audience than a R, so there's pressures to make films even milder if it's a marginal R. And, just like the MPAA, there are going to be oddities on how they rate certain marginal films. The rating is being decided upon by a board of humans, on what can be called a piece of art. You can't necessarily make up a metric based on number of deaths, that'd sink movies like the titanic, war movies having battlegrounds. Neither can you measure by 'punches thrown'(what if it's a documentary about a boxer?), amount of curse words, etc. It's all relative.
NIMF appears to be an organization of fear mongers, trying to control society through the cry of 'it's for the children!'.
If they want more games to be assigned an 'AO' rating, well, then they should actually work on convincing stores to stock them. Otherwise you'll get a number of 'borderline' games, where, just like in films, they edit and tweak to get the lower rating so they can actually have a physical presence in stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Target. Heck, even places like Gamestop and such don't stock AO games.
I was allowed to rent and watch R rated movies, with my younger brother, from when I was 12. My parents had to submit a signed letter with the rental place for me to be able to, but they did it. Why? They felt that I was able to handle the difference between fiction and reality. Of course, ratings were tougher back then, to the point that today, people today would scratch their heads and go 'They gave THAT an R?'.
If NIMF has it's way, it'd end up having to call for legal enforcement of the ratings systems, because adults would be ignoring them even more, like my parents did for the R ratings. Their only restriction was a verbal 'no horror films'. Of course, they usually watched with us.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not just a gamer, I'm a killographer!
Parents, here's a tip for getting your kids to stop playing a game you disapprove of: learn how to beat them at it. Once you can smoke your kid in a deathmatch, chances are he's gonna quit playing that "lame" game of his own free will.
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
I disagree. I think that kind of rating should be the purview of private industry. There is plenty of room for a ratings system that would rate things on the basis of their content, for example a "foul" word hit frequency log, number of scenes with [insert behavior here], et cetera. Plus, reviews written by a number of panel interviewers from specifically chosen walks of life, like "fundamentalist christian", "new-age feminist", "atheistic libertarian", et cetera. Each reviewer can have a bio so you can find out if you want their opinion or not. I think that the basic review chart should be sufficient to create the most important ratings, and if you want to know more, there should be a resource available to you that doesn't cost the developer anything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes they did look at games.
FTFA: To illustrate the degree to which video games have become more violent, more sexual, and more crude we compared six M-rated games representative of those featured in report cards during the late 1990s to six M-rated games from 2004.
With such a large sample size, I can see how they have conclusive proof that the ESRB is not doing their job.
No sig for you! Come back, one year!
(Then there's the 99.3% chance that consciousness is just an illusion and there is nothing after we die and the 1.0-1e-37% chance that even if there is a supreme being, he is nothing like anything described in any particular religious canon.)
Our brains control our perception of time (which is another way of saying that, ultimately, we control our perception of time). How do you know that the "afterlife" isn't the creation of the consciousness that is aware that its support system is shutting down? Would our minds simply stop recording time and infinitly time-stretch a perfectly real dream?