Slashdot Mirror
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."
NIMF: You suck!
ESRB: You suck more!
NIMF: Your mother wears army boots!
ESRB: Your sister swims after troop ships!
Does any adult really give a flying fig? Oh wait, the Slashdot demographic is... never mind.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
[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.
Parents should have the right to determine for themselves whether or not a game is appropriate for their child rather than worrying that the little tyke is at the store buying an M-rated title behind their backs.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Just install one of those kiddie mosquito noise generators http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/3 0/0021211&tid=126&tid=14> around the couters that sell AO only games.
Is it just me, or does that name just SCREAM "fundamentalist, religious, biased prudes"?
This is good in a way though, this battle is mostly being fought in the court of public opinion rather than being imposed by governmental fiat.
My Weblog
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
cEnSuRaBle
What are the odds?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Why do they just have to have generic rating. These companies should be obligated to print exactly what kind of material is in the game and let parents decide. I work in a video/game rental store, and I've seen mothers pick up M rated games for their 10 year old kids (I'm not joking) and I have to explain to them exactly why M doesn't just mean "blood". I have shocked more parents than I'd like to believe I have. An M game can have a hundred different things in it. I'd rather have a new system with more explanations.
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.
Sounds likely to me.
While it seems to me that an objective rating system could be a useful tool to parents, I am wary that it is probably the first step in restricting the sale of "violent" games to minors.
It just doesn't make sense to me to try to regulate the sale of video games. I am fine with legal age limits on movies, cigarettes and alcohol, which people often try to compare it to, but there are a few key differences:
1.) Movies, cigarettes and alcohol are relatively cheap. The ten or twenty dollars a teenager might have can go a long way. But what teenager has the $300 for a game console plus $50 per game without getting the money from his parents, which I would interpret as implict approval of their use? (And if a kid does earn that kind of money on his own, he is probably already sufficiently independent of his parents to make it a moot point.)
2.) Cigarettes and alcohol are relatively easy to consume on the sly, and short of never letting a kid out of the house, parents can't directly control what movies they see in theatres with friends. Games, on the other hand, pretty much require a setup that is going to be used at home, where presumably there is usually someone around to supervise. It's not like kids can sneak out after school and hang out in the woods playing GTA with their friends.
Anyway, my point is that the "protect the family" groups fundamentally misrepresent the danger posed to kids by violent games. And it seems especially hypocritical to claim to be "protecting the family" by undermining a parent's authority to have the final say in what is acceptable for their children... The regulation of games serves no purpose except to create the perception that these games are bad and thereby push one people's set of values on another.
I know if I was a kid, the most coveted games for me would be rated "AO" or "M", just because I technically couldn't buy them. As a kid, even if my parents were religious freaks, I would have just gone down the street to my friend's house, whose parents choose to expose their kids to everything instead of locking them up in a bubble.
I think the game manufacturers are probably quite happy with the ESRN simply because it adds an extra incentive to buy that title for kids who "can't". It's kind of like slapping those "explicit lyrics" stickers on CDs...doesn't do a thing.
you mean that *gasp* the video game industry does the EXACT same thing the movie industry has done for years?? I really wonder about the mentality of these censorship groups.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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.
We are just not as vocal as the Ralph Reed variety.
I am a Christian. I believe in God. I also read fantasy novels, play D&D, and even play some violent video games. I am also an adult.
I do not press my views on other people, yet I do not hide what I believe when asked.
I can't scare people into heaven, but I can tell them that I have a close relationship with God. Nor do I claim to know everything, or have a perfect understanding of God and religion.
My beliefs are personal, between myself and God. I will let other people develop (or not) the same relationship. I just know it works for me.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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 have just created a World Wide orgnziation called World-wide Institute on Media and People (WIMP for short). We give ESRB an "A+" Why? Just Because! and the NIMF, they get an "F" and a "U" from the WIMP.
I'm not just a gamer, I'm a killographer!
...what the movie studios do? A movie is made and goes before the MPAA for rating. MPAA rates it R, but the studios were hoping for a PG-13. The MPAA tells them what they would need to cut for a PG-13 rating, so the studios comply and get the rating they need to sell their movie the way they want. The ESRB also includes some description on the box of the game that says why the game was rated the way it was...i.e. "intense blood and gore" or "drug use", etc. In a way they are doing better jobs than the MPAA. All music CDs say on the front of their packaging is "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics", no mention of how explicit or the subject matter of the explicit areas. So they must suck worse than the MPAA. I don't understand how anyone can be upset with the ESRB rating process other than those who simply do not want the rest of society to have a choice as to how people go about entertaining themselves.
On another note, if the ESRB tightened their ratings, couldn't game vendors get around it by releasing expansion packs that make the game more graphic or explicit, much like "The Sims" has been doing? Rockstar could earn their weight in gold by offering expansions to GTA that make the game "AO" while selling the base game under an "M" rating. Would the expansion pack have to have an "AO" rating even if the expansion pack can not be played on its own, so if a kid bought it they would not be exposed to its content since a kid should not be able to buy an "M" rated game anyway?
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."
It looks that more and more Taliban-esqe lobbygroups and associations are getting momentum in the US, all these groups do the same thing, that is trying to pull as many rights as can from under the people. All this with cheap excuses as if kids* are in danger.
*Fill in any other group that you can hyjack for your political purposes.
The Taliban moved exactly the same way in Afganistan, slowly poisening society followed by a sudden coup, they also used exactly the same arguments as these right wing socalled christian groups in the US.
More and more I feel for the sane half of the US population.
It always irks me when some NGO feels it's appropriate to issue a 'report card' on any other organization, and even more so when it gets any attention.
The entire concept implies that that writer of the report card has superior knowledge about the issue at hand, like a teacher, and is dispensing wisdom to those lesser informed 'students.'
More often than not, the organization criticized has all the experience there is to be had in that particular field, while the issuers of the 'report card' are just assholes with a questionable, ill-founded agenda.
Moreover, the issuance of a report card is symbolic of a complete lack of humility, something I think most people could use more of. They don't consider themselves adults having a disagreement, they consider themselves unquestionably superior to the ESRB. I'm not particularly religous, but the right amount of humility causes you to seriously reflect on yourself, your motivations and your knowledge before you take decisive action. It also allows you to take criticism constructively instead of ignoring it or lashing out defensively.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It's bad because Wal-Mart doesn't sell AO games. (Nor do a number of other major retailers...)
A community-oriented lyrics site
Based on the breakdown of the board, maybe renaming it the National Institute on Media and My Family would be more accurate.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Can we get them banned?
They're using false logic in saying there should always be a certain percentage of games rated AO. That means no matter how bland and boring the games are, there's still some rated AO. Then games are forced to be blander and blander.
I haven't seen any single game go BEYOND what your typical R rated film does. Look how gory and disturbing The Devil's Rejects was (that is a good thing, btw)! That received an R.
Besides, M and AO aren't that different. M is 17+ and AO is *gasp* 18+. One year doesn't make a bit of difference.
Every game has a movie equivalent. So what game you wanna pick on? GTA? Then let's go after Goodfellas, Casino, or The Godfather.
You don't like Doom or Quake? Let's go after Aliens.
So in reality, the rating system is just fine. The problem here is that we put people in charge who think it's perfectly acceptable to push their bullshit moral agenda onto everyone else. Another problem is that those in charge are naive and ignorant, and dismiss video games as something "only children play".
If there's really that big of a problem with mature games falling into the hands of younger players, perhaps people should use their head and point the fingers at the parents. When they get the complaint about the game (otherwise, why do they care?), the person filing the complaint should ask the parents, "Where were you and what were you doing to let this happen? Sounds like a family communication issue."
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
My boy is 5 years old.
Here is a list of the things I don't want him exposed to,
1) TV news, especially local news. Seriously, watch the news tonight, count how many random murders, rapings, child abductions and deadly car accidents they describe in gruesome detail. I counted 13 reports of people dying on a local Tuesday night news report. Talk about scarring the SHIT out of children. Show a picture of a cute little blond haired blue eyed girl and then show a picture of this grisly looking bald drunk that kidnapped and rapped her home while her mother watched. Show the mom on the news crying. You want to fuck up your kids, let them watch the nightly news. The news glorifies and lingers on REAL horror and violence. Not appropriate for children or adults. Should be rated XXXX.
2) Really scary movies, I would never let him watch the excorcist because I don't need him waking me up at 3:00 in the morning telling me he hears a scratching sound on his wall, because that would scare the hell out of me. Movies that scare the shit out of young children should be rated XXX.
3) McDonalds, Must be 18 or older to enter. I can't count the number of parents who shove that processed food stuff in front of little children because their to lazy to make them something healthy to eat. Your kid weighs 300 pounds in 3rd grade and seeing a set of tits is his problem. Fat kids should be allowed to see porn, it might be enough motivation for them to lose weight once they realize they are never going to get laid being that fat.
4) pop and candy, my little boys best friends, both 4, eat a shitload of candy. Their parents are always giving us shit because we won't give our kid candy or pop, with the exception of cake at birthday parties. Both those 4 year olds have had multiple cavities. Once again, multiple times they have been to the dentist to get teeth drilled. We took our son in a few weeks ago for the first time. The dentist says it was quite rare to see a kid his age with such perfect teeth. If all that candy and shit is rotting our kids teeth out, what the hell is it doing to their insides, but why focus on that when we can focus on complete bullshit like kids shooting a virtual gun.
5) Dumb kids, everybody has met stupid adults, well guess what, those stupid adults were once stupid kids. Those people didn't become stupid when they grew up, they have always been stupid. I know their are some kids stupid enough to believe that video games are real. Ain't shit you can do to help these kids. They are STUPID. It wouldn't matter if it was a video or movie, some jackasses will mimic anything they see. My solution, create bullshit rating systems... oh wait, a better idea, teach my kid to pick out stupid kids and learn to avoid their presense at all cost, just like the rest of us do with stupid adults. I don't walk up and start a conversion with a drunk walking down the street with shit stains on his ass. Same thing goes for my kid, if he sees a kid sitting in the corner of his classroom eating his own snot, I tell my kid he should stay the fuck away from that kid because he will one day be that shit-stained drunk.
Here is a list of things I could care less if he sees,
1) GTA or any violent video game, he knows its no more real than pretending to have a gun in his hand and his friend having a pretend arrow. GTA, is just cowboys and indians 2000 version. My choices are, sitting down and playing these terrible games with my kid and explaining their all just make believe and showing him how offended I am at some parts of the game which helps him understand what is and isn't acceptable in real life, or letting him end up playing it anyway at some other kids house with his only influence being the other kid, the same kid who's parents would allow him to have a game like GTA and have his friend come over to play it without first asking the other parent if this is ok.
2) Nudity, seriously,
When everything I can buy or watch is not censored because "some" people are offended by them. I am an adult and I should not be treated like a child because other people don't agree or don't like some things... Unfortunately this probably means I will have to move out of the US.
Now i'm off to go play some Far Cry multiplayer with my 9 and 10 year old (seeing who can do the best ramp jumps in the drivable boats) woot!
---Penn (from Penn & Teller) said it best, "You do not have the right not to be offended." I'm an adult and as an adult, I expect that there will be things that are available to me that are not available to children. We have a whole host of them that we as a society have deemed unsuitable. The include things like booze, porn, and cigarettes just to name the three most notable examples.
.. You know what the biggest "thing" to do in middle school is? Any guess? It aint sex, as Bill Clinton put it. Yeah, oral sex. 12 year olds in middle school do this.. Now tell me that a few pics of Playboy would hurt em... Screw that, take them to an art museum and show them the many pictures and portraits of nudes. They evidently didnt think the human body was "bad". Pictures dont give veneral diseases.
---While I'm not a big proponent of any of these three, I think that they should be available for the adults who wish to indulge. Are they suitable for kids? No. Would I give any of the above to an eight year old? No.
I absolutely DO NOT agree with you. First, the 3 products you mentioned do not have a good age limit on them. Thanks to USDOT and Congress, they have made very state the limit to drink 21, which is UNFAIR to us citizens. I can fight for this goddamned country and get bullets in my head and knifed along my throat in the military, but how dare I drink a drop of beer. As a note, I first started "drinking" at 6. Yes, it was one of those small port glasses filled 1/4 of the way (very little, but with our supper). That never killed me.
Next, smoking... Most kids who smoke already have smoker parents who they steal cigs off of and cant smell their kids cig smell. Wow. If they want a shorter life, well, fuck em. Not my problem. You can thank those parents.
Wow, porn.
Still, my biggest beef is how courts try so many people as an adults. If they were GODDAMNED ADULTS, they'd have the same rights as adults. Surprise, they dont! Since they want to try kids as young as 10 as adults, I want drinking, porn, smoking, and voting rights extended to that age. There's been young leaders of whole nations who've died younger than our "citizenship" age.
They gave the ESRB an F for ratings accuracy because M games have gotten racier. Well duh! Games have actually gotten a lot more graphic in the last 10 years. And I suspect the success of the GTA franchise has made a large contribution to this trend.
But the conclusion they are drawing is incorrect. M rated games aren't supposed to be sold to young children anyway. So the fact that these games are even more inappropriate is moot. It's like that old expression, "the food is bad and the portions are small."
---Look, we as a society have set boundaries for things that we as a society consider to be "unsuitable" for children. Children are not given drivers licenses, allowed to enter into contracts, and cannot legally give consent for sex. Perhaps you'd like to extend that to 10 year olds as well? My point about the booze was that a 10 year old cannot go to the liquor store and make a purchase on their own.
Actually, children (15 and up) can get drivers licenses. They do cosign with an adult though, but nonetheless, are given legal rights for such. Also, "children" can consent to sex, as long as the state has posted statutory rape laws with certain ages. In Indiana (where Im from) that age is 16. 16 and above can consent.
---Seriously, be reasonable. I know plenty of 12 year olds. I come from a very large family. While I don't have spycam's on them 24-7, I'm pretty sure that they're not having Clinton sex or any other kind of sex. Most of them still think the opposite sex is "gross" or "has cooties". I'd say you might want to find a better neighborhood to live in if the 12 year olds are getting busy. Perhaps you should move out of what ever backwoods place you live in since the "old enough bleed, old enough to breed" philosophy seems to be in force.
Easy for you to say. Try driving by that high school when they let out. Many of them look lke 20 year olds by the way they develop. Along with that, what do you expect from the way they dress? I even had a cousin who was recently in middle school.. She said the biggest thing around school was herpes in the mouth. Turns out kids of this generation do not equate vaginal sex with oral sex. One of the very bad things from that are rather nasty viral mouth infections.
That school was bad enough that it actually made the newspaper. Similar stories are around here too (1 hour south of Indianapolis). And thanks to forcing sexual (and drug DARE prop.) talks on kids at such an early age stimulates them to want it.
---While I do agree that if you are old enough to be drafted, you ought to be old enough to drink. Frankly, I think that the legal age of responsibility ought to be raised to 21. No voting, no draft, no drinking, until that age. You obviously aren't old enough to recall when the drinking age was 18. The drinking age was raised because of the number of alcohol related deaths among those 18-21. A large number of them were from alcohol poisoning. The draft age was also originally 21 but was lowered during the Vietnam war because the Fed's ran out of 21 year olds. I find the fact that it's never been raised back up to be a bit disturbing.
I very much agree with this. All I want is a standard that once you hit a certain age, you're it. Other than limits like becoming a congresscritter, senator or president, you should have absolutely full rights of a citizen. None of this half-assed "can die for country, but cant drink" crap.
---My personal opinion is that if you think you're old enough to commit an adult crime like rape, armed robbery, murder, etc. then you're old enough to be tried as an adult. I don't know about where you live, but that's generally how it works here in Texas. We don't try 10 year olds as an adult for swiping a Snicker's bar from the 7-11. We will try a 10 year old as an adult for something like pre-meditated murder, though.
I believe in Indiana, it's about the same. We also fry bad people too, though not as much. I do think the 1000'th will be one of ours. Though my problem is you should never be treated as an adult unless you have the full rights of an adult. When you're a child, you are taught from all around you. Tells me that severe remediation should be used instead until they become an adult. Now, when they rape/murder a passerby in a side alley at night, fry the fucker. Im not for throwing somebody away, but sometimes, thats exactly what is needed. Texas got that right. I just dont agree when they should be dumped.
---In all seriousness, I wouldn't want a kid like that in my neighborhood. If you li