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What's So Wrong With the ESRB?
1up has an in-depth look at the Hot Coffee hoopla, and the resulting impact on the ESRB. From the article: "Hot Coffee's wake was also the tipping point for The National Institute for Media and the Family. Its strongly worded 10th Annual MediaWise Video and Computer Game Report Card awarded the ESRB an 'F' for ratings accuracy and a 'C+' for ratings education. More damning was the Report Card's statement: 'The so-called 'hot coffee' scandal does not simply reveal the bad faith of one of the industry's most prominent companies; it has shown once and for all that the present rating system is broken and can't be fixed.'"
Because no one really cared TOO much about what they said until the hot coffee mod slipped through the cracks. But this is what angers me. Hot Coffee had nothing to do with the ESRB. It was code that was hidden from the game. How was the ESRB supposed to rate the game down because of that? What groups like the National Institute for Media and the Family and Mrs. Clinton doesnt understand is that in order to find hidden content such as that, its not as simple as "put in the up up down down left right left right code" to unlock it. This feature was exploited by people who literally hacked the game to find it. Yes, Ill agree it should not have been there in the first place, but it is not the ESRB's fault it was hidden and they didnt find it. The ESRB plays the game and rates it on its content as well as how the game is described to them by the developer. They are not responsible hack every single game that comes across their table to find all hidden feature buried within the games source code.
I'm 34, and a parent. I have the quaint idea that a parent should review the content of any thing before they let their children have it if they are so concerned about said content. I do believe the ratings in general, but for every example you can always find a 'but wait' example. For exmaple Fox and the Hound was rated G. However in the movie there is an extremely intense, somewhat violent fight with a monstrous scary bear that sends most >5 year olds running for the hills. Should I scream and gnash my teeth? Or should I just not put that movie in next time because it startled them...
But what do I know, I'm part of the 80% of the US that is normal, it's the 20% that run the country that screw things up.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
that "The National Institute for Media and the Family" will continue to "fail" the ESRB until is has the kind of control over what people can and can't do inside of videos that THEY want, and not what the population as a whole wants? I don't disagree with ratings on video games, kids shouldn't play GTA (or the like), but I disagree with an independant board of people with very strong ideals, who don't necessarilly coincide with my own, having so much clout in what I do with my free time.
How is the ESRB's credibility damaged? They were presented with a fraudulent representation of a game's content, and then they revoked the rating when that became apparent. It seems to me that the system is working as well as anyone can reasonably expect it to, under the circumstances.
As for the 'F', maybe they need to set stricter guidelines as to what qualifies for what rating. Put in guidelines like "if it has this, it must be rated M" etc.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
So, you have a game which is rated M, with the label:
Contains sexual content, violence, drug use, heavy lifting, baby snatching, people getting their heads chopped off with katanas, swearing, bad language, improper use of commas, and buckets of blood.
Then, some people discover a mode which has you voluntarily patch your own game with a non-company made or approved patch so you can see a fully clothed male and a barbie doll engaging in quasi sex acts.
So, because of this *one* mistake, the ESRB gets an F for accuracy? How about we take a look at the other 100 games released last year and see how "accurate" the ratings are. Did "Katamary Damacy" deserve a "E" for everyone? How about "Chessmaster 8000"? "Resident Evil 4" deserved the M rating I'm sure, and didn't need an AO rating. So right there we're at a score of around 80% for accuracy, which from school is at least a B.
I'm guessing that the "The National Institute for Media and the Family" has an axe to grind - and looking at their review of Harvest Moon which rates the game's "Illegal/Harmful: Yellow" - I mean, it's a game about farming! Where's the "Illegal/Harmful" in the entire game!
Anyway. Organization with an axe to grind about entertainment in general being unsafe for, well, just about everybody gives the ratings board they don't control an F. In other news, Republicans give Democrats an F for being patriotic, and Democrats give Bush an F for managing foreign conflicts.
At least, that's my opinion after reading the articles. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
There are a lot of outlets for parents to find out about the games they buy their kids. However, as usual, the media and "family values" groups are looking for sound bites and blaming the industry itself. Far more useful ones than a sticker/label on the box.
There is no reasonable way the ESRB could have known that the "Hot Coffee" content was there. This is mostly Rockstar's fault for A) Lying about it in the first place B) Leaving it there to easily be uncovered.
But most of all it's the fault of people who are out to help protect everyone else, for keeping this alive. FUCK OFF. I don't see things the same way you do and neither do millions of other people (if not billions), just fuck off, ok? Let people control themselves and stop trying to tell society how it needs to behave in order to appear, at best, that we are a civilized people.
Millions die from cureable disease, hunger, and from having to drink from water sources tainted by billion dollar companies that spew shit all over us, how the hell can this be the most important thing that we should be worrying about?
FUCK OFF.
No sig for you!!
Before these parent groups start complaining about the ESRB, they should actually pay attention to the ratings these games get. GTA was rated 'M', which, according to ESRB's website, is "... suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language." 'AO' rating is "... content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older." Only 1 year difference.
So, putting aside the problem with how the ESRB is supposed to rate content it knows nothing about ("Hot Coffee"), this game was already marked by the ESRB as for adults only. It did not get the specific "Adults Only" rating, but when a game is rated for people 17+, I would assume that it does not include scenes from Sesame Street.
When the Hot Coffee thing first went mainstream, there were plenty of quotes in the media from parents and grandparents outcrying why this content was hidden in a game they gave their kids. WTF?! The game is already rated 17+. The rating system did not fail you, you failed to look at the rating system.
That is the biggest problem with the ratings system, not that it is bias, or fails to take into account hidden content. It is that most parents don't bother to look at them. A lot may not even realize they exist. Most think back to the Mario and Pac-man days and assume that modern video games are similar, with slightly better graphics. And before someone comments, "Well wait, I'm a parent and I'm not like that," well, by being on slashdot you've proven you're in the minority. Most parents pay little attention to the ratings of a video game, and you know it.
Ultimately, this is all about control. The government wants to control the rating system, and most parents want to be controlled, i.e. told, what to buy and not buy. Looking at the ratings for most games so far, they seem to be rated fairly, it's just that the parents aren't looking/caring about them unless they hear about it on the six o'clock news, then it is the ESRB's fault for not having a neon-flashing sign in 6-foot lettering announcing the game's rating. They (parent groups and the gov't) have been looking to push this agenda for a while now, Hot Coffee was not a sign that the ESRB system is failing, it was the excuse they needed to take control.
What gives these busibodies more authority than the ESRB? They're just a bunch of self-appointed moralists, one group in a cause already crowded with nutjobs and fundamentalists. The ESRB has the support and recognition of most game producers and merchants who sell games. They admit the rating was a mistake because Rockstar deceived them, and they corrected that rating very quickly. The system worked, what are the whining about?
This whole "Hot Coffee" mod thing is and always has been blown completely out of proportion by those who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Firstly, if parents were doing their job (which is unheard of in this day and age, gasp!), the game wouldn't have been in the hands of anyone who couldn't handle the nudity to begin with. This would have made the whole thing a small blip, where someone goes "Hey, there's sex in this game if you do all these changes", someone would write a program to do it automatically, and it would have faded away.
Second, the only way to access the content was to hack the game. The content was, to my understanding, unreachable through normal play. It's like blaming the toothbrush manufacturer that some inmate turned his toothbrush into a shank and stabbed you. Was the shank already in the toothbrush? Yes, but you had to modify the toothbrush, from it's originally intended purpose, to get to the shank.
Rockstar (or Take Two or whoever) should have removed the content if they weren't going to use it, but leaving it in should not have gotten the attention it did, especially because the ESRB did jump in and pull the M rating.
An M-rated game was revealed to have content accessible through adding an unauthorized patch to the game. This hidden content was less sexually explicit than many R-rated movies. In spite of the not-so-explicit nature of the sexual content, the ESRB reacted to the resulting public hysteria by bypassing their usual rating procedure, and slapping an AO rating on it.
The ESRB caved in to public pressure, and placed the equivalent of an X-rating on the equivalent of an R-rated game. What next? Will a protest from the FOP make it so an unrealistic, non-gruesome "cops versus gangsters" shoot-em-up gets an M rating rather than the T rating it deserves? Will pressures from religious groups cause religious themed games to get less severe ratings? If a game is alleged to have caused a fatal shooting or car accident, will outcry from an uninformed public cause its rating to change? Will it affect the rating of its sequel?
Through their actions, the ESRB has demonstrated that the answer to these questions is "maybe." Unless we know that the ESRB will rate games according to their actual content, we cannot trust their ratings.
The Ratings system IS broken, but not it the way that people think. The problem with the Ratings system is not that it is too weak, but that it is TOO HARSH, especially with regards to Rated "M" and Rated "T" games.
"Cops & Robbers," or "Cowboys and Indians" are typical child's games, but every game with cops, robbers, or cowboys will immediately get a "T" or "M" for subject matter. A good example is "Sid Meier's Pirates," which is essentially a collection of rhythm mingames & is suitable for the family. Yeah, the game does have pirates in it, but that is evident from the cover. Any violence that the game does have is highly stylized, separate from what the game's player is actually doing, and easily distinguised from reality. Yet, the game is ratied "T," the same rating as a WW2 shooter where the player spends the entire game behind the trigger of a gun. A garden variety beat-em-up like Devil May Cry, which is low on the purely objectionable content and which would be rated PG-13 as a movie, gets the same "M" rating as muder simulator Manhunt.
It is no wonder that family lobbying groups are PO'ed at the ESRB. Games that are probably ok for pre-Teenagers and Teenagers are given the same ratings as games that are definately not ok for these children. The problem with the ESRB is not that it is too weak in rating the Grand Theft Autos (adults who can vote should be allowed to play the game), the problem is that the ESRB is too tough rating every other game. Because the ESRB makes it impossible for parents to distinguish between an acceptable game and an unacceptable game, the ESRB has little value in its core role of providing information to parents.
Anyone who has had to deal with the process of getting a violent movie hacked down from a NC-17 rating to an R rating could probably tell you that the movie business's process of rating a film has its own problems. Think about it - is that the kind of rating system we want, where a game has to be produced and sent in to a ratings board, who then nitpicks a series of random encounters that they think may the game too violent and send it back with a list of things that would need to be taken out to avoid an AO rating?
To this point, the ratings board has been very non-subjective, if I must say. They haven't tried to apply a lot of their own values to the games; they've mostly recognized that bloody games are just bloody games, and the only thing that constitutes pornography is actual, intended pornography. This is how other games with nudity and serious gore (God of War, anyone?) squeaked by with an M rating. It's too bad that the public pressure came down that they felt the rating on San Andreas had to be changed. Certainly the worst thing that could happen is that the public pressure causes them to apply the same kind of litmus test that has to be applied to film.
Anyone who takes a serious beef with the ESRB, I hope you happen to catch This Film Is Not Yet Rated when it comes out in a few months.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.