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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.
But I'm sorry, I still can't take an ethics and censorship organisation whose acronym is pronouced 'nymph' seriously.
Great, government regulation of video games. Just what the world needs. If there's anything that the Hot Coffee Mod fiasco has made clear, it's that the media and the public are doing a pretty good job at being a ESRB-watchdog. Rockstar has felt the results in its bottom line. What's the problem? More info:
ESRB, Video game controversy, Family Entertainment Protection Act.
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.
"Game Experience May Change When Applying 3rd Party Hacks and Mods"
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
"They have tweaked things," said Olson, "but there is blatant pornography on the best-selling game of the year. That says that the ratings system didn't work."
But there's NOT. It is a FLAT OUT LIE That GTA:SA contained pornography. As soon as someone makes that claim everything else they say becomes null and void. They have proven that they are not qualified to speak about the subject. It is absolutely pointless to talk about anything else related to the subject until people actually know what the fuck they're talking about.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Personally, as someone who works in the computer sector, hot coffee realistically was perfectly fine, and should NOT have impacted their ESRB. If so, then everybody should be charged with public nudity, because if someone were to come by and rip your clothes off, you would be naked, and that is NOT acceptable. This is exactly the same thing. Yes, the programmers as a gag threw this in. Yes, they left the code in, but disabled it. Yes, someone figured out how to enable it. It is standard practice NOT to gut code when a feature is not desired, but to simply disable the feature to prevent side effects in otherwise tested code. As a result it made it easy to reveal, but it is NOT the fault of the developer for it being released. If modifying code to reveal something unintended should be put on the ESRB labels, then every ESRB label should have "warning: ESRB rating can change if code is modifed", much like online ESRB labels warn about changing ratings for online play.
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.