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The 'Truth in Videogame Rating' Act
The Escapist News Room reports on the introduction of the Truth in Videogame Ratings act to the floor of Congress. The act would require ratings boards to entirely complete the content of a videogame before applying a rating, and would involve the Government Accountability Office to oversee the ESRB's practices. This is a big change from the current system of developer disclosure. From the article: "Under the microscope would be the ESRB's effectiveness, the validity of peer review and advertisements targeted toward ages younger than a game's recommended audience. Less specific to the ESRB, the bill would also require research on 'the efficacy of a universal ratings system for visual content, including films, broadcast and cable TV, and video and computer games.' Game Politics notes that Co-Sponsors Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) and Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC) are up for re-election this November along with Congressman Cliff Stearns."
I'm actually all for the ESRB actually being required to play the games they rate. I always thought it was silly for them to just watch an abreviated video of the game and then come up with a rating somehow. Although, on the negative side, this could easily raise the cost of getting your game rated.
What I'm particularly worried about is this government agency "over seeing" the ratings... nothing good will come from that, at least not from our current government...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
...with Hot Coffee, something that's hidden like Aardwolf in Wolf3d.
While this would likely help in theory; the MPAA doesn't give ratings without watching the film, I doubt many people on the ESRB ratings board have much real video game experience. How many of them could master the controls on Halo or Metroid Prime?
Are they expected to just complete it? Or complete it with 100% scores?
Sadly, these people are just in charge of regulating things. They don't have to know anything about it.
Many games are rated M for mature to begin with and nearly nobody follows that rule. Parents will do what they're going to do anyway, and most of the time it will be buying children these games, just like they watch rated R movies with them. So where's the problem? If a parent deems his child mature enough to watch a certain movie or play a certain game, that is their call. The babysitting that the government is doing is becoming unrealistic. Enough of this "but think about the children" We've thought about the children, parents everyday think about their children and they are the ones best to judge who gets to play what. When it all comes down to it, whether a game is 14+ or 15+ or 14.75+ will not matter, only what the parent thinks at the time of the purchase.
There are much more pressing issues in our country than these childish laws.
Bolded for emphasis.
Republicans want to censor video games because they're afraid of boobies. Democrats want to censor video games because they're afraid of guns.
All citizens accomplish when they switch their vote between the Elephant and Jackass wings of the Party is ensure that a different set of freedoms is eliminated for the children, because if it saves just one life...
Government enforcement of third party ratings have already been thrown out as violation of due process.
I'm not sure how realistic it'll be to make something like this actually work. Are they expecting the ESRB to examine only content of a game that is disclosed to them by the developer, or are they planning to make the ESRB hire people to pound on a title for any potential exploits that might allow a game to become open to third party modification, such as the "Hot Coffee" mod to GTA:SA that enabled a "feature" that was never intended for the end user to access in the first place?
And who will be accountable for what? Will the ESRB be held accountable for not getting the rating right on the first try? Will the developer's be held accountable because some 3D model they use is too accurately detailed and exposed only through third party modification, even though the detail of the model actually improves the visual quality of the game itself? Will developers be forced by law to hold any "controversial" games indefinitely until the ESRB rates it under the new criteria proposed in this?
Personally, I think we may be looking at the end of the ESRB. This act would make the stakes too high for any civilian agency to control. Get ready for the new Federal Video Games Rating Board, powered by same good people in the red states who put our fearless leader into office.
8==8 Bones 8==8
This thing can't possibly fly. (And because this bill is starting in the House, it probably won't.) Attempting to play Final Fantasy X-2 entirely through to completion, for example, is a mission for doofuses on gamefaqs.com with all the time in the world on their hands, not an organization like the ESRB.
Are movie ratings subject to government oversight?
"Perhaps not surprisingly, Stearns, Matheson, and McIntyre are all running for re-election in November."
Everyone referred to as a Congressman (or Representative) is up for election every two years. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to receive the Congressman honorific, while members of the Senate are called Senators.
Congressmen = elected every two years
Senators = elected every six years
The act would require ratings boards to entirely complete the content of a videogame before applying a rating, and would involve the Government Accountability Office to oversee the ESRB's practices.
The only two cases anyone has really heard about were:
GTA3 (Hot Coffee) - You could play the game end to end, taking any path you liked, and never see it. It was locked content that got unlocked only through a hack.
Oblivion (topless textures) - You could also play this one end to end, as it was released, and have absolutely no way of seeing the textures. It was only through a mod to the game that they became available.
The Sims 2 (removing pixelation) - Not one I really count because no one's made much of a fuss but a console command will remove pixelation, revealing naked sims (to the degree of a Barbie doll). Again, not one that playing end to end would identify.
So, brilliantly, they've ensured the ESRB will play each game end to end and achieve... uh... well, nothing. Even played end to end, not a single one of the above cases would have come to light.
About the only case they could claim is Oblivion's "increased violence". To be fair though, this one was purely political when they were trying to justify seeming outraged (in order to placate politicians) over the nudity. The game doesn't get any more violent, there's no more blood nor more gore. It was also already rated with bullets for blood, gore and violence as part of the teen rating. The sad truth is, the topless nudity, only unlockable via a mod, really wasn't a good enough justification to demand a re-rating to Mature (which, politically, the ESRB needed to be seen to be doing) so they bundled in claims the game felt more violent than initially reported to try justifying it.
This also doesn't address the fundamentally forking nature of videogames. No one playthrough shows you everything - if it did, QA departments would consist of a single guy who works short hours. To play a game like GTA end-to-end takes anywhere from maybe 20-100 hours depending on how many side missions you take. Complete every mission, interact with every character in every way possible, jump your car off every ramp to see if you can crash through every building (who knows, you might be able to say see up someone's skirt if you get inside a building's mesh) and you're looking at tens of thousands of hours worth of work.
And that's while AI is pretty retarded. God forbid we actually develop decent AI any time soon (then again, if we can't get real intelligence in Congress, what hope do we have for the artificial kind in games). What'll happen when characters in games start learning from your interactions with them? What happens when a glitch in AI causes players who play one particularly obscure way causes creatures in Spore to learn that "giving head" is how you mate? What happens when intelligent human NPCs develop their own dialog and, thanks to your potty mouth, start learning some truly inappropriate conversational techniques? Or even totally appropriate ones that just get taken out of context?...
Imagine talking to an NPC helper who's helping you build a robot."
"Now pass me the arm."
"I don't want to give you [arm]."
"Fine, what do you want to give me?"
"I want to give you [head]"
"I like arm?"
In short, videogames branch - there's no way you can review end to end and catch everything. And, even if you could, the examples everyone talks about weren't available in regular end-to-end play anyway.
See that's the problem. Only one file is found but everyone acts like hackers ALWAYS find the files.
They don't. I can't give the names of the games, but I work in the industry and know for a bunch of guys that I worked with that often ESRB has told people "remove this or get a higher rating" and it's removed from the gameplay, but not the data (removing it from the data takes more work, and can cause problems). So the code remains but it's not found. ONE piece of code was found and everyone acts like no one else has ever done it, just because it's never been found.
When Libertarians want to take away our public education, welfare (which protects us from a proletariat revolt ala the Russian Revolution), and other public services, there's an obvious reason why nobody who knows politics votes for them.
See that's the problem. Only one file is found but everyone acts like hackers ALWAYS find the files.
I disagree. Disabled content is found far more often than you claim, however unlike Hot Coffee it was not mainstream news worthy. Hell, most of what is found is not even slashdot worthy.
The ratings system for TV, movies, music, and video games is all baloney.
First of all, only the parent can determine what is offensive. Who can say what porn is? Is Janet Jackson flashing porn? How about a naked David sculpture? How about watching to monkeys get it on at the zoo? If a 2 frame flash of boob gives a TV show one rating, and 30 seconds of hot monkey sex gives another show another rating then that is whacky.
Second, there are not enough raters to rate everything on the same standard. If every game has to be rated, then I feel bad for the rater that gets the short straw and has to play every possible path in Chessmaster XX. If Grand Theft Auto has to have every scenario played just to be sure the princess pole dancers keep their skirts on, then Chessmaster should get the same treatment to make sure the queen doesn't get molested by a frisky knight.
Third, only the parent can keep material away from a child. Ratings or no ratings, parent's are the only ones with a shot at keeping stuff away from their kids. Look at cigarettes. Kids are not supposed to smoke. Everyone agrees which cigarettes are not supposed to smoke. All the merchants are told not to sell tabacco to kids. Yet, any day of the week you can drive by most highschools in the US and see kids outside smoking. If something as "black and white" (relatively) as tabacco can't be kept out of the hands of kids, then why all the hubbub over video games, movies, etc?
Tangent: Why don't books come with ratings? There are tens of thousands of books published every year. If protecting the children is so important, then shouldn't all illicit material get stampped M for mature, P for pansy, etc? Sounds whacky to apply it to books, so why apply it to other knowledge/entertainment mediums? If anyone wants to sound really stupid try the line of thought that says games are for kids and books are not.
My solution: Leave rating entirely in the hands of NGOs (non government organizations). Let the MPAA and ESRB rate stuff. If parent's want to heed the rating advice fine. If not, so what. If some parent's do not like the standards used by those organizations, then use an organization that is tougher/easier as desired. www.screenit.com for movies for instance. Or a parent could watch/listen/play/read everything before letting their kids at it. It sounds crazy, but some parent's do it. Surely the government has better things to do than try to censure material from kids.
This come to your from here. So based on this description, wouldn't monitoring the ESRB be outside the departments normal duties? Also, wouldn't this take away from the Office's real job...you know acting like it is making the government accountable. I guess when your government is so corrupt and backwards (and yes I live in the US) distracting the Government Accountability Office isn't such a bad idea...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
So you mean to tell me that the lazy fucks who have made a family tradition out of Welfare and Food Stamps are giong to get up off of their asses and form together and attack the government? If they're that motivated, why aren't they employed right now instead of wasting my tax money?