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New ESRB Legislation in the Works
Gamasutra is reporting on new Senate legislation intended to place additional requirements on the ESRB. Backed by R-Kansas Sam Brownback, the 'Truth in Video Game Rating Act' aims to mandate specific amounts of time with each title, and places the organization under the auspices of the Government Accountability Office. From the article: "Were the Truth in Video Game Rating Act to pass, it would require the ESRB to have access to the full content of and hands-on time with the games it was to rate, rather than simply relying on the video demonstrations submitted by developers and publishers as it currently. The hands-on system might be more akin to the UK's BBFC ratings board's approach, which requires a team of testers to spend at least a day playing through a game."
At this point, the ESRB, as well as the video games industry in general, are both aware of what could happen should another ratings scandal take place. No one would be foolish enough to hide the violence from the ESRB to obtain a disingenuous rating. Plus, requiring longer periods of review for the ratings board, I think, is a good thing, but also, somewhat pointless. If you play 10 hours or 24 hours, it's not likely that a violent game is going to be all happy and peachy at the beginning, and then suddenly halfway through reveal tremendous amounts of gory violence.
This is a knee-jerk reaction to a non-existant problem. Longer reviews of both GTA: SA and Oblivion would not have revealed either situation in normal gameplay. Both were exploited by third parties after the fact. Their ratings would not have changed. Admittedly, it was foolish for Rockstar not to remove the hot coffee features completely, and for Bethesda to leave that topless texture on the disc, but unless the ESRB starts employing hackers and programmers to digg through the game's content as a whole aside from playing it, these things will continue to go unnoticed until found by third parties should they ever occur again.
Legislating this is a stab at "Save the Children" for an election boost. The Do-Nothing congress of the 21st century will probably fail at doing anything here as well.
Parents know about the movie ratings because they go and watch movies as well. Most (not all) parents to not play video games, or stoped playing video games by the time the ESRB was really around.
I doubt that when the movie system was first started up that there was a large push/campaign/whatever to make sure parents understood what the raitings were about. They just learned aobut them as they went to movies. Combine that with the fact that the movie industry caters to a much larger selection of the population and you can see why movie rateings are known, and the ESRB ones are not.
oh, and as a fun little note, it is alot harder to get an M rated game then to get into an R rated movie (this is speaking from personal experiance.)
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
All I see here is voter bait. From the ESRB site:
"Additionally, ESRB's in-house game experts randomly play the final games to verify that all the information provided during the rating process was accurate and complete."
So they already test the games, just not all of them. Kind of like taxes; does the IRS audit all US tax returns? No, they have to let the majority go by with a skin deep look and use random fine-tooth comb audits to try and keep everyone honest. Could they audit all the tax returns? Yes, but it would be very time consuming and costly. If the ESRB had to take an in-depth approach, they'd have to find some way to cover these costs. Whether they get that from the game developers or the government, it'll cost gamers in the end.
I think it's ok to trust the game developers to be honest. Past instances where the rating has failed have been delt with appropriatly and I think this bill is unnecessary buracracy.
btw, here's where you signup for employment. Its only 1-4 times a month.
Demented But Determined.
The problem with this is that it assumes all games have competely defined experiences right out of the box. This can't account for online gaming, sandbox titles using the GTA/Oblivion approach or third party mods. The mod thing is particularly troubling because it means developers have to design their games around the possibility it could eventually be modded, forcing them to sacrifice otherwise useful and innovative features. (One example is clothing... it would have to be "welded" to all character models, requiring developers to include multiple versions of the same character, just to change the outfit.) Another troubling issue, is that such legislation would require the ESRB to be aware of any and all possible exploitable parts of a game (including weird ones, like unintended mid-game disc swaps used to open holes). Also, does this mean the ESRB would be require to hire dozens of skilled hackers to pound on a game from every possible angle, in order to determine where alterations *might* be inserted into a game?
This could prove to be such a costly measure, that a civilian run ESRB could eventually become impossible to maintain. If you think this is bad, I can only guess as to what a federally run version of the ESRB would be like.
8==8 Bones 8==8