This Year's MediaWise Videogame Report Card

Mercury News has the complete, unedited release of this year's MediaWise videogame report card. The bottom line of the release is that "Parents Can No Longer Ignore Their Children's Video Game Habits". Citing evidence that games are responsible for increased aggression and poor health, the report urges parents to take a more active role in their children's lives, and moderate their game usage. In many other areas of the report (which is typically quite negative) high marks were handed out. Gamespot has a synopsis of the findings. From that article: "Specialty game retailers were given an 'F' for allowing anyone to purchase titles rated M for Mature, despite whatever store policy might have been in place. Also, in a category that wasn't present in last year's report, the NIMF gave an 'incomplete' grade to Parental Involvement for the year. 'As the world of video games continues to evolve, parents are falling behind,' the group said in a statement. 'As we found last year, this year's parental survey uncovered an alarming gap between what kids say about the role of video games in their lives and what parents are willing to admit.'"

Comments

Re:It's about time

[twistedsymphony]

I completely agree, though I think it's the ESA who needs to keep retailers in line, not the government.

If GameStop is caught selling an M rated game to someone under the posted age then they should pull all their content from that store for some pre-determined lenght of time.

If they did it on a store by store basis, (as in Gamestop #156, instead of all Gamestops globally) I guarantee they'd start respecting the ESRB ratings. This is essentially how the movie industry works. The Government doesn't regulate it but they have secret underage ticket buyers and if they get through... the studios pull their films from that theater.