Lawyer Opines On 'Flaws' in ESRB Rating Methodology

Gamepolitics has a post up looking at blog entry by attorney Mark Methenitis, who is not only a practitioner of the legal arts but also a gamer. At his site, he runs down some of the major pros and cons of the ESRB's ratings process, and on the whole he thinks they're doing a good job. Their major oversight, in his mind, is that at no point are the videogames ever actually played: "Game publishers send in a DVD of selected scenes and a lot of paperwork to get the game rated... The point being that the ratings board never plays the games. Yes, you read that right. The people who rate video games do not play the game they are rating. It would be the equivalent of basing movie ratings on a form and a trailer. Context would be wholly absent." The ESRB argues that if the publishers create their 'ratings package' within the organization's guidelines, they don't need to play the game. And indeed, with a title like Oblivion you can't expect the organization to play through the whole game. But ... c'mon ... maybe just the tutorial? How long would that take?

Comments

What good would that do?

[llevity]

The idea is to rate the game based on its content. So they create a DVD with a range of the various types of content.

You can't expect them to play through the whole game. And what good would they get out of playing the tutorial? They're not rating how good the game is, how the controls work out, how well the gameplay works. They're rating its content. They don't need to play it to do that.

The only flaw is when the developer does not include a true spectrum of the game's content on the DVD, but they have policies in place to cover that, I'm sure, as we saw with the whole Hot Coffee crap.

I'm really not sure how else you could go about doing it. Perhaps a DVD that contained the entire game played through, but for some of the longer games, you couldn't expect them to watch it all. And how do you handle more open ended games, with multiple branching storylines? (do those even exist anymore?)

I think the system probably works reasonably well as is, as long as everyone is honest. And its usually in their interests to be honest, so it works out.