Halo In Church Points Out ESRB Flaws

The recent controversy over church groups making use of Halo 3 to attract young men to their services continues to be a subject of debate outside of the fan press. GamePolitics notes that the debate is indicative of flaws in the ESRB's system, and in mainstream culture's understanding of those ratings. "When you look at it like that, it's hard to blame those who criticize bringing Halo into sacred space. For the most part the critics are not gamers and have no concept of the vast difference between Halo and GTA. All they know is that the games share a common M rating, a designation assigned by the game industry itself, theoretically for the protection of impressionable youth. For the uninitiated it's only logical to assume the content must be of a similar character as well. As someone who has played both, I'd argue that there is a world of difference between Halo and GTA."

Comments

Rating systems

[Gharbad]

When you have to pidgeon hole all media into about 5 slots, you're going to have differences between boundary conditions. Like how 2 R rated movies aren't necessarily the same in terms of content.

Read the bible lately?

[olddotter]

A game based on parts of the Bible could get an M rating as well. The bible is full of violence and sex. People just seem to gloss over that these days. Much like the people who say drinking is a sin, and over look that water to wine section.

Re:Read the bible lately?

[SkelVA]

The bible says "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;" Ephesians 5:18

Back in the day, before water purification techniques or even the understanding of what got a person sick and what didn't, wine was safer to drink than water. The wine they drink was also much less alcoholic than the wine we drink today. When Jesus turned water to wine as stated in the bible, think of it more like turning warm tap water to a cold soft drink or something along those lines.

And on the topic, there's a reason that movies give a basic reason for the rating. When I see an R rating for "Violence and adult language" it's different than if I see an R rating for "Nudity and extreme sexual content." The whole concept of a unified 5-slot rating system to classify offensiveness is completely intractable. The specific reasoning is much more useful to me, but nothing will ever trump parental involvement. Play Halo 3 for an hour or play GTA for an hour and you'll get a pretty decent, not complete, opinion of what the games' content is.

Suggested this myself

[Thyamine]

I submitted this to our own pastor and some of the others involved with youth and fellowship in our church. And I suppose being a gamer myself it just makes sense to me. The fellowship committee in our church is there to create activities that are not necessarily 'church' related, but help bring us together as a community, to get to know each other, and just to have fun. The youth groups do the same things. I don't see why it seems like such an alien concept that one or the other should use video games for that purpose. I mean, come on I'm a geek and 31 (and still thinking he's in college at times). Do I look like bingo or knitting are activities that I'm going to sign up for?

And I agree with the summary that it only seems strange to those who don't know about gaming, and while I can understand their initial confusion, I'd hope that after an explanation and (at most) a demonstration, that they'd see that. For the most part, I've run into very little concern about these type of things from anyone (and yes I'm going to stereotype) who was not under 65 or so in our church. But I think it's our part as gamers/geeks/fill-in-your-term-here to explain away the FUD that some people seem to spread.

Re:Still out of place...

[amRadioHed]

Both outline circumstances where killing is morally correct

Many of which are morally reprehensible to any modern civilization.

Translating the commandment as "murder" turns it into a really impotent commandment. As long as the people already had a concept of "wrong" killing and "right" killing, then telling them "wrong" killing is wrong is pretty useless. The history of western civilization should prove that some stronger language was warranted.