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Inside the ESRB Ratings System
Gamasutra has a lengthy piece up today looking at the ins and outs of ESRB ratings. There are a lot of misconceptions about the process, and ESRB president Patricia Vance took some time to set the record straight: "Q: What do raters receive or know about a game before the video arrives? Do raters receive information on the game along with the video? For example, could a publisher send along promotional or explanatory material for the rater? A: Along with the video, the only other information that might be provided to raters is a script or lyric sheet provided by the publisher for the game being evaluated. Capturing language and dialogue on the video submission, particularly in context, can be tricky. So sometimes, instead of having a video with a montage of several instances of foul language (including the most extreme), the raters review the scripts and lyric sheets to gain a better understanding of the dialogue and frequency with which profanity and other potentially offensive language occur."
but I still don't trust them.
One thing I was expecting to find in this interview but did not find was how much it costs to submit or resubmit a product for rating, especially a simple little budget puzzle game from a smaller publisher that would otherwise have no problem getting an E.
If anyone hasn't seen This Film is not yet Rated which the Gamasutra article's title alludes to I would recommend it as an eye opening look into the ratings process.
Just like the MPAA the ESRB is using an anonymous group of individuals with no clearly defined lines between ratings to effectively censor content (since many consoles will not even play AO content similar to many major studios refusing to release NC-17 content).
And here's the quote that the summary should have included in my opinion:
Do raters apply their own moral standards (on subjects like violence, substance abuse, and sexuality) to guide their rating recommendations? Or, are they merely to apply a standard that the ESRB has set out for them?
PV: It's really a combination of both. Rating games is an inherently subjective practice in the sense that content is always going to be interpreted in different ways by different people. So part of the equation is the raters' own views on content, but as I said, parity and consistency play important roles as well.
Page 3..
"Truth be told, though, I'm just not privy to the conversations that take place when the raters are doing their job. We take the integrity of the process extremely seriously, and nobody else is present in the viewing room when raters are reviewing and discussing content."
So for all she knows they may be rolling d100, and BS'ing the rest of the session...
Its the ESRB, not Jury duty.........
I personaly dont think the rating is the problem. The real problem is a game with a certain rating getting to the hands of a minor because parents/stores dont enforce it.
New rating sugestion: AOAIUKKAWANR.CMJT
Adults Only And If Ur Kid Kills Anyone We Are Not Responsible.Check Mate Jack Thompson.
It would be a different system and I think the ratings would reflect better if they used a Nielsen type sampling from around the country. Take a % based on population, give a loosely defined set of guidelines, pick a random sampling and rate. I think the main problem they have here in the ESRB are not gamers and not privy to the differences say between the violence of Halo/GTA (posted /. yesterday).
Try reading TFA:
How diverse is your pool of raters?PV: Our group of raters includes a mix of male and female, parents and non-parents, hardcore gamers and more casual gamers, younger and older. We recruit from the New York metropolitan area, which has one of the most culturally and socially diverse populations in the country. Sounds to me like they've got their bases covered pretty well.
And for the record, I think the ESRB does a pretty good job. Even when they re-rated GTA:SA. And Manhunt and Manhunt 2 should probably both be AO, but I'm not rating them.
The real question you should as is "who would you rather rate the games?" Besides yourself. You have to have a few qualifications to satisfy publishers. The group has to be small enough to ensure confidentiality, non-objective based (no or minimal political or social skews), and private. Draw on a larger pool and the publishers will get upset. They don't want any leaks about their content that they don't release.
And so, if you don't give it to the ESRB, or something very similar, then the job will fall into the laps of the politicians. Nobody wants that.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
That's bullshit. They've got six raters total; how diverse is that? If you were to divide people based on age (above/below a certain age so there's 2 groups), gender, and whether they're a parent or not, you would need eight different people to get each perspective. Adding more dimensions and more granularity (eg more age categories, age/number of children, race, etc), you're going to need more and more people to represent those groups. For her to say that they've got diversity when there's only six freaking testers total and only three from each game is, frankly, ridiculous.
Yeah, six doesn't allow for a lot of diversity, but remember that one of the six can represent more than one "group". For instance, you might have an age 31 male who's a parent of a 10-year-old, but also a hard-core gamer.
I would actually rather have IGN or Gamespot rate the games since they actually play through it and experience it, and not just watch a 20 minute DVD.
I get two.
1 sixteen year old male, no kids, hard core gamer.
1 45 year old woman, nineteen kids, believes the joker in a deck of cards doesn't represent but literally is Satan.
Maybe the ESRB should be ran like Jury Duty with a random sampling of the population where it is unlikely that the same person will review many games. At least then a liberal person might get to influence something once in a while.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The ESRB isn't perfect, but I trust them more than Hilary Clinton or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Without something like the ESRB, the government will step in and tell you want you can and can't buy. At least with self-rating we can avoid government censorship.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I think they do a ridiculously bad job. I worked for a game company, and while we had no significant trouble getting grizzly, visceral murders through the rating process as below M, ESRB had problems with hints of nipple showing through a female characters shirt, and they had problems with characters smoking certain types of drugs. I think the hypersensitivity to sexual(-ish) content and drugs, but non-sensitivity to ultra violent content is a monumental double standard, which smacks all too much of a religion-based concept of ethics.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
not quite true:
Barbarella was released in the USA before the MPAA introduced the motion picture rating system on November 1, 1968. It was consequently released with a tag "Suggested For Mature Audiences". A re-release in 1977 (to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977)) was edited to obtain a "PG" rating and was called "Barbarella: Queen Of The Galaxy. The video version is of the original uncut version and not the "PG" version (despite the subtitle "Queen of the Galaxy" and the "PG" rating on the cover) The version now on video in Australia is of the Laser Disc version which has a more "nude" opening credit scene. The difference {is] in the floating titles [which] reveal more of Jane Fonda than the original version and video did. The original European version had all the nudity intact on its first release. Barbarella: Alternate Versions
This strikes me as about the most damning thing you could say: That instead of drawing on a broad spectrum of ideas and content the M-rated game runs along a very narrow and predictable track.
It's not religion, it's the "standard" ethics code of the U.S. as a whole. In Europe, sex and sexuality aren't a big deal, which is why you can get a French movie intended for fairly young audiences that has some nudity in it. Meanwhile in the U.S., you can axe-murder someone in a PG movie, but show a nipple and it's immediately rated R.
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