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ESRB Supplements Rating System With Summaries
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) announced today that in addition to their standard ratings for video games, they'll begin including summaries of the games, highlighting the parts which earned the rating. As Giant Bomb points out, some are quite entertaining to read. The new policy drew praise from Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), both of whom have spoken out against "inappropriate" game content in the past. The summaries are viewable at the ESRB's website; thus far, they've only done them for games rated since July 1st.
I don't think the current rating system which just lumps things into categories like 'T' and 'M' work all that well. Take for instance, the hypothetical game "Bert and Ernie's Fucking Amazing Adventure!" where characters perform no violent actions at all and there is no sexual content in the game. The only catch is that every other word is the foulest profanity known to man. The game will probably be rated 'M' simply due to the language content, but being completely devoid of sexual or violent content, it's still fine for a child to play assuming you don't care if they pick up any fowl language.
Why not rate games based on a few categories: Violence, Sex, Language, etc. Each category is given a score where a higher score indicates more objectionable content. I think that this gives consumers looking at the box a better understanding of what the game's content is like without actually lumping it into some other person's idea of "Mature." This would also go a long way towards stopping games that are labeled "Adults Only" from essentially being banned from store shelves.
If you actually define the ratings fairly well you really don't need an ERSB as companies can actually determine where the ratings should be at themselves. It will probably never happen, but it's just another solution that's considerably better than the ERSB and all the incompetence and idiocy that comes along with it.