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Why Is the Grand Theft Auto CEO Also Chairman of the ESRB?
donniebaseball23 writes In an editorial at GamesIndustry.biz, Brendan Sinclair asks an important question about the game ratings board in America. Should Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, which owns the Grand Theft Auto franchise and has been at the heart of the ESRB's biggest controversies of the last decade, really be serving as its chairman? "No matter how removed from the day-to-day running of the ESRB Zelnick might be, his current role invites accusations of impropriety," he writes. "It's the sort of thing any critic of the games industry can point to as a clear conflict of interest, and many reasonable outsiders would probably look at that as a valid complaint. At least when titans of industry in the U.S. become the head of the regulatory agencies that oversee their former companies, they actually have to leave those companies."
1. The controversy is good for sales. The kids want the taboo stuff.
2. It allows him to set the line for "too extreme" as one step past GTA, meaning that he sells the most taboo title available.
The ESRB was created by the game companies so that they wouldn't get government involvement and can set ratings themselves. Of course it's going to be populated by Game company execs.
The film industry also handles ratings internally and despite the bullshit brought to light by "this film not yet rated" is still largely doing an acceptable job of it. It's nonsense to take potshots at the gaming industry over this.
Or rather, its nonsense if you take it at face value. Really it's transparently obvious that this is just astroturfing. It's a sad attempt at appearing to care about "ethical" issues betrayed by their utter inability to drop the moralistic, censorious, and authoritarian Jack Thompson 2.0 rhetoric even for long enough to get one good lie out.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The whole idea of an ESRB is a joke, why should it matter who heads it?
It is somewhat ironic that after successfully heading off conservative "think of the children!" handwaving last century, this century video games are being attacked by the left-wing radicals who for some reason see video games as destroying their view of social justice. Probably because video games are the purist form of meritocracy possible: it all comes down to your skill, judged by an unbiased computer.
Can't have that in a left-wing utopia, so they gotta attack video games from any angle they can. It's getting kind of pathetic by now, to be honest.
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There is no coincidence to this headline, weeks before the launch of GTA V for PC. It motivates the stupid to talk about GTA, and search for it raising its profile. I mean read the fuckin' title:
"Why is the Grand Theft Auto ..." why didn't they say "Why is the Rockstar ..." or whatever the conglomerate is? Specifying the game in the title, to an audience as well targeted as we are is mostly obvious.
Increased awareness == increased revenue.
Rockstar loves controversy because of it...
More importantly is this question: who gives a shit about the ESRB?
The people who are paid to...
Indeed. Watch the movie "This film is not yet rated" for a very clear explanation.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I don't worry about my kid going on a killing spree and being taken down by the national guard. I _do_ worry about her getting knocked up. That's the difference.
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That is because you can see female breast. Those are sacred relics, and displaying them in vain is blasphemous.
God is great in everything he created. I will now prove my faith by cutting off bit of my penis. Amen.
Firethorn said "violence and/or sex"(and, in practice, even in games that tempt fate by having sex as well as violence the two are usually largely separate, freaky Japanese imports aside).
That correction aside, though, there is one point of argument that I think doesn't get enough attention in the 'violence and stuff in videogames' disputes:
Since videogames are interactive, which makes player choice at least possible(if the developer doesn't force you onto rails), the existence of bad, even (literally) atrocious, things in the game can actually make it more morally salient, and more effectively challenge the player's "hehe, violence is lulz!" approach.
Just by way of example: in Fallout games pre-Bethesda(so everything before Fallout 3), you could kill children. In Fallout 3 and later there are some children but they are invulnerable and can only be talked to. However, your character's options, and likely his survival, strongly depended on the attitudes and cooperation of NPCs in the gameworld. You were free to kill kids; but (surprise surprise) most of the decent-human-being NPCs strongly disapproved, to the point of overtly refusing to deal with you and/or trying to kill you.
The option to kill children didn't really make it a 'sick child murder simulator!!!'. You could do it; but you paid a high, and fairly plausible and realistic, price: nobody wants to associate with, or assist, the sort of sick fuck who does that, and so you probably died in the wasteland. Fallout 3 and later just whitewashed that moral choice, and it wasn't even possible to commit that particular crime or pay its penalty.
This doesn't mean that any game with grotesque transgressions is a veritable font of moral wisdom, it'd be pretty trivial(and isn't uncommon) to have games that gleefully glorify (sometimes even without much ironic detachment) various sorts of mayhem; but it really ought to be remembered that one of the powerful, and morally relevant, possibilities of an interactive medium is to have all manner of choices, good, bad, indifferent, downright depraved, be available; but have the gameworld respond appropriately.
(Dishonored did a pretty good job with this one, I thought, even for its poor generic-guard-mooks: it was typically easier to kill them than to evade or stun them; but you knew that the poor bastards were just city guards, who thought you'd assassinated the empress, doing their jobs. How many could you justify killing 'for the mission'? 'Just because it was easier'? 'For fun'? Depending on that number, the NPCs you interacted with, and the city itself, would change its own tone. You could play 'clean', you could leave a trail of bodies for the plague rats; but the consequences would be felt.)