A Real Mom Reviews the Games Industry Report Card 126
Last month's National Institute on Media and the Family 'report card' was pretty much more of the same from the reactionary group. Recently a real parent (Colleen Hannon from GamerDad) sat down with the report to offer up some comments. "They still can't seem to read the names of the games off the front of the box. What they have listed as 'Call to Duty 4' is actually Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. That may seem like a minor mistake, but if you type what's on their list into a search engine to get more information off the ESRB's website or Google, it won't return the real results on the game. And without that last bit at the end, you're going to get a list with all the games in the series which can be confusing and not all of them are M rated. For someone who thinks parents should pay more attention and research they aren't helping them out much." Via GamePolitics.
Re:If he's such an expert.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even those of the 'gamer generation'.
The bottom line is parent's don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents that don't care, or are just prone to give into their kids anyway aren't going to do any research and aren't going to be watching their kids play.
Ok, this is a joke right! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Retailers must return to the level of compliance in previous years" - Ok, lets see when I was a Babbages(Now Gamestop) Manager we didn't enforce anything. You have $59.99 to buy this game here is your copy. You know what - thats the way it should be. Your the parent pay attention to what your kid is buying and playing.
Then:
The list of games to avoid, thats a joke too, at least without context. My Daughter is 10 weeks old, but lets scale this up and say she was 10 Years Old instead. I'll go an record as saying several of those games I would let her play when she is a 10yo I don't see a problem. The Half-Life franchise, Gears of War, Call Of Duty and several others I'll let her play those from the moment she can point the mouse in the right direction. She will know the difference between shooting someone on a computer and really shooting someone. Thats my job as a parent to teach her that. Its not some out side random organization's job to dictate that to my child. Now its also important to note that she will not have a computer/game system (or TV for that matter) in her own room until she is 14 at least. Therefore the only systems she will have access too will be in shared and/or public spaces in our house. We will know what she is doing.
"Mediawise Recommend Games for Children and Teens"
Not a shooter among them interesting...guess what shooters are fun, and they always have been Atari 2600 when I was kid had a shooter came with the system it was called "Combat" funny that...all those games of combat and I'm not twisted warped or on death row.
Re:So we counter a biased "report card" (Score:4, Insightful)
Missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Some people fight each other. Like punching and kicking. There's not really so much blood, but the girls wear very revealing outfits."
"You skateboard around doing tricks. The crashes are pretty brutal, and there's some crude jokes."
"You collect and control little monsters that fight and stuff. You don't actually see them fight, you just kind of read what they did."
And I think that's what's missing from the ESRB web site - they don't give the kind of context many parents need to evaluate a game. Now I think it's reasonably clear a young kid shouldn't be playing either Dead or Alive Extreme 2 or Mass Effect (and both are M rated, which seems right) but look at the content descriptors:
Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Simulated Gambling
Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Blood, Language, Violence
From just that, you might think these are comparable games. Compare that to the information you get from a synopsis:
"You ogle bikini girls and buy them bikinis. That's the whole point of the game."
"You buy guns and shoot aliens. In the story, there's a love scene where you can see a girl's bum for a second."
Whatever you may think of the relative offensiveness of that content, I think that's information a parent needs to have in order to make a decision. These games' content are very different.
Re:The bottom line is parent's don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Today's parents just suck at parenting. They lack the minimal backbone required to tell their kids "no," because they try to be friends rather than parents.
I can't stand how bad parents let their fat kids keep grabbing the Frosted Flakes instead of insisting on Cheerios or Raisin Bran. My grandmother had a strict "no sugared cereal" policy. My siblings and I knew it and didn't even bother trying to get her to budge on it. When I got to choose a computer game for my birthday present one year (the original Civilization), my grandfather not only looked at it (out of parenting and curiosity), he made sure that I was firm in my decision, and didn't just grab I'd toss the next day. Today the most sugared cereal I eat is store brand honey nut cheerios and I don't make impulse purchases. I owe it to the previous generation's parenting skills- my parents were pretty lousy at it.
Kids used to watch too much TV instead of playing outside. Now they play idiotic action games* on their game consoles (the new "idiot box") and have asthma as an excuse. As Mike Gravel said: "Americans are getting fatter and dumber". Hard to imagine, given the current the amount of flab you see everywhere and the numskull currently occupying the White House.
* see http://www.gamershell.com/articles/884.html [gamershell.com] on what's wrong with today's games.
Re:So we counter a biased "report card" (Score:3, Insightful)
She's pointing this stuff out, that many of the intended users of this list, video game-illiterate parents, won't know enough to correct the errors and ommissions. Think if someone published a Christmas gift list of "quality knitting needles", and you went to get the #3 needle for your gramma, but the style name was off, and didn't include a model number. Should you "know better, you poor-knitting-skilled buffoon"? Or should the writers of the list have analyzed their target audience better?
I assure you, the audience for this list is neither teenagers, nor young men in their 20s or 30s.
Re:Missing... (Score:4, Insightful)
My intended point was that the sexual content - described as "Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes" for both - is of a very different nature in the two games. I didn't search the list to find two very different games with an exactly identical list of descriptors, but I'm sure such a pair could be found, and I imagine you get my point.
I just dont think the one word description needs to be on the ESRB rating.
To be clear, mostly I was thinking about the ESRB site and how it could be more useful. Currently it shows only rating and a list of descriptors. I think it should also contain or link to a synopsis (or trailer, or site, or something) so that parents have something more substantive to evaluate, and can learn about video game content from a central, trustable source.
And, yes, I do think this would be a valuable service - a lot of parents, especially non-gamers, are going to have more difficulty judging the content of a game than the content of a movie or book, and could use the help. Sure, there's plenty of info on games on the web already - but it is serving a lot of different purposes (advertisement, discussion of gameplay or quality, etc..) and may be hard to find for the people who need it most. The game box, while likely very helpful for some games, isn't always on hand - and again isn't really geared towards giving this kind of info.
call of duty 4 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Enough with the censorship nonsense! (Score:2, Insightful)