Lawyer Opines On 'Flaws' in ESRB Rating Methodology 61
Gamepolitics has a post up looking at blog entry by attorney Mark Methenitis, who is not only a practitioner of the legal arts but also a gamer. At his site, he runs down some of the major pros and cons of the ESRB's ratings process, and on the whole he thinks they're doing a good job. Their major oversight, in his mind, is that at no point are the videogames ever actually played: "Game publishers send in a DVD of selected scenes and a lot of paperwork to get the game rated... The point being that the ratings board never plays the games. Yes, you read that right. The people who rate video games do not play the game they are rating. It would be the equivalent of basing movie ratings on a form and a trailer. Context would be wholly absent." The ESRB argues that if the publishers create their 'ratings package' within the organization's guidelines, they don't need to play the game. And indeed, with a title like Oblivion you can't expect the organization to play through the whole game. But ... c'mon ... maybe just the tutorial? How long would that take?
What good would that do? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't expect them to play through the whole game. And what good would they get out of playing the tutorial? They're not rating how good the game is, how the controls work out, how well the gameplay works. They're rating its content. They don't need to play it to do that.
The only flaw is when the developer does not include a true spectrum of the game's content on the DVD, but they have policies in place to cover that, I'm sure, as we saw with the whole Hot Coffee crap.
I'm really not sure how else you could go about doing it. Perhaps a DVD that contained the entire game played through, but for some of the longer games, you couldn't expect them to watch it all. And how do you handle more open ended games, with multiple branching storylines? (do those even exist anymore?)
I think the system probably works reasonably well as is, as long as everyone is honest. And its usually in their interests to be honest, so it works out.
Minor objection (Score:2)
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Most games have stuff like that in there. Unless you're really tight on space, fully removing unused stuff often isn't worth the risk of breaking something in the process. Especially not on a game primarily intended for consoles, where modifying things is hard and the game runs dire
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I've done the same thing in games I've created. Never anything controversial though. Just came down to I decided against using a feature, so I just turned off the flag in the level data that triggered it.
I've also seen ROM hacking guides out there where changing one byte changes a boss into a different boss that's not normally in the game.
I'm far more surprised that this e
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Perhaps, but the entire point of the Hot Coffee was that the *developer
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Playing the game would allow a ratings board to get a sense of context, as the article states. It would also give someone an idea of the kinds of choices the player has. In God of War you can can choose to kill a medusa by stabbing it repeatedly or by twisting its head off. All choices made by the player are bloody violent. In BioShock you can choose to rescue the Little Sisters or exploit them - a choice with positive and negative moral significance. A person may rate the violence and mature content i
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Context is provided in various ways. The ratings board is not just presented a series of money shots. They're given a DVD that is "representative" of the game but also includes its most salacious content. Both of those are requirements.
If the ratings board were forced to play the games, I guarantee two things would happen:
a) It would take forever to get games rated, resulting in huge delays and potentially fewe
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Most gamers are adults, and many of us are even parents, so no, the ESRB isn't for the people who have legal guardianship over us.
Despite your insistence on treating us like children, I do agree with your main point, the ESRB is not for us. I, and many gamers, have no problem with playing a game before deciding it's ok to give to a child (mostl
Exactly! (Score:2)
The Major Flaw (Score:1, Interesting)
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Except the console manufacturers won't allow unrated or AO games on their systems, and the retailers will refuse to sell an AO or unrated game. So it is pretty effective censorship.
Yet they'll sell unrated versions of the newest torture porn DVD to kids, without a damn problem.
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Although I don't have a reference for it, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that you simply cannot get a license to
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This is no different than the rating on films, yet no-one seems to complain about them.
I have to admit, I don't understand why people on Slashdot are so upset that games are rated. We are no longer in the 8 bit age of pixelated graphics and some of these games ar
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That's probably because you don't live in the U.S. like many of us do; I'm making that assumption since you're counting things as "rated 18" which is not how things are rated here. In the U.S., we don't have laws that enforce ratings. Movie ratings are voluntary and theaters set their own policy instead of having laws enforced. In retail, most stores are pretty lax about enforcing ratings. For example, a kid can
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This is no different than the rating on films, yet no-one seems to complain about them.
This is vastly different than the rating on films, for two very important reasons.
The first: The ratings are not entirely consistent. A film with brief, non-titillating nudity can still sometimes get a PG-13 rating, while Janet Jackson's infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' (or it's digital equivalent) would instantly garner an 'M' rating from the ESRB.
The second: As some have said before in other posts, it is much more challenging to get any sort of audience at all for a video game that receives the dreaded
"Legalized Censorship" (Score:1)
If a private entity doesn't want to publish games with a certain rating, that has nothing to do with the rating's or the game's legality. All it means is that if you want to produce a AO game, your
The lesser evil (Score:2)
Back in the late 80s (or 90s), the US government basically told the game industry: "You have to rate your games or we'll do it for you." A couple of organizations were created, and the ESRB became the standard.
So, in short, the ESRB is the only thing that stops people like Hilary or Arnold from tell you what you can play.
(And, yes, it still sucks)
Getting Flamebate Rating?! (Score:2)
From Wiki: "To obtain a rating for a game, a publisher sends the ESRB videotaped footage of the game's most graphic and extreme content. The publisher also fills out a questionnaire describing the game's content and encloses a check for between $2,000 and $3,000.
The ESRB states on its website that three trained raters, working independently, then watch the footage and recommend a rating. If all raters agree on the rating, content descriptors are added and the ESRB notifie
it's not how "hard" it is... doofus! (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you want to pay the costs of adding extra staff, time, & money at the ESRB to do:
- game installation
- software/hardware support (just in case games have trouble running underneath the ESRB's setup)
- and then the time to PROPERLY play through what needs to be played through to get the rating
also, the staff would have to be decent enough game players at some of these games to get through the appropriate parts to rate
plus, some of the critical content to rate is not later int he game, do not want to force developer to further pigenhole the degien to cater to the ESRB players or force the dev team to make a special demo just for the ESRB to play.
i mean, yeah, it is doable... but the extra cost would be handed down to the consumers, and games are expensive enough already. Not "hard" at all, if you want to pay for it, sheesh....
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As for the cost of an extra $1000 or whatever the ESRB would grossly overcharge for the "playing" service, that should amount to like $.01 being added to the game prices (for a nice round $60 rather than $59.99 woohoo) considering game budgets nowadays.
It is asking for a lot (Score:1)
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Would it really help? (Score:1)
hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
That would be a sweet job. I'd take it.
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Well maybe you like your current job more than I like mine.
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Sweet! I'll have to take a look.
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Analogy (Score:2)
But seriously, as long as the content they review is what someone would experience were they to play, what does it matter that the marginal amount of additional context you get from playing is absent? Unless there's a game that shows a mother nursing her newborn child and the ESRB has a form with a c
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I don;t think people quite get the ESRB (Score:1)
The impression people seem to have is that developers write a game, and then the ESRB decides what rating to give it. A developer knows full well what rating they want right at the start of the design. The game is targetted at the rating. They'll remove anything that will give it a higher rating long before anyone at the ESRB gets to see it. T
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Time_Spent(Games) Time_Spent(Movies) (Score:1)
Not really impossible to play the whole game (Score:1)
or perhaps a god-mode?
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This would ensure bot
I'm glad the ESRB is there (Score:4, Insightful)
The ESRB isn't holding back the AO games, its society, its the general consensus that video games are still just for kids and therefore we have to protect the children from bad content. This idea is changing, though slower than we might like. The boundaries are being pushed slowly allowing for more and more "adult/graphic" content. This isn't just meaning titties and extreme violence but, mature story lines and content that we identify with better instead of the usually spiky haired hero saves the day. Content that makes you think, challenges your ideals and makes the game more than just press button to shoot gun.
As we all have noticed our games and gaming habits are in the media spotlight, legislators and politicians as well as ambulance chasers and attention whores all have there two bits to say about how games are bad and this and that. Like Rock and Roll and Dungeons and Dragons, Video games are the scapegoat of the year and its up to us gamers to work with our system and to make people see that there fears and concerns are unfounded and a bunch of FUD.
We are parents, grandparents, business owners, teachers and responsible individuals, we play games, we love our games because we grew up with them. Its still a new medium and its slowly getting to be accepted and seen as more than just for kids.
For me, I'm for the ESRB
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The only reason the industry is self-regulated is because the government threatened to involve themselves. "Self-regulation" is a sham. I would rather have no ESRB, and a government that minded its own business--and the business of government is not to regulate videogames.
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While a major goal of the ESRB is most certainly to avoid government regulation of the industry, I happen to think that even without that governmental threat, a rating system along those lines is still a good idea.
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I would rather the industry was self regulated, instead of having big government come in, who has no effin clue about games and tell us what we can and cannot have.
Yup, that's the fear that's being played on. But IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The Supreme Court, even the current conservative court, has been very firm on protecting freedom of expression unless government money is involved. Numerous state laws banning or limiting the sale of "violent" or "sexual" video games have been overturned. Even "virtual child porn" is 100% protected because the logic behind banning child porn is based on the children being harmed during production (it's pretty tortured logic). The sa
It is easy to point out flaws (Score:2)
Expansions yes, mods no (Score:2)
Player made mods and such would not be applicable as they are not created by the company. If this was the case pretty much every PC game that is mod able would be considered AO.
Of course if this is what you meant then its all good.
Understand what the ESRB is for. (Score:3, Insightful)
The method used to rate games is perfect in this regard, because when video game critics attack games, they use video game footage of "objectionable" scenes taken out of context to do so.
Of course, this is why the "Hot Cofee" scandal was such a public relations nightmare, and I blame the ESRB for mishandling it. This is perhaps because the ESRB thinks that it really does exist to pass judgments on games. The goal should have been damage control, to the ESRB and to the game industry in general. Instead they caved into their worst critics and gave them new ammunition, based on some incomplete code that couldn't be reached through normal gameplay.
I used to make those tapes (Score:1)
So, while it isn't practical for the ESRB to play through an entire game, I think th
Can't expect them to play? (Score:2)
It's BS and we all know it.
Its true (Score:1)