Law of the Game States ESRB Process Flawed, But Working
By Shawn on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 5:47 PM PST In Game Related Laws, Games Industry
Attorney Mark Methenitis sounds off on the ESRB rating process in an entry on his blog Law of the Game. Methenitis was surprised, as I’m sure many Americans would be, that games aren’t played all the way through before they are rated.
I have often been puzzled at the ratings some games get. For example, when I saw that Smash Bros. Melee was rated “T for Teen,” my immediate thought was “What next, Barbie’s Mystic Horse Adventure 7 being rated M?”… 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.
Debate on the US rating system is by no means a new one, and has raged on across the nation since its inception. The US Senate is currently entertaining the Truth in Video Game Ratings Act introduced by presidential hopeful Sam Brownback (R-KS). Methenitis comments further on the effectiveness of the ratings system.
I get the impression that ratings for media content are more accurate when the reviewer takes the content in context and on the whole. Perhaps the better approach is to have the ESRB hire “designated gamers,” and have the reviewers watch the game being played for some period of time in addition to the forms and DVDs in order to contextualize the game.
Methenitis points out that the ESRB may be taking into account they aren’t seeing the whole picture and make sure to rate games a little higher to cover themselves.
Perhaps the powers that be would just assume most games be rated a tier higher than the content actually is, either to give parents more discretion or to insulate themselves from complaints. In any event, with the recent Manhunt 2 controversy, I expect that this issue will likely be blown well out of proportion by certain people in the media and politics. If anything, it creates a harsher rating system, not a weaker one.
via Law of the Game ; GamePolitics
I still think enforcement of the rules is the real problem. Instead of blaming the ESRB or the video game companies, they need to go after the retailers who are not following the rules and punish them.
now why is COD4 rated “M” ? It doesn’t fit in with the last 3
“I still think enforcement of the rules is the real problem.”
Enforcement of the rules is not the problem because the fact is that the rules need not be enforced as they are OPTIONAL. Retailers are not bound by law or contract to enforce the ratings, and the video game industry certainly doesn’t want to change that because it wants those extra sales to minors. If enforcement of the ESRB ratings became mandatory by the industry, that would be in effect no different than banning such sales to minors by law. The ESA’s argument against such laws has always been that they are censorship not that it should be the one to impose such censorship.
Mark Methenitis has a very legitimate point that the ESRB ratings are flawed because the games are not reviewed in their entirety or at all contextually by having the reviewers play even a portion of the actual game. The MPAA movie rating system is far from ideal, but at least its ratings aren’t based upon simply a text description of the movie and some stills or a trailer from it.