Congress Writes Letter to ESRB... Ignores Privacy

Congress Writes Letter to ESRB… Ignores Privacy

Submitted by George Walker on November 20, 2007 – 5:20 pm8 Comments

Good thing congress is here to protect us. Apparently not too busy from trying to fix their abysmal approval ratings, A handful of the usual congresscritters have, according to GamePolitics.com, “signed a letter” calling for a “thorough review” of the ESRB’s rating system in the wake of Manhunt 2.

Something that annoys me even more than EA: self-important politicians.

Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) sent the letter to ESRB president Patricia Vance yesterday. The move was prompted by the furor surrounding the M rating assigned by the ESRB to a revised version of Manhunt 2.

All four senators have been critics of the video game industry in the past. Lieberman is generally credited with pressuring the industry to create a rating system in the mid-1990

http://www.eklipse.net morphiend

Actually, its just a bunch of broo-hahah so that Clinton and conjure up more backers for her presidency.

Honestly, if that women ever makes it into the presidential office besides on the side of her husband when he kicked his feet up on the table, we’re in for a world of hurt.

What I don’t get is how people get so up in arms about the “conservatives” (which are usually attributed to the Republicans, for those of you playing at home) and then seeing a letter like this that is a majority Democratic. And let’s be honest, Lieberman is/was a Democrat.

http://www.farbot.com Paul Munn

This isn’t so much about privacy as it is about perceived indecency. I disagree with their perception and think that the M Rating is good enough for Manhunt 2 IF and only IF the proper content descriptors are there.

Do we need more content descriptors? I’m talking about things like:

“intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, strong language” http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

Do we need “depraved violence”? Perhaps “mutilation”? Do I hear a call for “cruelty to animals”? Anyone?

As for the T rating, it’s for 13 and up, not 16. The difference between 13 and 17 is substantial.

I DO think the way the ESRB rates games is pretty much crap. A jury of non-gamer soccer moms and so on to judge what deserves what rating is really not going to work when the publishers CHOOSE what they show to the ESRB raters.

Of course the publisher is now very highly motivated to come clean with how Rockstar botched the handling of Hot Coffee, the Oblivion game, and that great Halo debacle where an error message had a guy’s naked butt in it so it got the rest of the game an M instead of a T. But it still doesn’t make the ratings process right.

http://www.aeropause.com George

Actually, it is about privacy. It’s also about censorship.

If I want to play Manhunt, Halo, GTA, or Oblivion, I don’t want to ask permission from whatever ratings board Congress conjures up to take the place of the ESRB.

I also don’t think the ESRB is doing as horrible a job as you seem to be saying. Hot Coffee and Oblivion were the result of after-market mods. And the Halo butt was a placeholder graphic that was only accessible via the editor. It had nothing to do with Halo being rated M. It had to do with whether the game received the “partial nudity” descriptor. The Halo series has always been rated M, which is why there needs to be another classification to separate it from something that is clearly a few notches above it on the violence/gore scale. Like Manhunt 2, for instance.

Joe (Aeropause)

Well, I do think the ESRB has some issues. Did you see that DS game that I did a story about a few days ago. It has a kid running the border as a coke mule, rampant racism and even some insinuated pedophilia. Yet the game got an E rating.

The ESRB is too wishy washy. They change things after the fact, looking like they have no clue as to what is going on. It is a growth issue, due to the exploding popularity of games in the society.

While the MPAA seems stodgy at best, they have always stuck to their guns on a rating. You did not see them go back and reclassify Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Nope they rolled with it, and in the end Congress left them alone. A new rating came later, but they stuck to their guns and did not apply the new rating to the Indiana Jones movie.

The ESRB needs to do the same thing.

http://www.eklipse.net morphiend

No the MPAA has the same problems. I’ve “read about it on the inter-tubes”. There was a post somewhere about someone trying to get their movie out and because they weren’t a big name or something they were getting unjustly branded as NC-17 while another movie with the same type of content was only R.

Quite frankly I think the ESRB has done a GREAT job over the years. I have not played that DS game and cannot judge it. But what Congress needs to do is get a bill together to spend millions of our tax dollars on advertisements, mailers, etc. to educate the masses on the video game rating system. Just like how they’re doing it to tell everyone that their archaic televisions will go black in 13 months from now. (This is partly sarcastic and partly truthful).

http://www.aeropause.com George

It’s true that any rating system is going to have some issues.

The real question is this: is it okay for government to decide what should be rated and how? I’d rather decide for myself what is and isn’t appropriate.

Joe Haygood

I can agree that I don’t want the government dealing in what is good or bad. Two things come into play. Parents should be deeply involved with what their kids is playing and what they are buying for their kids. Secondly, There needs to me a better scale. The leap between T, M, and AO is just too diverse.

The ESRB has now told me that a game can be incredibly violent if you throw in some blur filters. That is the line between AO and M now. Same thing goes for Farhenheit. Not an overly violent game, but because they had some sex scenes in the game it got hit with an AO rating. Does that make sense? Nowadays, you can have brief nudity in a PG-13 movie but if that happens in a game, you get an AO rating.

http://www.eklipse.net morphiend

The blur filter is the (almost) the same as the difference between some movies getting R or NC-17. Sometimes the difference is just removing the DIRECT scene (anal sex scene anyone?).

But now you’ve hit on another head: Video games are seen as an entity for kids, not adults. So it has more twisted views as to what is T vs AO. Heck, you can even drop the F bomb and get a PG-13 nowadays, but you can’t say “sh!t” in a video game w/o a M.