Everyone’s Favorite Video Game Conversation: Ratings!
Feminist Gamers is always a source of interesting and important conversations, and this week was no exception, when Mighty Ponygirl put up a thread called Virgin/whore videogames? The part of that post that caught my eye was midway down when she starts talking about the ESRB rating system.
A lot of poeple don’t really know that much about the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), which isn’t really that surprising, even if it is sort of disappointing.
Ultimately, I don’t really have a problem with rating systems. I think that they’re not particularly well conceived right now, and I think that they’re too subject to commericial pressures, and not informative enough, but the concept isn’t completely pointless. It’s not realistic to expect everyone to play a game before the purchase it for other people, and going online to try to find information about a game you’re thinking about buying is a crapshoot at the best of times. It’s near impossible if you’re someone who doesn’t game regularly and doesn’t know what you’re really looking for.
I think that one of the problems with the current system is that it’s more focused on trying to tie content in with a proper age bracket, and doesn’t give consumers nearly enough information about what’s actually in the game. The games usually contain an age recommendation, and some content descriptions, but there’s no way to know exactly what got a game the rating that it received.
Consider: After looking at the ESRB ratings for Dreamcast games, I found that “Ooga Booga”, “Confidential Mission”, and “Maken X” all had content descriptions of “Violence” or “Animated Violence” (the ESRB no longer uses “Animated Violence” on games). Yet, they’re rated E, T, and M respectively. Newer games aren’t immune to this, either. “Transformers: The Game” got a T rating for “Violence”, while “Burnout Dominator” got an E10+, and “Super Monkey Ball Deluxe” and “LEGO Star Wars” got an E for the same.
Over on the Feminist Gamers thread, I suggested that a three point rating system might be more effective. I think that a system that gives consumers more information about the actual content of a product, with less concern about the age ranges, would be of more use to the average consumer. Telling someone that a game contains “Violence” isn’t helpful when you count everything from bopping a koopa on the head to ramming a car to shooting someone repeatedly as being “Violence”.
The mild comedic violence in most Mario games probably doesn’t bother most people or children. Is it violence? I suppose so- but it’s hardly the same as the violence in a game like Hitman. It’s mild cartoon violence, at worst, and the rating on a game like that should make that clear.
My suggestion was that games should have ratings in three basic catagories:
1. How graphic is the game in terms of violence and sex?
2. What is the relative difficulty of the game? (How hard is the game to play?)
3. How mature are the themes in the game? (How complex/difficult is the story?)
I don’t think that’s a perfect rating system, and I’m sure it could be refined, but I think that those three things, combined with the genre of the game, are probably enough to give some indication of whether a game is quite what you’re looking for.
Marle raised a few criticisms/critiques of this idea, and while I don’t completely agree with them, I think that they’re worth examining:
Roy, movie ratings are no more transparent than game ratings. Also, every game has content descriptors (fantasy violence, blood and gore, gambling, whatever) on the rating on the back of the box, while DVD boxes usually just have “R” or “PG” or whatever. Books don’t even have ratings, yet we don’t hear any think-of-the-children whining about books. The problem is not with game ratings; the problem is people expect more from games than from other forms of media.
Not to ignore your rating system idea, I think since difficulty and maturity/appropriateness of themes are so subjective, then people should read subjective reviews on the internet or in magazines to find out the detail they need. For example, I’ve beaten almost every Final Fantasy and find them all pretty easy, but I get my ass handed to me in Halo, while I’m sure there’s others who are exactly the opposite, so how do you put them on a scale? Do you compare them to other games in the genre? What if it has elements from other genres, like an FPS with lots of puzzles but simplified controls, so the FPSers find it difficult (because of the puzzles) but other gamers find it to be one of the easiest FPSs (because of the simplified controls)? Yeah, I think that’s best in a subjective review, not a simple rating.
I think that the point about movie ratings is totally fair- movie ratings aren’t transparent. On the other hand, I think that’s a problem, too. I think that the rating system should be made as objective as possible, and there should be a fair level of transparency so that everyone can understand why a game/movie is getting the rating that it gets. Ultimately, your guidelines ought to be clear enough that most producers should be able to guess what rating they’ll get before they even turn the game in, and for what reasons.
Another thing that would help is a database that contains the ratings of each game, and some kind of detailed write-up of why it got the rating. The ESRB is already halfway there, since they have an organized list of all the games that they’ve rated, as well as content descriptions. The problem right now is that the descriptions are too vague to be of any help. Given that three different games with three different ratings all have the one word content description “Violence”, it’s hard to see how that’s particularly helpful.
Of course, I think that ought to be done, even if nobody likes my three point rating system. I don’t see the value in making the rating process secretive instead of open. The current system is seen as being ineffective and hostile to both consumers and game producers, so it’s not like they’ve got anything to lose by being a little more open about what they’re doing. It might help their PR a little bit if they were more open.
I’ve been thinking a bit about the book thing, and I’m not sure that Marle has that point quite right. I don’t think it’s that people necessarily expect more from videogames than any other media form- I think that people place books in a special place all their own. Books are given special license, because they’re books. Movies, television, music, and games are all rated. Another interesting thing about books is that, while they don’t have specific ratings, they are sort of loosely grouped by age range. There are children’s books, teen books, and everything else.
Still, it’s true that books aren’t rated by age, and as I say, I’d actually rather that games weren’t, either. I think that it’s better to have a system that gives information about the content of a game, rather than some arbitrary age-range.
As far as the subjective nature of the proposed system goes: I think that any rating system is going to have elements of subjectivity. I’m not sure that there’s any way to avoid that. Some people will consider any racing game to have violence if it’s possible to bump or damage other cars. Some people won’t. I think that a system that merely notes the type and severity of the violence is probably less subjective than one that tries to draw an appropriate age, though.
Ultimately, I think that subjectivity is unavoidable, and I think that the best we can do is try to come up with a system that acknowledges the subjective nature of rating, and tries to be as objective and consistent as possible. Difficulty is subjective, but there are standards we can get to. As I stated over there, I think that most people can agree that Gran Turismo is a more difficult racing game than Burnout.
Ultimately, the more information you give a consumer about why you’re rating something the way you are, the less important the individual rating becomes, because you’re giving them to tools to form their own rating, and that’s really more important. It’s not enough to say “This game is difficulty 5.” That tells the consumer very little. Instead, some notes about why the game was perceived as difficult are in order: “This game contains realistic driving physics, highly customizable vehicles, complicated courses, and aggressive AI”.
Anyway, I think that the reality is that ratings are here to stay, and given that I don’t have any particular objection to them, my main concern is how to create a rating system that will work, without becoming another tool for censorship. Unfortunately, I suspect that the ESRB isn’t going to improve the rating system any time soon. In the meantime, we’re sort of stuck with a system that few parents care about, most don’t understand, and everyone seems to hate.
Awesome.
