Most of us are well aware of the Supreme Court's ruling this past summer that video games are protected free speech, as well as the inevitable media controversy that always follows any outside-industry discussion of games. However, the cause-and-effect arguments about violence, sexual perversions and other emulated criminal activities don't bother me nearly as much as complaints like "it's the government's job to ban inappropriate games!" from people who either can't trust themselves to set limits on their kids' gaming habits, or who have conveniently forgotten that the Entertainment Software Rating Board's (ESRB) classification system is ridiculously accurate in describing game content and keeping players informed about what they're buying.
But for all its industry- and parent-friendly advantages, there's a significant, exponentially-accelerating market that's bypassing the ESRB's morality altogether in the fast lane: online games. Casual games. Mobile apps. Anything that you can play that you can't buy in a brick-and-mortar retail store—which is, needless to say, something in number like a fourth of China's population (the latter is ~1.3 billion).
Casual games are getting professional industry treatment at all the conferences, in all the blogs, by all the triple-A developers. Should they be subject to the ESRB as well? To me, such a question is really just a thought-experiment. I'm not advocating one extreme or the other.
First of all, our source material for this mental lab, in the image below. I will use "casual game" to broadly include MMOs, downloadable freeware, indie-studio projects, social media titles, and other online games:
Hypothesis: If we regulate and rate casual games to a morality standard, everyone will be happy.
Procedure:
1. Send out announcements to all big-name or known casual-market developers that all future games "from this date onward" will require an ESRB symbol rating and content descriptor badge in order to be released. (For traditional video games, the ESRB rating process is a voluntary step, but only the "good" retailers will sell ESRB-approved titles. Thusly for the Internet in this case.)
2. Because any site could contain some sort of game or "interactive piece," the vast majority of websites will also become subject to the ESRB's "guidelines" by slapping a rating badge somewhere visible on their interface.
3. Because on further inspection, most online developers have no trouble uploading content to the Internet and calling it a day, we will create a publisher, or several publishers specializing in different casual arenas, to whom all developers will have to submit content.
4. Because step 3 necessarily appears redundant, the Internet itself must be partitioned: one side for the general public, another for "administrators" who alone create the content that we see and partake of on the web.
Results:
Thanks to Anonymous and 4chan, there is now a "black market" Internet. Parents reminisce about the days of eBay splurges before it became rated AO (the kiss of death) for "real gambling" and remember when their kids used to try to sneak CoD: Black Ops home from a friend's house.
Conclusion:
In a day when almost
everything you find on the Internet can be rated and critiqued with a single click, the online medium of games can't be contained or summarized in the ESRB system, at least not the way it works for hard-copy video games in the brick-and-mortar stores. Don't get me wrong, the ESRB symbols could still be easily applied to online games, but it doesn't work as a mandatory publishing requirement. Let's see what the next five to ten years will bring us as the casual game market bombs, and how the industry will handle ratings then—because sooner or later, the issue will come up like it did in the 1990s, the incident that conceived the ESRB in the first place.
Totally agree that it's the parents job to look over the game's content. It really doesn't get any easier than the ESRB rating. I have a real problem with parents that dodge their responsibility in looking out for their kids, and expect the government to do something about their bad parenting. It's not the government's job to raise your kids.
ReplyDeleteBut the problem with casual online games having ESRB ratings is that ESRB actually costs a few thousand dollars to get. Most casual online games are made by 1-3 people on a home computer that don't have the money it costs for ESRB. If ESRB was required by law, there would barely be any online games at all, in my opinion. Merely because of sheer cost.
On a separate note, however, I wish books had content ratings as well. I get tired of picking up books with content I'm not into. Especially teen books who like to put in a heavy amount of mindless, perverted sex. Give me some warning!
I did not know about the ESRB rating cost--it makes sense now that I think about it (I wouldn't rate games for volunteer work), but you're absolutely right, mandating an expense like that for online games would kill the genre long before any other damage could be done. Admittedly I did turn a blind eye to actually researching all the legalities of how the ESRB works when I wrote this post (for a more theoretical viewpoint), so thank you very much for pointing out these realities.
ReplyDelete100% agreement about content ratings for literature. Even the Japanese manga companies (often notorious here in the west for their "edgy" morality) have nice little stamps in their books suggesting a reader age minimum and any strong violence or sex issues, and it's just a nice little guide, not at all "censorship" (the main argument that seems to come up time and again the moment somebody suggests rating books). Funny how game and movie ratings are more or less accepted without any particular qualms or debates, and yet, to apply a similar rating system (based on child development *recommendations*, not even rules) to literature is typically considered blasphemous and Orwellian... That subject definitely deserves its own blog post, but maybe not on here.