Articles > Playing Politics (August 2007)

Playing Politics

By Hal Halpin
EGM, August 2007

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (or ESRB, as it is better known) is the body which reviews and rates interactive entertainment products and assigns them a symbol and adds to that a content descriptor which further explains the severity of the most potentially controversial aspects of the game. It is akin to the movie industry's rating system in many ways, where a "T" or "Teen" rating is roughly equivalent to a "PG-13." It's not perfect, by any means, but it is ours - and we have a duty to embrace or enhance it.

Building and fostering the ESRB was and remains crucially important to the games sector, as it empowers and enables retailers, parents and gamers to have faith in the system and understand it in a meaningful way. In fact, only recently were games required to be rated in order to be sold - a merchant-specific demand that aided in the industry's quick adoption of the ESRB. But therein lies the rub: the trade quite quickly built and received compliance from publishers, but in doing so has put up a seemingly insurmountable roadblock for fringe or edgy content.

When movie studios want to release a product that is more violent or sexual in nature than an "R" rating would allow, they release the title as an "NC-17" or "Un-rated" film. The motion picture industry never asked retailers to only sell rated product - as the game publishers had done, and therefore a glaring loophole exists for "Un-rated" content. If you don't like your NC-17 rating, just release the DVD as "Un-rated" and you get a free pass to get on store shelves. Not so with games. In fact, here in the US, receiving an AO-rating - as was the case recently with Manhunt 2 - is effectively a ban, albeit one that the industry itself has created.

Another problem central to the issue is that the console manufacturers will not allow "AO-rated" games to be published for their respective systems - further stifling creativity and limiting consumer choice. These are antiquated policies originally constructed to make sure that consoles were not seen as porn machines, but rather would instill confidence in parents and watchdog groups that adult content could not be played on their systems. Here, the duality of the problem persists: consoles are consumer entertainment devices at their core, much closer related to a high-end DVD player or Tivo than a toy... an image that the industry has worked diligently to maintain.

And finally, we, as a group - developers, publishers, manufacturers, retailers, distributors and consumers - simply must stop treating games that do receive an "AO" rating as though it were an X-rated film. Doing so tarnishes the system and emboldens the arguments of anti-games and anti-gamer groups and advocates. If a parallel must be drawn between the two systems, an "AO" is akin to "NC-17" and we should therefore treat it similarly.

So the conundrum facing software creators is significant, and the business finds itself painted into a corner through its own volition. What's clear is that we all lose as a result. What's unclear is how to extract ourselves collectively from the mess we've made. If you have any suggestions email us at .