The Elections and You
The results are in, and Wired examines the potential impact of the elections on gamers of the world. The “WTF Are You Thinking?” award goes to… wait, it’s a tie! Cliff Stearns and Fred Upton win for their “Truth in Video Game Ratings Act,” which would force the ESRB to play through literally the entirety of a game before rating it. Which is, of course, completely impossible in the MMO realm, and way too much work in all other genres.
/me signs up for a job with the ESRB.
The Elections and You
I just wish people would get video games.
And I also wish parent’s would stop whinning when THEY buy (or let their kid’s buy) video games they wouldn’t want them to have because THEY are too lazy to learn anything about the game. It’s not a ratings problem… its a parenting problem.
I don’t see why there’s such a big problem with this. Couldn’t they have a disclamer or something? “This rating is based on the section of this game tested by our team and may not be representitive of the game as a whole or any additional add-ons or plug-ins which may be added in future. If you are uncertain as to whether this game is suitable for someone, please play through the game fully to asertain whether it fits your view of suitability. The ESRB is not responsible for any changes made to this game subsequent to our testing which may have invalidated it’s rating”.
Distribution might be a problem, but I’m sure there’s a way around it. Maybe have people distributing games put a sign up about the ratings with this on it? (I realise that slips inside the games would be unsuitable though, nobody would see it until they’d actually opened the game, at which point the warning would probably be pointless.
[...] Inspired by the recent brief post on Nerfbat regarding the political impact of the recent election on the gamers of the world. Feel free to check out the post and the post on “Wired” it refers to. For now though… my 2 copper: [...]
I disagree it’s impossible, but I do agree it’s a huge timesink.
If you had a dedicated tester doing nothing but one MMO for 40 hours a week, you could probably get through to the endgame in any title in about 6-7 weeks. At the rate new MMOs release, this isn’t terrible.
That’s not the real problem though. To me, the actual problems are two-fold:
1) The game always changes. You can’t continue slapping labels on a box each time the game changes enough to compel a new rating.
2) No rating can account for other players. PEOPLE can drive the rating from T to AO in a heartbeat.
There’s only so much a company can be held accountable for in MMOs. Other genres have less an issue but really any of them that has an online component can run into the above two issues. Not sure any rating system can get around that problem. All it takes is for one parent to watch their kid in a T-rated MMO and witness some antics from an asshat to be calling Leiberman or Clinton looking for blood.
It’s not really a problem until ESRB ratings are an absolute requirement, as defined by needing to be there to be on a store shelf. Right now I think it’s still fairly voluntary, both at retail and in development.
The end game isn’t the entire game, though. And I don’t think you could solo from ground zero to max in 6-7 weeks even at 40 hours a week in a majority of MMOs. To play through all the content an MMO like EverQuest II has to offer, it would take 40 hours a week for a good 3-6 months. And as you said, the game changes so often it couldn’t possibly be checked at all times.
Because it’d be impossible for a developer to walk them through the entirety of each game in Godmode or via disabling the challenging content.
Wrong. That would take only a few hours, even for an MMO.
The object isn’t to play through the game, it’s just to see most of it in as fast a time as possible to make sure that little Johnny suddenly isn’t rocking with a prostitute in the Hot Coffee Cafe in an unseemly way.
Games are an entertainment medium. Just like movies have ratings, the more games go mainstream, the more they’ll be in the public and political eye. The main argument here is parents should be the ones deciding. Well, it’s tough to decide if there isn’t a standard making things clear.