PoolCleaningRobot said:
I can't fully remember my first M rated game actually. I remember convincing my mom to let me get Super Smash Bros Melee when I was 10 even though the game was rated "T". I think my first M rated game was Twin Snakes for the Gamecube. I had a friend with all the cool M rated games and I loved watching him play the Metal Gear franchise. He got it for me on my birthday so I circumvented my parents but I doubt they would have cared if they knew
Therumancer said:
The problem is that the ratings system isn't used properly. Simply put it's become easier for a company to simply slap an "M" rating on a game that at best deserves a "T" rating to avoid having to fight for it's release. When a company wants to release a "T" rated game they often try to sanitize if of everything remotely offensive and produces something like an "E" rating.
I'm under the impression that you're comparing ESRB to the rating system for movies and I see what you're getting at, a game like Halo is rated M even though it contains the same amount of content as a pg13 movie. The thing is, within the last few decades, movies for older audiences have been increasingly marketed to younger audiences. The kind of content shown in pg13 movies now is becoming more like the content that would have been shown in R rated movies years ago. ESRB is using the system correctly, its Hollywood that's misusing the rating system for movies.
Personally I like this. It means have M rated games that can snippets of mature content without going balls to the walls with it. I don't care if a kid can't play Mass Effect because it has a side boob in it. I'd rather it be that than a space fucking simulator with Dead Space levels of gore
The result is that this leads a lot of parents buying games for their kids to not respect the ratings, since they don't expect anything really bad to be in an "M" rated title. Thus when a game that really deserves that rating comes along they get upset. The same can to a lesser extent be applied to "T" rated titles which people tend to look at a lot less
I don't see how that's the rating's fault. It says in a quick blurb on the back of box exactly what content is in the game. You can look at the back of a Halo game and see that it contains blood and violence and know there won't be any sexual themes or drug references then see that GTA 5 does contain that. Why defend people who are too lazy to get educated?
Well in regards to the last point a big part of it is that the warnings are vague. "Blood and Violence" and "Sexual Themes" might include anything from some innuendo and side boob with cop shot gun fights, to something where you might graphically watch a dude get sodomized with a chainsaw while a bunch of hillbillies can be seen jacking off to it in the backround. In both cases the description was honest enough, it just didn't do it justice. Even throwing "intense"
in there doesn't help, because again what's "intense" is very subjective, that might be a "John Woo" like shot of a bullet from a sniper rifle hitting a guy in slow motion and showing part of the results before speeding up again, or again chainsaw rape.
As far as the ratings systems go, I think you have it backwards actually. The thing is that Hollywood tends to be more aggressive in terms of proper ratings, and is more willing to fight. Thus you see PG movies that actually take the PG rating to the limits that are allowed (which are higher than most people accept) as opposed to keeping it moderate, or simply accepting an "R" rating when the MPAA decides to try and give it one. In comparison, the gaming industry backs down and tends to take the easy path far more often than the movie industry does (though it does happen), you rarely hear about a video gaming company brawling with the ESRB the way you've heard some of the stories about movie
producers getting into it with the MPAA, and that is half the problem.
How far the ratings are pushed within their technical limits depends on current trends. When horror is popular for example you tend to see more people releasing stuff as PG that is on the high end of the spectrum, coming just short of an "R" rating on technical merits. In the UK for example there was a big crusade with their equivalent ratings system where movies in the 1980s were getting banned left and right and stuck on a "video nasties" list (though this was later repealed) in part because it shocked a lot of people... and this was actually a time period when a lot of horror movies (many current classics) were being made, much like how now your seeing some people complaining about "PG" rated movies (or ones potentially rated as such) because Hollywood now cares about the technical arguments and getting horror movies out to the new generation of fans that are demanding them.
At the end of the day people need to get more used to labeling games properly and get people used to how far a "T" rated game can actually go instead of just slapping an "M" label on everything so it becomes unusually shocking when a game that deserves the rating comes along. The descriptions on the back of video games should also be made more clear somehow, OR those selling video games should be required to post how far a specific rating can go near the area where they are sold.
For example, one of the big standards with movie ratings (which also applies to "M" rated games) is that you can pretty much do anything you want as far as violence and general nastiness in an "R" rated movie as long as you do not show actual sexual penetration. This means that you can show people being flayed alive, or two people having intense simulated sex that looks far better than the real thing could ever be, and it will never become "X" since the "X" rating has that very specific requirement (and "X" rated movies can as a result be a lot tamer than "R" rated ones oddly enough, the major appeal being that you "know" the sex is real). When you go from "PG" to "R" is touchier but as a general rule it needs to feature unusually intense content, which doesn't include people being stabbed, shot, making out, or even showing breasts, even when there is blood. Basically you need to be going into unusual territory to really hit "R" things like elaborate, sadistic, gore effects and the like... for example someone being sodomized by a chainsaw is "R" rated material, someone having their throat cut (even if there is blood) is not.
