The ESRB and Violence

[RoseCoveredCadaver]

This article will focus primarily on shooters for the XBOX 360, but there are numerous examples of this throughout the entire industry.

I've never thought about this before, but Halo: Reach has a "Mature" rating, despite the complete lack of obvious sexual innuendos and being shot only resulting in a little blood spurt. I will explore this logic.

Yes, the game has blood, but its still not realistic in the first place. If I shoot you with a rocket launcher in the chest, its going to be nasty. In this game, the ragdoll physics humerously fling these bodies around regardless of where you actually shoot them. Black Ops got a Mature rating too, but was far more violent. Does that mean that the ESRB board holds Halo: Reach and Black Ops in the same light because they have blood in them? Yes. I believe so.

If the ESRB actually played the games beforehand at least, we might have a slight increase in the accuracy of game ratings. Instead, the fact that blood is in the game automatically constitutes an M rating. Consider this however. Black, the PS2 video game, has no blood in it, yet it received an M rating. Why? A few cuss words and the fact that you're shooting humans? Nowadays, even middle school kids are engaging in sex, drugs, and violence, and parents are completely ignorant of it. Where is the line between mature and immature really drawn?

A game that is mature should cover controversial social themes or have some emotional investment in the game to compliment the gameplay itself, while immature games handle the opposite side of the spectrum with mindless violence, physical humor, and another impulsively attractive themes. Black Ops deserved its mature rating. Halo: Reach? Nah. Black? Not really.

Why not get rid of the ESRB ratings completely? Parents willingly buy their kids disturbingly violent games just to keep them busy while the mom goes to work overnight at the strip club and the dad sits at his corporate office on a business trip, screwing the foreign secretary. Let's face it. The ratings mean nothing, because they no longer deter what they're meant to.

 

[AnOriginalConcept]

Of course all M rated games won't contain the same level of offensive material. It's a category.

Are you saying that ratings are useless because SOME people disregard them?

 

[emeraldrafael]

Over exaggerating much with that last paragraph?

Honestly... you could say that about any rating system. What a person can "handle" and how "mature" they are is all subjective. But the ESRB does its job (surprisingly). it informs of whats on the box and gives a clear distinction as to what "experts" and the people who play the games feel is the appropriate age limit for a game.

 

[RoseCoveredCadaver]

I suppose you're correct, and the ratings system isn't in place to prevent people from playing video games. And yes, that final paragraph was an exaggeration to make a point, but the fact is that many parents get their kids these games to shut them up.

For the main point of the post, the ratings system doesn't seem to be that useful in the first place. This is coming from someone who keeps eyes open and ear to the ground on most games that are coming out today though. There has to be a better way to inform those that don't pay attention to the video game industry but still make the purchases.

 

[DirgeNovak]

The ESRB are like most ratings boards: they catalogue everything that could potentially be considered inappropriate by parents. The case of Black is actually a great example: the characters say "fuck" a few times, and some parents of teenagers could find that inappropriate, so they don't take any chances and rate it M even though there is no blood and the deaths are as cartoony as in MoH Frontline.

I was pissed at that kind of stuff when I was a teenager -> I remember being slightly pissed when Chaos Theory was rated M while the previous Splinter Cell games were rated T (and there was no swearing and as little blood as in the previous games, too). Now that I can buy every game I want, I don't really care about ratings. Except when a game or movie is censored because of an AO or NC17 rating. San Andreas was re-rated AO just a week before I could afford to buy it, and I get a bit down when I think about how Manhunt 2 turned out because of the ESRB cunts.

 

[Kiefer13]

I don't object to content ratings, but I think that age ratings should be done away with. Children mature at different rates, and will be ready for more violent/sexually explicit/adult themed content etc at different ages, depending on both personal mental/emotional growth and on how well their parents teach them the difference between reality and fiction.

Speaking from personal experience, I played games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and the like from the age of 9-10 or so, and I'm glad that I was allowed to do so. Thinking back, I would've missed out on so much in terms of movies and games until less than a year ago (when I turned 18) if my parents had blindly and lazily stuck to the age ratings on the box. And did being exposed to so-called "child inappropriate" content at such a young age mentally scar me or turn me into some kind of violent desensitised psycho? No, it didn't. You know why?

Because my parents weren't fucking incompetent.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

It's why I've been saying for years that we need an MA15+ rating, like Sega had in their original ratings system, and like Europe has had all along. Games like Halo and even CoD are not anywhere near as violent as games like Left 4 Dead or Mortal Kombat, yet all four games received the same rating. What's worse, there's not even consistency in what is enough objectionable content to receive an M rating. For example, the original Zone of the Enders had just enough objectionable content to qualify for a PG rating if it had been a movie, but as a game it got an M rating, for no reason I could ever discern. Conversely, the Gameboy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (Metal Gear: Ghost Babel outside of the US) revolved around war, death, and destruction, and had enough swearing and violence that even at the level of detail present in it's videogame form, it would have been given a PG-13 rating by the MPAA, but the ESRB somehow slapped it with an E rating. All in all, the ESRB has problems, big problems.