The Escapist Bulletin: Violence for the censors
Now I know my ESRB, won’t you come and play with me?
What’s better, the BBFC or PEGI? What about the ESRB and USK, who wins then? The alphabet soup that pervades video game rating obfuscates the fact that it essentially comes in two flavours: government controlled and industry controlled. The character of a given ratings board has a profound effect on games development in that country, and potentially the rest of the world.
The trend seems to be that countries where the government regulates the sale of video games take a more draconian stance than their industry based counterparts in other countries.
Microsoft didn’t even bother releasing Ninja Gaiden 2 or Gears of War in Germany, as the changes necessary to get the even the highest rating were just too great and their already hard-line stance on violent video games was given further impetus in the wake of the Winneden shooting, which might force Crytek to make good on their two year old threat to quit Germany if such a ban in violent games comes into force.
Australia’s OFLC takes it one step further and refuses outright to create an adult rating for video games, and China, possibly the world leader in censorship, has banned games that feature ‘mafia-like gangs’ because they are a “bad influence on youngsters.”
Of course, an organisation like the BBFC seems to buck the trend, and has often taken a fairly liberal stance on the recent controversies in gaming, but it is the exception that proves the rule.
What’s notable is that the industry-based regulatory organisations aren’t much better. The ESRB rates games for the USA and Canada, and draws its funding from developers and publishers who are members of the ESRB’s parent organisation, the ESA. From a gamer’s point of view, the ESRB seems to be the biggest impediment to gaming developing beyond the action movie pastiche trap it’s largely become.
As the ratings board for the largest market in the world, its decisions have amazing relevance to the rest of the gaming world. While occasionally a developer will make a different version of a game for the US, as happened with Indigo Prophecy and The Witcher - interestingly enough, both made by small European developers - more often than not a game is made with the ESRB in mind.
If you’ve ever wondered why the strippers in GTA IV never actually got naked, blame the ESRB, and while that’s a gratuitous example, the ESRB’s fear of nudity coupled with its complicity with extreme violence means that the safest route for developers to take is to continue to make the shallow action titles that so dominate the market.
Ratings boards start being detrimental to games development when they stop trying to inform consumers and start trying to protect them instead. If the highest rating that your system has is commercial suicide then something has gone wrong.
Consumers don’t need to be shielded from the horrors of the world: they need to be given the relevant information so that they can decide for themselves what's appropriate for them or their children, which happens all too rarely. This cloud does have a silver lining, though, as the next generation of ESRB workers will have a much better idea of what this gaming thing is all about.
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