PAX knocked me on my ass, so it's been a while, but welcome back to a brand new edition of Ask The Weekly Geek! This week, I will use my MASSIVE BRAIN to tackle yet another inquiry by you, the intrepid Dtoid reader. Prepare yourselves for a cranky rant about morality, it's anecdotally delicious!
Q: What will it take for the AO rating to be legitimate and not just a death sentence? (Thanks, A New Challenger!)
Adults Only. What a strange rating to have. While the name implies that only mature, responsible people should partake in said rated media, it holds a deeper, darker connotation. Boobies. Gore. Swears. More boobies. Yes, a game marked Adults Only is sure to be filled to the brim with so much depraved material as to choke a horse (I believe horse choking also garners an AO rating). Most recently we have seen Rockstar's Manhunt 2 scarlet letter'd by this AO mark of evil, which effectively banned it not only from stores like Wal*Mart, but from entire consoles as Nintendo and Sony's policy is to keep all AO games off their systems. This is a major blow to Rockstar's profits should the game be released, being that Wal*Mart owns the world, and Nintendo sells a metric butt-ton of Wii systems. So what is the purpose of the AO rating if it just functions as a way for the moral police to say what we can and cannot show in games?
A logical comparison would be to the MPAA's NC-17 rating. Movies such as Showgirls and the South Park Movie were threatened with the deadly NC-17 tag, only to go back and cut out content in order to slide under the R mark. Most theaters won't show NC-17 movies, and some stores (again, Wal*Mart) won't sell the DVDs. Here in America, we are too hung up on what may or may not fall into the hands of children, and what is morally right or wrong for society as a whole. The only problem with this is that: 1. the rest of the world thinks we are fundamentalist nutjobs, and 2. we are fundamentalist nutjobs.
I used to work in the electronics department at an unnamed mega-grocery-chain-outlet-store-thing (okay, it was Fred Meyer) and I cannot tell you how many times I had parents come in and purchase games (and music) that were completely inappropriate for their children. I had one woman come in to purchase Grand Theft Auto 3 for her son, who was standing next to her, flitting about like a butterfly from the stacks of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to the batteries back to the register. He couldn't have been more than 8. The vacant look in the woman's eyes showed me that she had no capability to understand reason, but I soldiered on anyway.
I told her that she should play the game with her son and ask him why he enjoys it. If she didn't put this much effort into it, she really shouldn't buy it for him. She then informed me that he would just play the game at his friend's house, rolled her eyes, and paid. There is an interesting dichotomy here. On one hand, we live in a nanny state where parents expect game companies to be responsible for the content that their children are seeing. On the other hand, parents don't really seem to give a crap. It's a half-hearted hypocritical caring that is pervasive in American parenting today.
Is the AO rating really all that much of an issue, though? To date only a handful of games have been given an AO rating, and pretty much only for sexual content. Heck, most of the games are just Playboy screensavers or games called "All Nude Cyber". Incredibly violent games get an M rating, while boobies (which over half the population have two of!) get you banned from pretty much everything. What the hell? The real issue here isn't the legitimacy of the AO rating, it's the strange moral standards that the ESRB uses to rate games. It's the rating system as a whole. Does anyone really take the ESRB ratings seriously? When was the last time you heard a parent at a store say "Wait little Billy, let's check the ESRB rating first!"
My point is that the rest of the rating system isn't taken seriously or regarded as legitimate, so why should the AO rating be any different? It's a joke. It's our obsession with controlling what is "ok" for people to see, play, hear or watch. It's America's fear of new media -- a theme repeated throughout the generations. When will the AO rating stop being a death sentence? When America stops giggling whenever someone says the word "penis".
Tee hee. Penis.
Chris Furniss is the editor and host of The Weekly Geek, a podcast mostly about video games. He is also a life-long fan of boobies. Ask him a question for next week's column, will ya?
Contest:
3:43 PM on 08.31.2007
| 
Parents that would normally be observant over matters like their child's entertainment, would check out what their child is playing/watching with or without a rating system. My mother used to check out my music and games well before they had any standardized rating system.
Parents that won't monitor what their children are experiencing, won't even bother to look at the ratings. If you don't care what your child sees, what does a little box with an age change?
Personal experience: When I was in middle school I listened to Manson and all sorts of hard shit (older friends), my mom knew this (she could control purchases, but not my computer), and so she sat me down and made sure I understood that these were just expressions and lyrics... and I haven't killed anyone (yet).
It's called parenting.
A: Radical social change within our country. Our country is so bent on blaming anyone but themselves for anything. And they expect everything to be done for them or regulated so they don't have to. Society itself must change before ratings guidelines are actually seen as such.
It's sad, really.
My mom said that was messed up. She said she would rather I see a woman in a natual state of undress than to se someone brutally decapitated. She went on to say she would rather I not see a woman in a natural state of undress until I was much older.
I ignored the second thing she said but I remembered the first thing forever.
Now ask me a good question for next week.
Companys that are in it for the money, and why those companys joined the gameing industry?
I think I phrased that right...
Roger Ebert says video games can never be art. We all know he's wrong, but if somebody asks why he's wrong we mostly just say "old people are stupid!" While that is true, it doesn't really answer the question satisfactorily. So can you articulate why video games are or can be art so that we gamers can have some good answers ready to fire off when this is talked about?
Hugs and Kisses
Grover G. Grover
How can gamers overcome the mainstream "gamer" stigma?
Actually I have heard a parent say essentially that, mind you it was only on one occasion, but it still restored a bit of my faith in some parent's competence.
I download the podcast every week man, great job on this post:
My question is this.
Do you agree/disagree with the current trend of game manufacturers attempting to market to a broader audience? I don't want to use the hardcore/casual gamer reference, but the president of ubisoft said that his company is redirecting alot of the companies' resources to the casual game market due to the overhead being much cheaper, the games are faster to produce, and a there's usually a guarantee of seeing a return on the finished product. What's your take on this?
The stories of parents buying their kids an inappropriate game stand out because nobody notices when a parent decides not to buy a game for their kid.
And to think it wasn't that long ago we were content with jumping up and down in a side scroller collecting coins.
sadly, it would take someone figuring out how they could make lots of money with it.
if parents have to be spoon feed how to parent, they shouldn't be parenting.
Good times.
Article was once again spot on, so I ask a question for the next feature. Bioshock's recent cracking has sent shockwaves around the gaming community. Is piracy actually hurting the industry? And why do developers only get around 20% of profits?
I highly recommend the film "This Movie is Not Rated". They hire a private investigator to track down the people who work for the MPAA and thoroughly discuss the problems surrounding the NC-17 rating. I found a lot of parallels between the MPAA and the ESRB while watching the movie.
I think you have a good point, Furniss: the ratings themselves aren't being taken seriously. I think the actual ratings the ESRB assigns to games are fitting 99% of the time; as a gamer I know what I can expect in terms of content, that part of the job is being done just fine. Where they've (somehow) failed is in getting the nongaming public to know or care what the ratings mean. That certainly contributes.
What's so frustrating about the Manhunt 2 shitstorm is it's really hard to pinpoint which segment of the whole video game industry is damning the AO rating. It's like that Thomas Nast cartoon where everyone is standing in a circle and pointing at the next guy over. You have politicians banging on the pulpit to threaten retailers and manufacturers with legal consequences and regulation under both existing laws. The ESA is fighting back, but at the same time console manufacturers are playing it as safe as they can by banning a whole category of games that in all likelihood would form a very small percentage of releases if allowed, and retailers doing the same. So the politicians influence both, but how much interplay is there between the retailers' reasons for not carrying AO games and the big 3 banning them? I suspect retailers are leading the console makers. And I'll continue in a new post because I'm about to hit the text limit on the Wii.
And then the announcement comes that it has been rated AO.
To get back to where I left off, I think the retailers are leading the console makers for the most part. Thus far, most proposed (and enacted and then shut down by the courts) legislation has been directed at retail. Stores are taking the brunt of the political fire, and are doing what they can to shield themselves from even further attacks. Furthermore, Walmart, the single largest game seller, has its own social agenda as evidenced in the past by forcing record labels to put out an edited version of an album if they want it carried by Walmart (which they do, if they like money.)
.......
This is ending up really long, I think I'll make it a blog post later when I have access to the PC.
He still faced the challenge, however, of proving that the impalement scene was merely special effects. In court, he explained how the effect was achieved: a bicycle seat was attached to the end of an iron pole, on which the actress sat. She then took a short length of balsa wood and held it in her mouth and looked skyward, thus making it look like she had been impaled.
Knowledge is power man. ;)