Follow up on Brownback's video game crusade

An email I received yesterday from Citizenlink contained, among other interesting items, a link to a new article regarding Sen. Sam Brownback's reintroduction of the "Truth in Video Game Rating Act." (By the way, for those who are interested: Sen. Brownback's most recent appearances on FotF and FRC Washington Watch Weekly were regarding "A deeper look at Christian Prosecution" and "Fostering a Pro-Life culture in the United States" respectively. A search of "Brownback" on the FotF site brings up 59 hits, mostly Citizenlink news articles related to pro-family legislature.) The "Truth in Video Game Rating Act" is intended to require the self-regulatory ratings agency known as the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) to "review the entire content of a game to ensure the accuracy of the rating."

From the Brownback website:
Currently game reviewers do not play the games prior to determining ratings. Their reviews are based on taped segments of the game submitted by the game's producer to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. Such taped segments may or may not fully represent the game's content. The bill would prohibit video game producers and distributors from withholding or hiding playable content from a ratings organization.

In the Citizenlink article, Bob Hoose from Plugged In is quoted: "Based on recent ratings and content fumbles with games like Grand Theft Auto and Oblivion, there are obvious flaws in the system. When we review a game for Plugged In, we have to play through the entire game so we can give our readers as much information as possible. It seems that the ESRB needs to do as much."

This struck me as odd and a bit deceptive considering Monday and Tuesday's radio program guest, Bob Waliszewski, also from Plugged In, was cautious in regards to the magazine and website's forage into video game rating, stating that they didn't feel comfortable releasing a positive review for a game where only levels 1-4 were reviewed and deemed okay and then level 5 was where the violence and sex started (my paraphrase) and acknowledged the difficulty and level of "sophistication" required to review video games compared to movies or music. (See my previous post for more on these episodes)

A quick visit to the website shows that where "Movies", "Video/DVD", "Music", and "Television" have their own sections, video games must be searched individually. Probing further, a search of some popular titles, "Gears of War", "Halo", "Zelda", turns up another interesting item: from every review I was able to find, it appears games with people (i.e. not disjointed blocks falling rapidly) and any chance of violence or sex are rated poor or concluded with a message of caution. Yes, that's right. Plugged In appears to be hedging their rating "bets."

So basically, Hoose wants the ESRB to be more like his agency and just barely review a handful of games poorly. The problem that Hoose knows and Waliszewski admitted is that some games are just too long... and too hard... or can be hacked. Because of their "play through" policy, Plugged In can't keep up with the sheer volume of releases, and neither could the ESRB, and, while I do think companies who actively deceive a reviewing agency should be punished severely, user-created content and massive-multiplayer universes make it theoretically impossible to "play through the entire game," and "fumbles with games like Grand Theft Auto and Oblivion" should reflect poorly on the game's manufacturer (or horny end-users with programming skills, respectively), not the ratings agency.

So why the harsh criticism directed toward something the logistics of which Hoose and Brownback either have no comprehension (and would probably therefore not be competent to comment authoritatively on and propose legislature regarding, respectively) or else know to be imposing an impossible set of regulations? Well, I'll leave that up to you. But the kid in me wants to say, parents just don't understand, while the cynic in me thinks Brownback will be introducing a lot of go-nowhere bills this year that Citizenlink's news and emails will be more than happy to cover.