Entertainment Technology Advisor

Hi all,
ESA president Douglas Lowenstein recently gave a public response to House Resolution 5912 proposed by rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL-6). You can read his comments for yourself but they're pretty much what you'd expect, especially with regard to Section 2(1) RATING GAME ONLY ON PARTIAL CONTENT.

At a glance H.R. 5912 looks like a pretty reasonable suggestion (it's also miraculously brief and readable): 1) If you're going to rate a game you should know what's in it, 2) If you're submitting a game for rating you shouldn't hide any of the stuff that should be rated, and 3) If you rate a game you shouldn't lie about what is in it.

Wow! All legislation should be this clear-headed. But, wait, I must be missing something. What exactly is the point of this proposal? To assign blame should something go wrong? I guess the infamous example is the Rockstar/Take Two debacle, where there was some hidden content (requiring an unauthorized patch to view) that raters didn't see. But, it seems to me that this is already covered by the ESRB's enforcement rules:

As the game industry’s self-regulatory body, ESRB is responsible for the enforcement of its rating system. Every publisher of a game rated by the ESRB is legally bound to disclose all pertinent content when submitting the game for an ESRB rating. After a game is publicly released, ESRB testers review the final product to ensure that all pertinent content was fully disclosed. In the event that material that would have affected the assignment of a rating or content descriptor is found to have not been disclosed, the ESRB is empowered to compel corrective actions and impose a wide range of sanctions, including monetary fines. Corrective actions can include pulling advertising until ratings information can be corrected, re-stickering packaging with correct ratings information, recalling the product, and other steps the publisher must take.

So the legislation proposed by Cliff Stearns, a good Republican by all accounts and his own voting record seems somehow redundant; duplicating established industry effort and necessitating additional taxpayer expenditure for re-enforcement of already-enforced strictures. This doesn't make much sense to me.

Ratings are a good idea but, really, they're just a guideline for game purchasers to make intelligent decisions about the products they're putting in the cart. I'm not aware of a recent mass of misrated titles. If you are aware of some please enlighten me because I missed them.

Honestly, if someone bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (see cover at right), which bore an ESRB rating of M (Mature), expecting a game the family could enjoy together on Saturday nights under the warm glow of the television then that person should really get a subscription to Parenting Magazine.

In my opinion, the industry has already policed itself and is doing a good job of providing guidance on the content of its products - and H.R. 5912 seems like a royal waste of time and money at a juncture when our country's legislative bodies have much bigger fish to fry. Let's keep the priorities in focus a little guys. Whad'ya say?
More Later,
M

Hi all,
We've taken Entertainment Technology Advisor to a new format - one that allows any-time posting and brings Acacia into the much vaunted 'blogosphere'. Welcome to Web 2.0!
M

Ed: BTW, you can still access the previous newsletter-format issues of ETA at the following links: Issue 1, Issue 2, and Issue 3

M