Video Game Rating Systems - A Better Approach to Content Ratings - Extra Credits

For years, the ESRB rating system has sort of been the sole arbiter of how age-appropriate any given game is, but times are changing. Today, with the flood of games for the mobile, social, and tablet world, as well as the vast increase of games we're seeing digitally distributed on services like Steam, there's just no way for the ESRB to keep up. On top of that, the ESRB charges a fee to rate games, as they have to go over a video sent to them from the developer by hand, and this fee is prohibitively expensive for small studios or people just trying to break into the market. So, what do we do? After all, as an industry, we do need some way for players to be able to get a vague idea of what sort of content they'll be getting when they pick up one of our games. Parents need some way to tell if a game is appropriate for their children, and all of us at a glance need some way to tell if a title is going to contain things we might find objectionable. So, what's the solution? Well, luckily, the first step in solving this problem is quite easy. In fact, many companies, including the ESRB, are already doing it, and that's to have a checklist of content that the player might want to know about before picking

up the game, such as alcohol use, nudity, or explicit violence, and have the developers fill out this content checklist before launching their game. This puts the entire burden of rating games on developers, thus spreading the burden around and making it feasible to rate every game that comes out without making the process too expensive for anybody to do. But, how do we keep people from cheating the system? After all, there are plenty of unscrupulous developers out there who might want to get themselves a lower rating. Well, that is the hard part, mostly because it means we're going to have to agree to use the same system, and then we're going to have to give it some teeth. So, first off, we need all the digital distributors, Steam, GOG, Facebook, the App Store, Google Play, and so on, to agree to a universal checklist, a standard set of questions that every developer has to answer before they can even get their game onto one of these stores. This checklist can then generate a general minimum recommended age for a product, similar to how the ESRB currently rates games. Once you have that, you'll have all games required to get a rating before they can go live anywhere, but that's not quite enough. We still got to make sure that developers, either by error or by choice, don't misrate their games. So,

next we have to have all of these distributors integrate a system where players can flag misrated games. If a game, for example, contains a fairly explicit sex scene that the developers failed to include on their rating list, thus garnering a lower recommended age range for the title, players could flag it for inaccurate rating and from a drop-down box pick sexual content as the reason why. If you wanted to get really slick, you could even give the user a comment box where they could say exactly where in the game this content was found. Once enough people have flagged this content, then the game would be subject to review by an independent body, potentially the ESRB. If this group deemed that the complaints were justified, the title would then be suspended from all services for 30 days and wouldn't be returned to the services until the rating was amended to reflect the issues found with the game. This would heavily disincentivize people from trying to circumvent the rating system because the cost of being suspended from these services for a month would be disastrous for most games. But, at the same time, the system wouldn't fall prey to user abuse, either. Even some Call of Duty versus Battlefield fanboy flame war were to break out and spill over into

this area, they couldn't just get a game auto banned by flagging it enough times because a real human reviewer would have to get involved before any real consequences were dolled out. And since the number of titles that would require this rating review process would likely be relatively small, the digital distributors could probably foot the bill for the rating review submission without too much pain. And if necessary to offset the cost, they could even charge a fee to any developer found inappropriately rating their games before that dev could put games back on their distribution services. Of course, this system I'm proposing isn't without its own problems. The two major issues with this system is that one, it doesn't work for retail products, and two, a misrated game could only be corrected after launch rather than before it. The first of these two problems isn't particularly concerning as we already have a perfectly workable system that we've been using for years to rate retail products. And while there may be some changes that we'd want to make to the existing ESRB system, there's no reason not to continue using it. As to the second issue, I think you'd see all the biggest titles still get ESRB ratings for retail purposes anyway, so we don't have to worry about those, which just leaves the smaller games. And

while it's true that these titles might not always be perfectly rated when they go live, at least they would have some rating rather than none at all, which is the case today. Additionally, a system like the one I've proposed is apt to catch any errors before a game really grows to reach a wide audience. And the last thing a developer wants is to see their game suspended from the distributors just as it was taking off. Again, more incentive for developers to take that rating checklist seriously. So, to answer the opening question, how do we rate the flood of games that are being created today? Fundamentally, we ask the developers to do it. We just make sure that they do it right by getting all the distributors to use their power as the means of access to games to make sure that the devs do it right. Catch you all next week.