AvsJoe said:
The ESRB has done a great job in the past but unfortunately due to the ever-changing world of gaming it too needs to change. I wish I knew how to help, but I have no solutions to offer these guys. Great article.
I'm going to have to disagree.
Just because After 2+ years of doing nothing (basically) but reading psychology texts and case studies I've found...as have apparently hundreds of separate groups of psychologists and other researchers...that there is no connection between video games and violence.
Even on a larger scale, video games have been getting more and more violent overall every year, yet violent crime amongst teens has dropped in the US every year since at least as far back as the Atari.
What else are we trying to stop? Knowledge of sex? When I was in elementary school I had the hard details down before 5th grade, where did I learn? Most of my friends who learned from their older siblings or various sources. This was before the internet was even a viable tool for folks in my area (income issues). Who is old enough to forget just how young they were when they discovered sex?
Drugs? I don't really understand the drama of drugs in video games. Frankly as I was young there were adds for cigarettes all over the place, my friends were doing pot, all my father had to do was explain the situation clearly to me. Even at a young age it wasn't rocket science. If someone is going to do drugs they'll end up doing them regardless of censorship or laws, all you do with these two tools is delay the inevitable.
Likewise it is a terrible tool for parenting. Because the ESRB is not a rock solid tool, it is not objective, because of this it provides parents with another organizations opinion on what is acceptable for their kids.
The most immediate example is Hot Coffee for Grand Theft Auto, now I realize...theoretically kids shouldn't be playing this anyways. While I disagree I understand that is the expectation. However what was it that was wrong? Slaughtering Civilians? Nope. Murdering Hookers after a quick bang in the back of your car? Nope. Aiding Criminals for hours on end? Nada. That was all kosher. It was consensual sexual relations with your own girlfriend. That was what was the abomination.
What kind of fucked up logic is that? I can run around cutting heads off with a katana but heaven forbid I see two fully clothed sprites making out?
I realize this is a bit of a rant and it doesn't even necessarily relate to the actual discussion of the target article. But for as long as I've been alive the ESRB has been entirely irrelevant to good parenting.
If you don't have the time to be the 'esrb' in your child's life, or theoretically in your future child's life, you might not be in a life situation where having kids is a good idea.
Both my parents were incredibly busy with work, as were most of my friend's parents, however they all still knew for the most part what we were doing (and likely more than we thought they did). We ended up playing everything that piqued our interest from Goldeneye to GTA III and everything in between. The ESRB was entirely irrelevant where I lived because it serves no purpose. (To reiterate we didn't merely play violent video games either, just that they were no more special than any tennis game we picked up)
Like using the disney channel as a nanny, it is a terrible idea that does little more than throw an arbitrary rating onto a game. Lord Critter Crunch has "Tobacco Use" under its rating. I've been playing it for 10 hours or so and haven't seen so much as a Tobacco Plant. It really feels like this is just the early version of the Terrorist Alert Color Code, people get told something that ends up being entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Violence is not merely violence, drugs are not merely drugs, it all is part of a context that cannot be experienced by a single clutch of letters and a few lines of detail.
