Poll: Too few ratings?

[CheckD3]

So one thing that's been on my mind is the thoughts of ratings. I've wondered about them since we see more and more things about how their being enforced, how they're law but they're not law, ect. ect., and I wondered something, or asked myself something, Why do we only have 6 different rating grades? We have EC, E, E10, T, M, and AO. I apologize if I missed one btw

But this gives us a scenario where you have Halo: Reach and Splatterhouse both rated M. However, the games are not rated closely at all. Sure, Halo has blood, and violence, but minimal blood, and violence is so overdone in games that shooting aliens has little effect nowadays. There's light language I believe, but you don't have swear words out of the character's mouths ever minute, and you don't have naked people dancing around the screen in a wild sex orgy doing things that are probably illegal in many areas of the world. Then you have Splatterhouse, where swearing is everywhere, you rip apart scary demon beings, have more blood on the screen than they do characters, and sexy photos of a naked woman posing as a side quest when you don't have your arm shoved up a demon frog's ass. Yet both are as "harmful" to our kids according the rating.

So I ask you fellow escapists, do you think that having more ratings would help the game industry? Would it squash some controversy, having games that border the M and T rating have their own, or be able to lower ratings by having a special category where it's visuals are a rating, but other parts could be offensive. A game that has mild language could be bumped up to a T, where the rest of the content is actually E, or something. Would more ratings help out games, or would it light a bonfire for the industry, and have the anti-game crazies dancing around the fire in loin clothes, letting their genitalia flail around as they praise their future space king to smite the evil video game for using the word Fuck when they themselves taught it to their children but are too embarrassed to admit it when their kid yelled it across the cafeteria when someone spilled their drink on their favorite shirt?

 

[joebthegreat]

The question isn't something like "on a scale of 1-10, how f***ed up is this game"

It's more a question of, is it appropriate for what age?

With that being said, once you cross the M line even a little bit, there's no reason for further distinction. It's either not appropriate for people under 17 or it is.

That being said, I've always thought Halo should have been rated T.

Also, quit trolling people who don't exist. It's odd. Those of us who enjoy dancing around flames with our genitalia waving around (and usually in the faces of our children at the time) swearing at our children to teach it to them and forcing them to do disgusting acts who hate video games with the same passion we use to make out with our family members most certainly do not get embarrassed when our children yell the word "Fuck" across a cafeteria.

 

[CheckD3]

Also, quit trolling people who don't exist. It's odd.

I don't mean to troll people who don't exists, I just like to come up with very odd scenarios and lengthy paragraphs to describe things that could normally be explained in a sentence or two

And by crazies, I mean the people who would scream hate at a video game if they even heard from someone stranger who heard it on the internet from some random guy's uncles brothers friend that was made up by another person, so a claim that had no actually backing or ground, and use it as if it were fact...I guess I am making someone up....huh

 

[ScorpSt]

The thing is, we don't just have age-appropriate ratings, we also have content descriptors that tell people why these ratings were assigned. We don't need additional ratings.

 

[joebthegreat]

And by crazies, I mean the people who would scream hate at a video game if they even heard from someone stranger who heard it on the internet from some random guy's uncles brothers friend that was made up by another person, so a claim that had no actually backing or ground, and use it as if it were fact...I guess I am making someone up....huh

You mean the people who would cry horror if the thought even were to appear in their head for even a moment that their mothers uncles pastors wife's illegitimate daughters stylist said something that could be construed as bad about video games in any way? And then would use that imagined statement of that person as a calling to do war with video games through terrorism and lies? The kind of people that take the children of gamers hostage and beat them with sticks every day to remove the taint of gaming and cleanse this world?

I'm sorry, I'm having too much fun with this.

 

[CheckD3]

The thing is, we don't just have age-appropriate ratings, we also have content descriptors that tell people why these ratings were assigned. We don't need additional ratings.

The problem with the descriptions is that people don't generally read them, and working at Blockbuster, I know this for fact. People would ask for a rating of a game their young child brought up (after they tore the entire section part) and the second I would say M they're freak out as if I told them that the game would make their children crack addicts and want to run away and join a porn circus as the bisexual middle person who takes it both ways 5 times a day for nothing but the sweet sweet crack the game has made them love so much

Sometimes, however, a game rated M may only be so because if has a little bit of blood in it, or they use a lot of swear words. The parent who denies the child the M rated game usually leaves with at least 1 movie rated R for swearing and sexuality that their kid will watch anyway, because they don't care about language, but avast, the game was M so it MUST be for something as horrible as clogging all the toilets in school and handing out fart flavored scuba suits to the teachers and setting alight all the other children with a Molotov cocktail and a trail of gasoline that spells out "You will all feel the growing wrath of Satan soon enough" on the lawn of the toilet water filled school

 

[Danceofmasks]

Australia needs something higher than 15+.
Srsly.

 

[ScorpSt]

The problem with the descriptions is that people don't generally read them, and working at Blockbuster, I know this for fact. People would ask for a rating of a game their young child brought up (after they tore the entire section part) and the second I would say M they're freak out as if I told them that the game would make their children crack addicts and want to run away and join a porn circus as the bisexual middle person who takes it both ways 5 times a day for nothing but the sweet sweet crack the game has made them love so much

Sometimes, however, a game rated M may only be so because if has a little bit of blood in it, or they use a lot of swear words. The parent who denies the child the M rated game usually leaves with at least 1 movie rated R for swearing and sexuality that their kid will watch anyway, because they don't care about language, but avast, the game was M so it MUST be for something as horrible as clogging all the toilets in school and handing out fart flavored scuba suits to the teachers and setting alight all the other children with a Molotov cocktail and a trail of gasoline that spells out "You will all feel the growing wrath of Satan soon enough" on the lawn of the toilet water filled school

It's not the fault of the rating system that that these people don't know what the ratings mean. Generally speaking, the average M-rated videogame is more tame than an R-rated movie. Hell, I just watched an episode of Family guy that was bloodier than a lot of M-rated games I've played. The rating system would work if parents took the time to understand it like they do for TV and Movie ratings.

Captcha: "Thoum Observes". Weird.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I've always thought the E10+ rating was silly, and they should have introduced an M15+ rating instead. PEGI and the BBFC both have one, and it's never made sense to me that the ESRB didn't. I mean, which is a bigger gap in terms of maturity, six to thirteen, or thirteen to seventeen?

Edit: Better way of putting it: Which is a bigger gap in terms of what sort of objectionable content parents are willing to let their children see?