Wait...what? First of all, I was proving your
"Pretty straightforward right? Except there is a big difference between "May have content suitable for X" and "Game allows you to kill hookers and steal their money". Or, "Game shows drug use" and "Player can drink alcohol to regain health or other bonuses". Game ratings are most like TV ratings, however, they are not as clear as to what the player will actually be DOING." wrong, because it takes two minutes to find exactly what the player will actually be doing.
I will agree with you that "M" for mature can mean a wide variety of things, but if you see it and look at the
"Content descriptors: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content," you shouldn't be surprised when you see Junior ripping the heads off of Olympian gods. Yeah, you don't need to know that a character in an R rated movie swears to go into one expecting it, but the fact remains that the ESRB provides considerably more information about games than any other medium does and really, if politicians are trying to police it so hard, why don't movies provide intricate details as to what the characters will be doing or saying? You know, those things that depict real people doing unspeakable things? Watch "A Serbian Film" if you want an example of what I'm talking about.
You argue that the interactivity is what makes the biggest difference, and I just don't buy that. Just because the character is being controlled by you doesn't mean it will have any more impact than reading Stephen King's "The Shining" or watching Ian McKellen rip iron from a man's bloodstream in "X-2." Or was that X-3? Eh, doesn't matter. It's not hard to educate yourself on what the content rating means, and it's only slightly harder to look up exactly what your spawn will be experiencing if you buy them Grand Theft God Of War XXIII.
EDIT: Also, as to the "advertisements" section of your post, why would they advertise that in this paranoid world? Don't you remember how EA advertised Dead Space 2 (and Dante's Inferno) and the huge amounts of controversy it generated? And they weren't even actually advertising how truly brutal those games were. The media is doing whatever it can to slander video games, it's happened with books, movies, and comics in the past, so advertising that your game contains massive amounts of violence, swearing, and nudity? That would spark more controversy than anyone needs.
Extra EDIT: Also, personally I always was more impressionable from movies rather than video games. I never played a game and then ran outside thinking I could emulate it, but you better believe I tried it out with movies. Movies are and always have been more realistic than video games, and I've stated before: If a kid plays GTA IV and then goes out beating people up with baseball bats and trying to jack cars, that kid probably had an issue to begin with.
