Some Portal 2 spoilers follow. You have been warned.
So I recently finished Portal 2, and as I was thinking about the brilliant story, I became more and more surprised by the ESRB rating it was given. It features sociopathic AIs with a complete disregard for human life, human experimentation so horrifically absurd it's easily played for comedy, and all manner of unsettling undertones and background events--not to mention the cut audio files of Caroline's mind being uploaded into GlaDOS which sound disturbingly rape-like. And yet this is a game the ESRB thinks it's appropriate for ten-year-olds to play, because the only immediately obvious objectionable content is mild violence against things that don't bleed and the sort of foul language your grandmother probably uses.
Compare this to, say, Oblivion. Sure, it has severed heads on pikes, moldy-looking zombies, and one or two cases of very mild innuendo. And I guess there was that whole mod debacle (OH NO! A BLURRY TIT! Never mind that we all spent the first year of our lives sucking on one). So the ESRB prevents people under the age of seventeen from even buying the game. Plot-wise, however, Oblivion is as tame as a fantasy story can possibly be: Demon bad guys are attacking the verdant happy fantasy kingdom, help the heir to the throne defeat them via adventuring and grand battles. There are more mature themes in the King Arthur legend, which most children have heard some iteration of by the time they're twelve, and the violence and innuendo are nothing worse than you'd find in many books aimed at middle schoolers.
So I pose this question: Now that video games are more than just "shoot these guys, collect those powerups" and are quite capable of telling complex stories and insinuating what they don't show, do we need a more intelligent rating system that takes less obvious elements of the story and environment into account? Discuss.
So I recently finished Portal 2, and as I was thinking about the brilliant story, I became more and more surprised by the ESRB rating it was given. It features sociopathic AIs with a complete disregard for human life, human experimentation so horrifically absurd it's easily played for comedy, and all manner of unsettling undertones and background events--not to mention the cut audio files of Caroline's mind being uploaded into GlaDOS which sound disturbingly rape-like. And yet this is a game the ESRB thinks it's appropriate for ten-year-olds to play, because the only immediately obvious objectionable content is mild violence against things that don't bleed and the sort of foul language your grandmother probably uses.
Compare this to, say, Oblivion. Sure, it has severed heads on pikes, moldy-looking zombies, and one or two cases of very mild innuendo. And I guess there was that whole mod debacle (OH NO! A BLURRY TIT! Never mind that we all spent the first year of our lives sucking on one). So the ESRB prevents people under the age of seventeen from even buying the game. Plot-wise, however, Oblivion is as tame as a fantasy story can possibly be: Demon bad guys are attacking the verdant happy fantasy kingdom, help the heir to the throne defeat them via adventuring and grand battles. There are more mature themes in the King Arthur legend, which most children have heard some iteration of by the time they're twelve, and the violence and innuendo are nothing worse than you'd find in many books aimed at middle schoolers.
So I pose this question: Now that video games are more than just "shoot these guys, collect those powerups" and are quite capable of telling complex stories and insinuating what they don't show, do we need a more intelligent rating system that takes less obvious elements of the story and environment into account? Discuss.
