From the Land of Ill-Advised comes a report that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the official games rating system in North America, has decided to stop doing its job. Because its job is hard.
Thus in what I deeply hope is an elaborate and belated April Fool’s trick, the ESRB is switching to a computer-based system with little or no human intervention. Games will now be rated by algorithm and, apparently, a questionnaire that draws a distinction between whimsical and non-whimsical portrayals of feces.
But does it draw a distinction between “stupid ideas” and “unspeakably stupid ideas?”
Update: I got a note from Eliot Mizrachi, Communications Director for the ESRB, and he alerted me to a significant inaccuracy in this article. Below I imply that this new system is to be used for all games; that’s not correct. It will only be applied to console and hand-held online storefronts – digitally distributed titles. Eliot said the objective was “…the need to create a scalable ratings solution that is reliable, enforceable, and that keeps our services affordable and accessible to the growing number of developers of lower-budget, digitally-delivered games..”
Apologies for the mistake.
Believe me, I of all people know that the ESRB and other ratings agencies have their work cut out for them. They’ve never had sufficient punitive authority to punish studios and publishers that deceive them; unlike movies it’s really impossible to play through a whole game before giving a rating so they depend on ten minutes of “most offensive” footage supplied at the developer’s discretion; and of course so many commercial games are released these days that keeping up with them is a nightmare.
But handing the whole job over to a computer is lunacy. With the US Supreme Court poised to make a landmark decision in Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association and absolutely no assurance that said decision will result in a win for the good guys, an announcement like this is both poorly timed and poorly thought out.
Now, the ESRB is still requiring a reel from developers, showing what could be considered the “bad” stuff. But I’m unclear on what the review process for this material will be, aside from the fact that humans will not review a game until after it’s released. The ESRB is depending heavily on this new computer program that supposedly can’t be tricked, and it appears to use human involvement and the reel as backup. This seems risky.
And, if I can be blunt, what about those (admittedly incredibly rare) occasions when a company like Rockstar simply lies on its application for rating? That the ESRB missed Hot Coffee is completely understandable if you know about game technology, but the organization was still vilified in the mainstream press for “failing” to rate a portion of the game. What happens when the next Hot Coffee rolls around and the press gets wind of the fact that computers rather than people are making these decisions? The ESRB claims that humans will still make the ultimate judgment. That may be true. But are the humans simply rubber-stamping what the computers tell them? Going this route makes the whole thing seem dangerously easy to me.
The ESRB has never adequately defended itself against spurious claims that it’s inept, incompetent, incapable, or regularly deceived. It has never strengthened the honor system by which developers themselves choose what they consider to be offensive before submitting their reel. And unlike the MPAA, which rates movies in America (and is far more fucked up than the ESRB ever was), the ESRB has never had the trust of caregivers. Despite having what I consider to be a highly robust and clear set of standards, parents claim they don’t get it. Now, retailers have stepped in for these parents; it’s hard to buy an M-rated game without getting carded at most big stores and plenty of little ones (a nine year old would probably be able to buy A Serbian Film, but couldn’t buy Saint’s Row).
Algorithmizing the ratings process is going to reduce its credibility – credibility which wasn’t great among the general public to begin with. And with the battle for free speech protection as an art form far from over with, this route, while making it decidedly easier on the ESRB, isn’t gonna help anybody in the long term.
It’s delightful that their computer program is so prescient that they think it’ll be able to tell, Googleishly, what’s good and bad in games. That’s lovely. I’m sure you have wonderful programmers over at the ESRB. Maybe if you’d spent that money hiring more raters, a better PR firm, and a stronger director of operations, you’d be in a better place than you are now.
Hey, I like the ESRB and what it’s done. As someone in the industry I know that it has fulfilled its job more than adequately and the attacks against it are unfair. And I don’t have a solution to the aforementioned problems with correctly rating games for content. But I can tell you that this solution is the easy one, not the right one, and it stands to bite the ESRB right in the ass one day.
Which would get it rated “M” as a solution because I would think that the program would categorize ass biting as a mature activity inappropriate for children or young teens.
Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
Well said Steerpike. Hopefully someone rethinks this obvious gaff and rights the ship before any real damage is done.
Odd that anyone would feel that a computer, which has no use for morals or ethics, could provide a viable solution to helping parents make sound moral and ethical decisions. Never mind the fact that even Jeopardy playing computers aren’t that smart yet and that parenting is an overwhelming challenging for most fully capable humans.
Say, what?
Staggered that there was a meeting in which a lot of people sat around and thought this was a good idea. It’s so ludicrous, it makes me wonder if it’s one of those My-Son-Knows-A-Thing-Or-Two-About-Algorithms-He-Could-Build-This-For-Us or. I’m sure there’s a shorter name for that, something like SHIT, but it escapes me for the moment.
Maybe Google or Autonomy could take a run at something like this, but the “ESRB”? Are they well known in the sphere of algorithmic complexity?
Wha- how?? How in the great wide world of grumble-fuck can a computer applied algorithm judge a game? Does it play the game? Does it have boob recongition software or something? Blood spatter recognition software for how gratuitous death and dismemberment are?
What if the algorithm is a bad shot, and can’t shoot anything? What if it can’t perform a fatality in the next MK game? Will we finally get a version of MK down here if the algorithm approves?
Maybe it’s an AI…
Nah, it’s probably something like, the publisher now doesn’t provide a reel but a list of features that is created by choosing from a multiple choice questionnaire. Something like, you get a list that says does your game have
a) decapitations
b) oral sex
c) violence against human or human-like characters
d) references to drugs
e) oral sex with a facial
etc. etc. and then you tick the appropriate boxes, the computer gets fed this data and it regurgitates the rating. This is essentially what ESRB does now except they have people watching the reel and they debate whether you can actually see a facial or is it just implied. But it’s basically a matter of identifying potentially offensive content from a finite list. So why not give it to a computer? It’s not like ESRB debates whether the killings in Max Payne are justified because he is understandably enraged by having his family shot to death and whether the game should, on account of this, be rated lower than Bulletstorm where a lot of killing is just for fun.
The problem is, as Steerpike says: what do you do when people start lying? Even with reels now, you count on someone being honest enough to show you the most potentially offensive footage but this is all
a) voluntary – ESRB is NOT part of government and having its rating is not mandatory, it’s just needed to have the game sold by big retailers.
b) based on a set of American puritan values that the rest of the world often finds hilarious (the most obvious example being the Hot Coffee scandal where having fully clothed consensual sex somehow managed to be worse than chainsawing people to pieces).
So, yeah, some people will perhaps lie and some other people will think that some things are simply not offensive. And then you’ll get rating problems and then you’ll get Little Big Planet-type scandal with certain people of islamic persuasion protesting against Kur’an verses being used in music – something most people will find inoffensive enough but then other people will find it worthy of a lot of noise…
As usual Meho makes great points (BTW, all, please note an update to correct an error – this system is to be applied only to digitally distributed console and handheld titles… for now at least).
The LittleBigPlanet item is especially unique. In this case the developer meant no harm and made an honest mistake; while some might consider Sony’s global recall mere days before the game was to hit shelves excessive, to me it shows respect for realizing you’d potentially offended another culture.
In the case of Hot Coffee, it was silly. There was nothing offensive about it. What’s offensive is that (despite their denials) I believe Rockstar knowingly included it, knowingly leaked how to unlock it, and knowingly lied to the ESRB about it. If the ESRB had the broad punitive powers it needs, it would have cut their balls off and been rightful in doing so.
I think if any in the mainstream media had actually seen Hot Coffee (and if our media wasn’t so broken), it wouldn’t have created an uproar. But the Mass Effect Lesbian Alien Sex Scene got Fox News lots of ratings even though it was wildly inaccurate too; in America gory violence is fine but sex is unspeakably sinful. Sad but true. And tossing a story about “child’s toy includes lesbian alien sex” is a ratings winner.
Currently the new system will only be for digitally distributed games, but it eventually move into the packaged retail goods market as well.
I think the ESRB rating system is inaccurate as it is; I don’t think this helps.