Rann:  I suppose I should preface this by saying that the ESRB isn’t all bad. It’s a way for the industry to say “Hey, at least we’re trying”, and get at least some amount of the moral guardianship off their backs. It’s arguably helped the industry weather some of the outrage about violence and so on by saying “Hey, we have ratings, parents can use ‘em to know what they should and shouldn’t buy for their kids.”

I think the problem is that a lot of people have actually bought into this notion. Including a lot of gamers.

One forum I follow that discusses/rips apart a particularly bad writer/artist’s work was referring to a recent comic he did, where it showed a young boy’s mother being shocked by the violence in Gears of War. A number of people immediately launched into a litany of “Stupid bitch! It’s rated M, you should have known it was violent! Why the hell did you buy it for him if you’re not okay with him playing violent games?!” To… y’know, the character… but that’s not the point. Leaving aside the myriad other ways the kid could have gotten his hands on the game other than his mother buying it for him, even if she did buy it for him, that would go to illustrate just how useless the rating system is, and probably echoes a problem that happens quite often.

Because while it’s not like anything vaguely more intense than a Barbie game is gonna get an M, it’s also not that difficult. The Halo series was rated MA/M, and considering it’s popularity, it’s probably not that unfair to say that a lot of people could thusly judge their expectations of what that rating means off of it. If a kid managed to demo Halo to their parents in a store, most of them that aren’t Moral Guardians themselves would probably cave. Sure, there’s violence… people getting shot, the occasional brief spurt of blood, some gross stuff, all that. But hey, if you let your kids watch TV past seven on a weeknight, they’ve probably seen worse, so why not? And so when the kid comes to them with Gears of War and they see the same rating on it, it’s really difficult to call them idiots for expecting roughly the same level of stuff. But occasional sprays of blood and mostly immaculate explosions is a long way from graphically cutting someone’s entire body in half with a giant chainsaw (which is what shocked the mother in the comic, by the way). The violence in Gears of War and the violence in Halo are two pretty damn different things. If you pumped someone full of a clip’s worth of Needler rounds in the style of Gears of War, you’d probably be able to go in and take a close-up look at the gaping, sucking craters of bloody wounds that it had caused. That’s a long way from just being a bit banged up or even largely immaculate but just flopped out in a funny position like when you Needle someone to death in Halo.

The same exact thing happened with the R rating for movies. Think of pretty much any action cop movie you care to, with guns blazing and the occasional F-bomb dropped and maybe even a flash of boob. Maybe not something you’d want to let your five-year-old watch, but hey, the ten-year-old or twelve-year-old? It’s unlikely to scar them to see a gun bang and someone go flying back and fall over.

Then think about the fact that 300 got that same R rating the action cop movie did. Or hell, to compare period pieces about war, think about the fact that Braveheart and 300 got the same R rating.

It’s really easy to blame parents that you see as too stupid to pay attention to the ratings. And hey, some of them really are that stupid. But the MPAA ratings are so broad and in many cases arbitrary that a parent who’s just trying to judge on the rating it got could go in without knowing what they’re in store for. When everything from a few slightly graphic gunshots to a bunch of people laying around with their organs spilled all over the floor falls under the same “graphic violence” heading, how’s the parent at fault for not knowing what it means? Sure, you can say that it’s still the parent’s responsibility to vet the movie beforehand or whatnot, but then we’re getting into an area where you wonder what the point of having the rating is.

And the R rating is a good example of where the M rating is going to wind up heading, because we’re seeing it in action now. Hell, we’ve already been down this road with the X rating. Originally the X rating was just for stuff that went a little further than R… stuff that was a little too graphic, sex that was a little too sexy, etc. But because so many theaters refused to carry it due to the restrictions on who could get in to see it, it morphed into the porno rating. And I think we’re now seeing the same thing happening to R.

The influx of PG-13 rated horror movies and action movies and so on is indicative of how some studios are coming to see the R rating as a bit of poison, because that’s a whole four years of demographic that they might theoretically be cutting out. And so they recut movies down to the most technical of qualifications to get a PG-13 and figure “We’ll release the ‘uncut version’ on DVD later.” What this is doing is simultaneously slowly turning the R rating into that same movie theater taboo that the X rating once was, and broadening what the PG-13 rating really means by leaps and bounds at the same time. Both of these taken together could very well mean that within a decade or so, you could wind up seeing the R rating verboten at a number of theaters… after all, not only are not many movies being made with that rating, but look at what they allow in a PG-13 movie! If they put worse than that in the movie, then just carrying it could get the place picketed!

And of course then eventually the whole thing will start all over again with PG versus PG-13. We could be less than twenty years away from Sam Raimi or Wes Craven putting out their first G-rated horror movie, “The Grumpy”.

It’s a difficult problem to address, largely because it’s a question of nuance and keeping things simple enough for the average person to grasp, as well as the momentum the industry is already putting behind it. However, I think the simplest solution would be to deemphasize the letter and be more specific with the actual text. I mean, how many of you out there really ever even read the text that goes with the rating of any individual movie. It’s squashed on there so tiny most peoples’ brains probably apply the “small print” filter to it and never see it as more than a couple of squiggles, because we’ve been trained to go right for that huge “R” or “PG-13” or “M” or “T”. The simplest, most effective solution would be to make the big letter smaller. Turn it back into the general guideline it’s supposed to be, and then stop using vague blanket terms like “graphic violence” in the description. Heck, properly utilized, this could become a helluva marketing tool, far moreso than it is today. Let the game company or studio write its own blurb, if the blurb is judged to be generally accurate and acceptable, send it on through.

There. It’s short enough that most people aren’t going to shut off their brains just looking at it, but long enough that it gives you a sense of just what it’s going to have in it. The style and type of the violence says that you’re not likely to see anyone’s limbs go flying off or the gaping stump where their head used to be, so if your kid doesn’t wet his bed at stories of the boogeyman, he’s probably gonna be okay.

See, not only does that description send up a big flashing “Warning! Warning Ma Robinson!” to a concerned parent in the space of three sentences, other people are going to be able to look at it and say “Holy SHIT! Motherfucking chainsaw guns, motherfucker! This game really is aimed at an older audience! It’s in the warning! I am so buying this!”

Same thing for movies. You might have to make the ratings on the theater board bigger or teach the people at the ticket counter the current crop of movies’ blurbs, but it would definitely make things a lot clearer. It would almost certainly take the wind out of the sails of a lot of the complainers since people are being forewarned of exactly what they’re buying or buying a ticket to.

Plus, let’s face it, right now the ESRP and MPAA as annoying and useless as they are, are the industry regulating themselves. If they continue to go down the road of becoming obviously useless, we all know that the government’s eventually going to step in and try to do what they do, and I don’t think anyone (except maybe the Moral Guardians) want that.