Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5 has a great editorial over at Eurogamer on how the ESRB handles rating games, or the lack thereof.
Julian Eggebrecht has said that games’ inability to include sexual content, satirical jokes and fantasy violence without degrees of censure are symptoms of a wider problem with ratings – and said that he didn’t feel the US Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) took the medium seriously as an artform.
Just how ludicrous is the ESRB rating system? You can’t get a teen rating with any display of splurting blood or chunks of organic material, yet you can set thousands of people on fire watching them run around in agony dying without a problem, just as long as you don’t have any visible blood…
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Curious who actually determines the ratings for each game?
“Who is rating the games?
Basically, your average Joe. Almost anyone can rate for the ESRB, whether they’ve ever played a computer game in their life, or not.
To obtain eligibility to rate a game under the ESRB label, an individual must undergo extensive training, involving a wide variety of entertainment software, before becoming certified. Supposedly, upon passing this game-experience training, the individual is deemed fit to judge what is acceptable and unacceptable for the designated age groups in America; with this ability, they are queued with 100 other raters.
From this pool of raters, three are randomly chosen to judge each game. ”Raters include retired school principals, parents, professionals, and other individuals from all walks of life.” This is a group of non-gamers. Outsiders, some might say. Despite this, they are respected by various government and educational groups, and, because of this, are given virtually free reign to decide what games thousands of people should or should not play.”
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=ESRB