The Hot Coffee hubbub and casual game ratings
There’s been several sites talking about the recent Grand Theft Auto fracas, that I won’t bother rehashing it here, other than to say that there’s a game within GTA that was not publicly accessible, and somehow, somebody found a crack to make it accessible. The game in question allows the player to simulate having sex and that is something which would have almost undoubtedly pushed the game to an AO rating, and thus out of several major retailers.
The interesting thing is that a lot of the people who have a problem with this aren’t attacking Rockstar for putting it in the game, rather they are attacking the ESRB for not giving it an AO rating.
If the ESRB is so important such that it should be held responsible, how long will it be until casual games need ratings? Would ratings on these games be meaningless anyway? The argument for ratings on retail games is that parents will see the ratings, and decide whether or not to purchase the game for their child. If the game is freely available online how will the rating accomplish that goal?
In the past I’ve considered having some of our games rated by the ESRB, not because I thought the rating would mean anything, but because I thought it would lend an extra sense of credibility to the title.
This largely isn’t an issue right now since almost all casual and downloadable games would get an E rating, but that won’t always be the case.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Advergames, Casual Games, Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 13th
2005 at 5:32 am
I think this can be quite damaging to the rest of the industry. It’s like the big witch hunts of video nasties during the 80s where the film companies did nothing but encourage rumour and notoriety around their titles in a vain attempt to sell more. They cut off their own noses as the videos ended up being unwatchable, chunks of story got cut out for seemingly no reason and people who watched them felt ripped off by the awful content. Low budget filmmakers found it harder to get films out, since they have to pay stupid costs to get their films re-cut and re-cut before the censor to get a certification. Distributors need to be held responsible for their advertising scams (which I think this is) and parents need to pay attention to what their kids are playing, who seem to think the kids are innocently bashing 2d space monster sprites or something. We’ve been here before with video nasties and it took 10-15 years for censors to chill out. Let’s not go there with games!