Last Friday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 1179. In doing so, he terminated a piece of the First Amendment. The bill, penned by Assemblyman Leland Yee, prohibits retailers from selling or renting violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. The bill does not include any mention of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a group that was created voluntarily by the Electronic Software Association in 1994 after the video game industry started getting flack over violent video games.
The ESRB is responsible for rating games so parents can tell whether a game’s content is appropriate for their children. Unfortunately, the ESRB is almost an absolute failure when it comes to providing parents with the information they need to determine what is appropriate for their children. If the ESRB did its job properly, this sort of unconstitutional bill would never see the light of day.
In order to understand why the ESRB is a failure, we must first examine how the ESRB rates a game. Logically, the ESRB would have to play a game before rating it, right? Wrong.
When a developer submits a game to be rated, it does not submit the game itself; instead, it submits a questionnaire that explains what is in the game. Along with the questionnaire, developers send a videotape that, according to the ESRB’s Web site, must show “the most extreme content and an accurate representation of the context and product as a whole.”
Then three raters watch the footage and arbitrarily give the game a rating. Here are the ratings: E (Everyone), T (Teen), M (Mature), and AO (Adults Only). Unfortunately, there are no guidelines that raters must follow when rating a game.
Since there are no guidelines, the rating system is a mess. Games that are rated M include everything from Tecmo’s “Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball,” where scantily-clad women play volleyball, to Rockstar’s “Manhunt,” where players can gruesomely kill enemies with everything from a plastic bag to a shotgun. The popular game “Halo 2” is rated M, but the violence in it is far from graphic. Rockstar’s “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” just got slapped with an AO rating after a crudely rendered sex scene was found in the game’s code, but “God of War,” a brutal beat-em-up that has a threesome sex mini-game (the sex is off screen), is rated M. The ESRB explains the disparity by saying it’s all about the context of the game, but ESRB couldn’t possibly know the context if it hasn’t played it.
The rating system needs to be re-worked. First, the ESRB needs to establish a clear set of guidelines that would give game ratings a consistency they lack today. The M rating is too broad; it needs to be broken up into more specific ratings. Some parents have no problem with their children shooting aliens and cyborgs a la “Halo 2,” but cringe when they think of their kids beating up hookers in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” Second, if the ESRB truly wants to analyze the content of a game, they need to play the game.
ESA president Doug Lowenstein released a statement saying the ESA “intends to file a lawsuit to strike this law down, and we are confident the we will prevail.” This is good news for Californians, but after the law is stricken down, the game industry needs to retool its shoddy rating system to prevent itself from being an easy target for vote-hungry politicians.

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