Game ratings debate

Debate has heated up recently over whether the videogame industry is qualified to rate games (the way the film industry provides movie ratings). At a "summit" held in Minneapolis by the National Institute on Media and the Family, the organization's president, David Walsh, pointed out that, even as people discuss how games are rated, the process is only getting complicated by the fact that games are moving from discs inserted in players to the Web – "users can join online role-playing games that aren't covered by the current rating system [and] many of these games are hosted in foreign countries, muddling the issue of jurisdiction, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. The question has also been raised (in Washington and in the news media) over how the rating is done. Raters "just view an hour-long videotape of an upcoming title's most graphic content. Game companies pick the content and submit the tapes themselves to the Entertainment Software Rating Board," the Washington Post reports. "The board says there isn't enough time to play every game in full to come up with a rating. The average game today contains dozens of hours of action. If the board discovers content it objects to after a game is released, it has the power to re-rate a title and, effectively, get it pulled off the shelves." The Post doesn't mention the key issue of how to rate games that are becoming more online services than products. In other words, videogames are increasingly like social-networking sites – content comes from the users, so by its nature is increasingly tougher to rate or control.