This essay is, by nature, dated. I am responding very directly to the state of affairs as I'm writing this, in mid-October of 2005, as I watch a global debate in which both sides are vilifying each other to a truly cartoonish degree. As things stand, here are the two viewpoints, as I see them expressed in various outlets (and I apologize if my titling of these sides seems inaccurate):

The Pro-Censorship Lobby (at the extreme end) appears to believe that the majority of videogames, by design or by accident, subliminally brainwash children into sociopathic murders, and give them extensive training in the use of deadly weapons. The more rational people on this side still at least believe the makers of videogames to be filling the world with blood and pornography, with no care at all if little children happen across it.

The Anti-Censorship Lobby (at the extreme end) appears to believe that the Pro-Censorship Lobby is dead set on completely dismantling the videogame industry and taking away their sole source of joy. The more rational people on this side still at least believe that the Pro-Censorship Lobby considers videogames to be mindless entertainment designed for children, which should therefore be stripped of any provocative content or artistic messages.

All of these people, I hope at least, are wrong (to be fair, the Anti lobby is dead on about a small percentage of the Pro lobby, but you can't confuse one crackpot with a movement). So let's just step back for a moment, take a deep breath, and look at this issue with open minds, shall we?

First of all, believe it or not, I think we're all really on the same page. Here are two things that are generally accepted in our society. 1- Parents should be able to keep their children away from anything they don't think they're mentally prepared to handle, and there should be systems in place that keep them from being able to hand their kid's something that looks completely tame, but will in fact give their kids nightmares. 2- So long as you aren't trying to sneak this sort of thing into children's entertainment, you are free to create and distribute all sorts of bizarre/provocative/violent imagery in various media, which mature responsible people may freely look at, and in fact, you're expected to do this if you're trying to deliver some sort of powerful award winning message to your audience. If you disagree with either of these two points, I am not going to sit here and insult your opinions, but I feel obligated to point out that your views are way outside the cultural values of our society (for purposes of this essay, "our society" being America circa October 2005), and therefore you are in no position to dictate your values to others, and should keep your mouth shut in debates like this one.

Sadly, for the most part, the two sides of this debate have no frame of reference about each other. Nearly all if not all people who object to the violence in videogames aren't people who play videogames. All their information comes to them second-hand, often from blatantly misleading pieces of propaganda. I could spend the rest of this essay detailing how misleading such information can be, but for brevity's sake I'll spare you. Meanwhile, the majority of people who play videogames don't have children of their own. Why? Because the videogame industry is only about 30 years old. Anyone who already had kids when videogames became popular was probably too busy to pick up a new hobby, and the people who grew up around videogames are only just now old enough for some of them to be having kids. There is precious little overlap between the people who know about videogames, and the people who know about parenting, although for the reasons I just described, the gamers are doing a lot more of the crossing over. Personally speaking, I don't have any kids, but my aunt has a five year old daughter, and a good friend a four year old, both of whom are interested in videogames, both of whom I am periodically responsible for, and both of whom I would never dream of exposing to some of my favorite games until they are in their late teens/early twenties... and even then that's a big maybe.

So, now that we've established the common morale ground, let's ask ourselves again what it is we're really arguing about. Well, we're arguing about exposing children to the Big Three Scary Evils of the adult world. Foul language, sex/nudity, and violence. Let's take a moment please to consider these individually shall we?

Foul language is pretty clear cut. We have a short list of words which we don't want to say around children. I believe we all know what these are, and making sure they don't appear in games aimed at kids is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Sex, honestly, isn't really an issue. The videogame industry as a whole is surprisingly prudish. True, people make pornographic videogames, but it's the porn industry branching out, not the game industry. This is evidenced by which sort of store is likely to carry these, and the fact that by all accounts, such "games" don't really qualify as such. They're more like smutty, illustrated, choose your own adventure books. The absolute worst I've seen from the actual, accountable videogame industry is far tamer than what can be found in a PG-13 movie, or daytime television. This in the sort of game that's considered very edgy, controversial, adult, and has no real appeal to children to begin with. A few companies have recently been pushing the envelope with games that would potentially an R were they movies, but here, this is their sole selling point, and so they aren't inclined to find their way into the hands of small children, nor even the hands of people like me that don't pay for garbage because they can't get a date.

Finally, there's violence. What do we really mean by that? We don't mean violence itself, or even death. That's always been fair game for children. Hansel and Gretel ends with an old lady being burned alive in an oven. It's a rare cartoon where nothing violent happens. Disney movies frequently end with villains falling to their death. Even those old educational computer games from years ago have your character die when you make mistakes.

What we really object to here is blood and gore (well, really just blood, the gore rarely comes up). Totally understandable that. Seeing blood is highly upsetting to little kids. So are dying, twitching bodies. Just like foul language though, this is pretty darn easy to keep out of things aimed at small children.

A lot of people out there also believe, mistakenly, that we need to protect children from learning how to kill people from videogames. Frequently these people will cite specific games as an example. I own a lot of those games. I've played'em quite a bit. If they've taught me how to kill people, then my basic understandings of biology and the mechanics of gunplay must be way off. If I'm shooting some big nasty bad guy in one of these ultra-violent games, I'm holding a small piece of plastic with both hands, at waste level, pushing buttons on the front of it while I look at a screen that has a cross hair pointed at the bad guy. It's quite likely by the way that the cross hair is pointed at the bad guy's big toe or somesuch. To my knowledge, the act of actually firing a gun at someone would involve me holding a very heavy metal object up to my eye, trying to judge that I have it pointed at a spot on my target where it will hit some vital organ, squeezing a trigger, and bracing myself when the gun jerks back at me from the counter-force. This is knowledge I may have first gained from Old Yeller by the way. So let's put this notion back in the crackpot box for now, and get back to the three concerns above.

We have some clearly defined things we don't want children exposed to, and we have (if you ignore computer games) an industry which is already highly regulated, with many different groups having to evaluate things before they become available to the public. There shouldn't be any problem at all in getting clear cut ratings stuck on these things, which parents can use to determine how suitable they are for our children. Heck, before the ESRB sprung up, the industry regulated itself for many years, and anything that wasn't absolutely squeaky clean was forced out to the fringe.

Unfortunately, we honestly don't have the sort of clear labelling in the videogame industry that we should. There are three main reasons for this. First, we have my earlier point that there is precious little overlap between the people concerned about what children are exposed to and those involved with the medium. Second, precious few videogames come from this country. Different countries have different cultural standards. Third, well, the standards used by the regulatory body we do have are highly inconsistent to be quite frank.

As stated earlier, not many videogames are made in this country. A few come from Europe, there's a notable company from Canada, Korea's getting in there, and so forth, but most come from Japan. So real quick, let me just compare cultural standards between the U.S. and Japan to the best of my ability. In Japan, they have a slightly lower tolerance for violence, but greater tolerance for blood in a non-violent context (like nosebleeds or transfusions). They are much more uptight about sex, but slightly less uptight about nudity (their age of consent is a little lower too). For the most part, these standards are close enough to each other that their differences don't matter. Something can't fit in the 1-12 year old appropriateness grouping in one country, and the 18+ grouping in the other. That 13-17 group on the other hand can get things spilling into and out of it from both ends due to those minor discrepancies.

Self-regulation is honestly a lot more effective than most people think. If I'm targeting something at little kids, which contains things that are going to be disturbing to those kids, their parents are going to hate me for it, and that's going to hurt me financially. If I know the standards I need to be following not to offend the youngest members of my target audience, I'm going to follow them. Just look at Hollywood. Movies routinely cut scenes to get lower ratings. Many also throw in a couple swears or flashing of dead prostitutes to make sure their rating is high enough to make sure subtle messages and tones they convey don't reach children. The movie makers know all the rules, and play by them. Game makers could do the same thing if they had access to a similar list of rules.

It's been a while since I've read one of their pamphlets, but as I understand it, what the ESRB does is ask the publisher of a game, right before it's released, to compile a videotape of all the scenes from the game which might be offensive, and give it to a representative of theirs for review. This system is horribly flawed. First, the people actually making the games have finished their jobs and moved on to other things months beforehand. Second, you're relying on the publisher to have good enough judgement to know what aspects need to be rated (I don't know of any controversies having stemmed from this point, which says a lot in favor of self-regulation), and thirdly, most importantly, these snippets are being rated by someone who doesn't have the proper context for them, and often has some seriously distorted personal biases.

The results of this? I have a games whose ESRB labels tell me they aren't appropriate for anyone under 18 because they feature "Mature Sexual Themes," and I've seen a dozen G-Rated movies that better match that label. I have a game riddled with things like a realistic 3D rendered movie in which a dog's head splits in half like something out of The Thing, no mention of this is made (of course, I'm using the same game in both examples, so at least the letter code was right). Overall, I'd say that at least half the games I own, released since the ESRB sprung up, have outright lies in their ratings. Most err on the side of being too high, which is something at least, but the system has problems.

So here's what I want to see. Either reform the ESRB, or make a new organization to deliver this. I want a clear list of content guidelines, dictating what levels of profanity nudity and blood are allowable in games targeted at age groups that match the established rating system we have for movies (and not made arbitrarily more severe than the standards movies follow, as they currently are). I want this list publicly available, and specifically sent to the major game publishers and hardware manufacturers. Ideally, these companies should send copies to developers when doling out their development kits. Next, the people already handling other forms of quality assurance for these publishers and manufacturers should be officially trained and certified to rate games. This is the only way to make sure the people doing the ratings both know their stuff, and know the proper context. Oh yes, and please keep that training and certifying process from being long and costly. Again, we all have all the same goals here.

Once we have a system like this, I can live with not selling R rated games to minors, maybe a public service announcement or two for the benefit of parents. Past that though, I'd like the government and "other concerned groups" to kindly stop demonizing the industry. No blaming murders on games, no calling for games not to be sold in certain stores, or only in curtained off back rooms. No weird propaganda campaigns. No implying that punk kids on the internet making flash games where you re-enact the assassination of JFK using the actual video footage are representatives of the videogame industry. Just like how a college student with some video editing equipment adding a comedic soundtrack to footage of dead bodies from the Vietnam war shouldn't be called a representative of the movie industry.

Oh, and since I already labelled this as a dated essay, here's a quick word on the current headlines. The whole Grand Theft Auto thing. I'm not psychic, and have never talked to anyone at Rockstar, but I'm assuming certain motives for the sake of brevity. They have more of a reputation than they deserve for making scandalous games. Grand Theft Auto 3 has a bit of bad language and innuendo, and people bleed when you shoot'em, but other than that, it's honestly pretty darn tame. For some reason though, it was singled out as the most morally reprehensible game of all time. This gave it a ton of free press, which seriously helped the sales. So recently, they've been pushing the envelope when it comes to scandal to keep this up. With GTA: San Andreas, they decided to really push things to their utmost limit. Personally, I think they overdid it as it stands, but at one point in development, they were thinking of including crude little "sex scenes" to get a rise out of people. They eventually thought better of it and disabled these. Why disable and not delete? Because when you delete something from the source code of a game, you're almost always going to break something, often taking months to find and fix. Both methods though yield the same end result. It flat out doesn't appear in the end result. So... what's with these headlines? A bunch of punk kids dug through the source code and modified it to put them back in. This is the equivalent of digging up controversial scenes from the cutting room floor of a movie, and editing them back in yourself. The difference is that the cutting room floor is easier to find, and the editing process takes much much much more expertise. It wouldn't be that much more effort to create them from scratch really.

That though, shouldn't be the issue. Even if these scenes were in the retail version of the game, they're the sort of thing that would maybe get a movie an R rating. I didn't go out of my way to find this, but I've seen clips on TV (where kids can easily see it incidently, shame on you TV) and heard descriptions. Rather crude looking polygonal models of characters, one of which is fully clothed, on a bed going through short little animation cycles. That's tamer than the oddly controversial scene in Team America, which got an R rating. Granted, an R rating means this seriously shouldn't be seen by children, but uh... children shouldn't be playing this game to begin with! It already has the game equivalent of an R rating on it. Let me go get it and read it. We've got the big M for Mature, and then a list of reasons why. "Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs" is what it says right here and the corner. I think we're covered. Honestly, I think we're more than covered. Blood and Gore refers to little cartoony red spurts that appear when people die. Intense Violence throws me. I've seen plenty worse in games with no warnings. Definitely not for kids this. Heck, just the depressing anti-drug themes of the game should be enough to keep kids away from it.

The other issue of the day is about this troll (if you aren't familiar with the term, it's slang for someone who enters a community, usually an internet message board or online game, and starts berating everyone around for attention) with a law degree. I'm not going to mention his name because, well, he's a troll with a law degree. Being a troll means he wants me to talk about him, and having a law degree means he'd potentially slap me with a frivolous slander suit for calling him a troll. So, if you're not familiar with the guy, you might want to poke around gaming news sites around this date (mid-October of 2005) and have yourself a laugh, but really, my only point in mentioning this is that I want to stress to the more level headed folks on the other side of the fence that we don't consider him a serious representative of your cause.