ESRB Gives NIMF an 'F'

[fitbabits]

There's funny as in Scrubs, then there's funny as in the following report (http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/051206/0103288.html) from Yahoo! Finance (http://biz.yahoo.com).

ESRB Flunks National Institute for Media and the Family for Its Disservice to Parents and Their Children.

"In recent years, the report card concept has become increasingly arbitrary, simple-minded, and silly, more of a headline-grabbing tool than a parent-helping tool, and NIMF's 2005 report card continues that disappointing tradition," said ESRB President Patricia Vance. "For years, ESRB respected the work of NIMF, recognizing it as a serious-minded watchdog group sincerely interested in helping parents make smart media decisions, and for this reason we have previously sought to engage them in a cooperative and productive dialogue. But this year NIMF made clear that its real agenda is to undermine parent trust in the ESRB. We will not allow NIMF to mislead parents about the accuracy and effectiveness of ESRB ratings. Accordingly, and reluctantly, we have little choice but to publicly challenge NIMF's numerous inaccurate and misleading claims."
You can view the full press release report by clicking here (http://www.esrb.com/downloads/nimf_fail.pdf).

NOTE - Adobe Acrobat Reader (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html) is required to view the above report.

I don't know about you folks, but this tickled me pink!

[Citizen Philip]

Oh please ESRB don't challenge the NIMF! The NIMF will have to explain how their "F" is not about jumping on political bandwagons, but instead on the basis of fact!

[kizke]

First: Scrubs is damn funny. Nice. :)

Second: I think the ESRB is doing a damn good job, and the NIMF is being way too reactionary about video games...which is altogether not surprising.

[Spigot]

I particularly enjoy the way they show that for all of NIMF's ranting about the ESRB, they tend to agree with the ESRB's ratings 80% of the time.

Good little PDF file.

[sparkfizt]

what? not grading on a curve? -_-

i've never understood the whole "report card" strategy that everyone seems love... oversimplified and well... just silly? :P

[fndarkone]

i too enjoy the comedy to be had in scrubs.

[TrackZero]

So sweet. It's nice to see it flung back in their face.

[The Iron Weasel]

I watched the first couple seasons of scrubs as they aired, and it was great, has it maintained the same quality of programming?

[Derella]

The ESRB sticking up for itself is a good thing. Their comparison report card was priceless... For a system that is "beyond repair"(NIMF's words), the ESRB's rating is almost identical to what NIMF gave it.

[Heretic Machine]

I think it's great that the ESRB is fighting back, and I hope this spreads through the industry. For too long this industry has let itself be kicked around by politicans and lobbyists, it's time we kicked back.

[The Letter 3]

Oooooooooooh! We have ourselves a showdown! *grabs a bag of popcorn and waits*

[Rirath]

I loved the first few seasons of Scrubs, but then dropped off.

I'm not exactly sure when we all jumped on the side of ESRB, especially since we still don't really have any good R like ratings for games. Yes, thankfully there's M, but M hits its limit awful fast once you get out of violence. I seem to recall several stories of games being toned down to not get an AO. This is the same ESRB, is it not?

I will also never understand the reluctance to have M rated games -sold- ONLY to M ranged adults. Sure, I'd like to see it be voluntary, but it's obviously not working. If a kid wants to play such a game, and I played many, their parents should buy it. It's not a matter of them finding a way around the system, it's a matter of there BEING a system. It would help stop so much of this silly finger pointing, and give gamers something to fall back on.

It's funny to see gamer's reactions to this... I consider myself rather liberal and I'm all for it. A highly conservative friend thinks it's awful and shouldn't be done. My grandmother, who back in the day bought and played many such games with me, thinks it shouldn't be done. Who on Earth would it harm to keep kids from walking into a store and buying an M rated game? Everything past that is parental responsibility.

And am I the only one who can't read NIMF without thinking "nymph", MILF, etc?
Dang videogames warping my mind...

[LilAbner]

As a parent, I must say this about the NIMF:

YOU GOT PWNED!!!

[Deadend]

As a parent, I must say this about the NIMF:

YOU GOT PWNED!!!

Or for the nongamers out there.

YOU GOT SERVED!

/Dance off

[DreamSlider]

Did anybody else look closely at those ratings and go WTF?!? a couple times when looking at the NIMF ratings? Case in point:

Halo 2 18+
Manhunt 17+
Doom 3 17+

Now call me crazy, but I'd want my kids to play Halo 2 first (minus the Live profanity and racism from all the morons, though Doom 3 could suffer from Live too so that argument doesn't even hold), then Doom then Manhunt... perhaps the last two would be on the same level... never really spent a ton of time in Manhunt and I got tired of id's old tricks after Quake 2 was finished.

So a game where there's little to no blood & dismemberment is less appropriate than one game that essentially imitates a snuff film (may be too graphic for Manhunt, but I don't know) and another that was one of the pioneers in exploding enemies in a bloody, gooey mess.

Methinks I'm off my rocker or the NIMF says "ok... Halo 2, FPS, humans, throw it in the 16-18 age range and then use some arbitrary method like throwing darts or whatnot to narrow it down."

I'm all for protecting our kids from violent games, but the fact of the matter is, the parent needs to realize that it is their kid, and ultimately (within reason), they are responsible for their children. Don't understand something? Jump on the Internet (either at home or a public library) and educate yourself. Can't read? Ask a friend. No friends 'cause you live in the middle of nowhere? Then you probably don't have a game system. Isn't that what parents do about most of the rest of raising their kids? Seek knowledge on how to perform the job?

Sorry. This all started off light and I kind of went off on a tangent. It happens though.

[AversionFX]

Beatdown!

The message you have entered is not long enough!

[bean19]

It's a press release. . . you could have quoted it all. :)

Edit: Oh. . . 4 pages.

heh.

This seems so reasoned and rational to me. What a terribly thankless job they get rating games.

[bean19]

Did anybody else look closely at those ratings and go WTF?!? a couple times when looking at the NIMF ratings? Case in point:

Halo 2 18+
Manhunt 17+
Doom 3 17+

Yes. I noticed that too. You would think they would have rated a game that allows you to select 3 different methods for killing someone with a peice of broken glass (the most graphic being the hardest to perform) a bit higher than Halo 2, as this game is fairly wholesome and honestly is one that most parents wouldn't mind letting even very young children play.

Well, except for the Online bit. . . you know, I've wondered why Live doesn't allow parents to key gametags so that they are marked as kids and then lock them into only gaming with other children and/or people on the Friends list, with only the child being able to send out invites (so they can put adult relatives on their list and play with them).

Of course, it is nearly 100% children who are using profane language and racial slurs, so I guess that wouldn't work either. When I was 8 years old, my mother rented the Goonies for me and my siblings and then fast forwarded through one scene at the beggining where there is a lot of cursing. I remember thinking it was ironic that she wouldn't want us to listen to profanities in a movie, but having seen the movie already at a friend's house, I knew that the cursing was far less imaginative and hurtful than the stuff I heard every day on our school's playground.

[Verocity]

This part is about the "Hot Coffee" mod:

It’s easy to criticize, but given the reality that some games take more than 100 hours to play, requiring great skill to reach every level and access every bit of code, any rating system would naturally have to rely to a large extent on disclosure of content by the creator. And considering the “Hot Coffee” scene had been “locked out” by the game’s programmers, no rating entity, even if NIMF was the rating czar it seeks to be, would have found it without the use of sophisticated hacking tools and expert programmers on staff to modify the underlying source code of the game.

Pure gold. Man, the ESRB put the smackdown on NIMF. Weird...NIMF strangely reminds me of MILF...

[TheKeck]

Owned!!!!!

[midrael]

Ah this article made me smile :)

Good for the ESRB.

[Heretic Machine]

will also never understand the reluctance to have M rated games -sold- ONLY to M ranged adults. Sure, I'd like to see it be voluntary, but it's obviously not working. If a kid wants to play such a game, and I played many, their parents should buy it. It's not a matter of them finding a way around the system, it's a matter of there BEING a system. It would help stop so much of this silly finger pointing, and give gamers something to fall back on.

Well, we don't use such a compulsory system for movies or books. Why should we for games? Besides that, we have this pesky thing called a constitution... see it protects our rights and it's not the easiest thing in the world to get around. Ya, I know, what a bummer... <.<

[nonchalance]

Well, we don't use such a compulsory system for movies or books. Why should we for games? Besides that, we have this pesky thing called a constitution... see it protects our rights and it's not the easiest thing in the world to get around. Ya, I know, what a bummer... <.<

Why don't you for movies, though?
Sure, free speech is important, but your First Amendment doesn't stop XXX movies or pornography being kept away from kids, why should it stop ultraviolent movies and games being given the same treatment?

[*Legion*]

Why don't you for movies, though?
Sure, free speech is important, but your First Amendment doesn't stop XXX movies or pornography being kept away from kids, why should it stop ultraviolent movies and games being given the same treatment?

I think that would be OK. Thing is, every argument for doing this to games wants to use much harsher guidelines on the games than the movies.

The threshold for restriction that many are trying to apply on video games is excessive and not in line with other forms of entertainment.

Pick a definition of "obscene" and apply it equally to all forms of entertainment.

[WastelandDan]

The responsibility of monitoring a kid's entertainment intake is that of the parents, not the state. There is a system in place to inform parents about the nature of the games that their kids are playing, the ESRB ratings system, and I think that they do a pretty good job at defining the rating of a game and for saying why it was given that rating. A strong federal government is great for helping people who are unable to help themselves, but we don't need a stronger form of control for something that clearly falls under the catagory of first amendment protected entertainment.

Parents need to step up to the plate and stop blaming society for when their kids do fucked up stuff. There are so many resources available to most parents that at this point in time it's not an acceptable excuse to tell the authorities that they didn't know how to talk to their kids before they stole a car or brought a gun to school. An ounce of prevention people.

[Opty]

I'm not exactly sure when we all jumped on the side of ESRB, especially since we still don't really have any good R like ratings for games. Yes, thankfully there's M, but M hits its limit awful fast once you get out of violence. I seem to recall several stories of games being toned down to not get an AO. This is the same ESRB, is it not?

What's that have to do with anything? It's retailers who say "No AO games in our stores" that make companies tone down their games, not the ESRB. The same thing happens in movies, where R movies are toned down to PG-13 because then teenagers with disposable income can see the movie without hassle. The ESRB is essentially the dam that keeps government regulation out of the valley of video games.

[nonchalance]

I think that would be OK. Thing is, every argument for doing this to games wants to use much harsher guidelines on the games than the movies.

The threshold for restriction that many are trying to apply on video games is excessive and not in line with other forms of entertainment.

Pick a definition of "obscene" and apply it equally to all forms of entertainment.

Well, we do that in Australia. Same rating system for both forms. The only thing that sucks is that we don't have the R18+ for games, which will hopefully change soon.

[EyesNoMore]

NIMF obviously sucks, but I dislike the ESRB a fair bit too. If you read their guidelines for an AO game, it will contain excessive violence and/or excessive sexual content. GTA is, by that definition, well past the AO line, with or without Hot Coffee. Res Evil 4 is a ridiculously violent game, why doesn't it have an AO rating? God of War? Ninja Gaiden? The difference between 'violence' and 'excessive violence' is the difference between beating someone up and shooting/ripping/cutting their head off.

The main problem is North America's skewed sense of morality. No one blinks an eye when a life is ended in a videogame(or any media for that matter), but if you flash a titty everyone is in an uproar. You may think I'm exaggerating to make a point, but consider that a few seconds of nudity were cut out of the N.A. version of Indigo Prophecy(a game where you play as a murderer) so that it wouldn't receive an AO rating.

The other problem is that the ESRB doesn't have the balls to give any of the big games an AO. Don't forget that they were created by the videogame industry, they are not an entirely separate entity. Can you imagine the pressure they would be under if they gave GTA the rating it well deserves? Forget the rating change that the game got for Hot Coffee, that was simply a political move. Having sex in that game is probably one of the most wholesome activities available to you.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like all the games I've listed, but I'm 26 and well-adjusted. If changing those games to AO ratings would make parents actually care about what their kids were playing, I'm all for it. I work at an EB and all minors need to have their parents with them to buy these games. But most of the time, upon telling them what their child will be doing in the game, I receive a 'knowing' roll of the eyes as if I'm supposed to understand that they have no control over what their kids will play. I just want to yell, “Tell them they can't fucking have it, you douchebag!” Unfortunately that option is not available to me.

Just my 2 cents.

[bjornbarspingvinen]

Smart people = 1 , stupid people = 0

Yay!

[KDups]

But most of the time, upon telling them what their child will be doing in the game, I receive a 'knowing' roll of the eyes as if I'm supposed to understand that they have no control over what their kids will play. I just want to yell, “Tell them they can't fucking have it, you douchebag!” Unfortunately that option is not available to me.

Totally awesome. I agree with everything in this post.

[jeffool]

http://pictures.jeffool.com/scrubs.jpg!

Great show. And good job ESRB.

[OUX]

Smart people = 1 , stupid people = 0

Yay!

errr I would say it was more like smart people =1 stupid people = 12,784,378

BUT WERE GAINING GROUND!!! :D