APRIL 17, 2011 • The ESRB announced that it was now going to use computers to decide whether to rate online games E, T or M. Faced with an explosion of online titles in recent years, the ESRB believes the move is necessary. Retail titles will still be evaluated first by humans. Publishers will have to provide a detailed digital questionnaire that gauges all examples of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily functions that appear in-game. The program evaluates these questionnaires and then makes its decisions based on a database of cultural norms. At first, the new ESRB system will work with the up to 650 titles distributed via Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network, as well as Nintendo’s Wii and DSi shops.
Impact: We can see where a flood of smaller online games popular via free-to-play sites and console online services would tax the resources of the ESRB. We will even agree that a large percentage of online games are fairly innocuous, and not much of a worry. Yet sometimes the whole of a creative work can be taken as more or less offensive in such a way that an evaluation of a pre-fabricated outline checklist may not catch. Relying on automated means to judge content, even with a human overview at the end of the process, strikes us as short-changing the trust parents, and politicians, have put into the self-regulatory ratings system.
