ESRB: What the Hell Were You Thinking?

By Plagiarize

Hot coffee, ah yes, I remember hot coffee. Who doesn’t? I actually wanted to see the ESRB chewing out Take Two on that one, because, you know, it was less of a hit to the industry if the ratings board came away as victims. Take Two and Rockstar HAD violated certain guidelines, and the ESRB can’t be expected to go through every single animation in the game to check there’s nothing hidden in there.

It didn’t take long for politicians, and the mainstream media to convince everyone that somebody needed to take the blame for Hot Coffee. I don’t think most people really cared, but when the press and politicians get together it’s easy to get the impression that America is united in its anger, whether or not it actually is.

So, the ESRB covered its ass, Take Two lost a lot of money, and that was the end of that.

At least it should have been.

While many are quick to defend the ESRB in the ‘Elvish titties’ debacle, as the naked skins are apparently sat right there on the disk, just inaccessible, I’m not cutting them any slack this time, and while I’ll be sad if the rating system is destroyed as a result of this, it’ll be the ESRB’s own stupid fault.

Hot Coffee was something that had to be addressed. Hot Coffee was a modification only possible because the content was already on the disk. Heck, you could unlock it on the PS2 version using a GameShark or similar. Everyone knew about it, and if nothing had been done, the repercussions would have been devastating for the game industry, and mature games in general.

But this?

Oblivion was a moddable game. Even if the jubblies hadn’t been already provided on the disk, they’d have been added to the game. The modder that provided the mod that unlocked them even said as much. He was going to make a topless mod using custom textures, but found Bethesda had already done most of the work for him.

Think about that for a moment. Regardless of whether or not the textures were on the original disk, anyone that wanted to be able to play as a topless woman, would have been able to. They’d have found the mod just the same, downloaded and installed the mod just the same and the end result would have been the same, as far as the end user’s perspective goes.

Anyone thinking logically would get that. Whether the mammaries were on the disk or not, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all.

So lets pretend that Bethesda were going to take the Hot Coffee route, and pull the content from the game and re-release it as a ‘Teen’ minus womanly orbs on disk. Within a week you’d still have a topless mod. So what exactly would you have achieved?

Nothing quite obviously… which is probably why the game is just getting rerated and left as an M rated game. An optional patch will be made available, presumably so that parents of teenagers already with the game can protect them from seeing any meat sacks should they download the mod. How it’ll stop them downloading other mods that contain mod community made nudity isn’t mention because it quite obviously won’t.

There are two other major factors being buried under the weight of all those heaving bosums, that many people are overlooking and which I believe tell the real tale of why this is the dumbest and most suicidal thing the ESRB could have done, and has ever done.

At first their pro-active stance on this seems like a smart move. They obviously thought it was. ‘Look!’ they said ‘We’re defusing this before our critics find out about it, because we’re a reliable and dependable ratings board.’

How they thought that their critics wouldn’t leap all over the ESRB issuing a press release saying that it’s rerating a game that’s been on the shelves and selling like wildfire for over a month, I don’t know, especially given that Take Two are the co publishers of the game.

Furthermore, this rating change isn’t merely a one year difference as Hot Coffee was. This is a 4 year difference, and arguably more importantly, this is a puberty sized difference.

What critics hear is two fold. Take Two did it again, and the ESRB again didn’t notice until it was too late.

Remember, these self same critics were saying things like ‘this proves the ESRB is ineffective’ and ‘Take Two are knowingly distributing pornography to underage children’ last time around. Take Two apologized saying ‘we didn’t know hidden content counted’ and the ESRB blamed Take Two for not disclosing the content as they were meant to.

It doesn’t matter to critics of the industry that Take Two were only really the distributors of Oblivion, and had nothing to do with the rating process this time around. The name Take Two is on the box, and any explanation on the behalf of Take Two is only going to sound like one thing: another excuse.

On the ESRB’s side of things, it makes them look ineffective. They already supposedly admonished this publisher, and yet the publisher was able to do it again. Critics are going to say it’s because the ESRB is funded by the game industry. They may make efforts to appear to be doing something, but they’re not going to enforce anything lest their funding get cut.

Now for the crux of this point, and the part that’s most likely to cause contention.

The ESRB should have done nothing. They should have left the game rated T.

I know what you’re thinking. How can the ESRB have any credibility if it puts out a film rated T, finds out it shouldn’t be rated T and leaves it with the T rating. Surely actions like that don’t make for a reputable and reliable ratings system?

Well no, they don’t, but when the ratings board is already squarely in the firing line of major politicians is it wise to draw attention to your mistakes? There’s two possible outcomes to doing nothing. One is that nothing happens and the other would be arguably no worse than what we have now.

The mod had been out for weeks, and there had been nothing. Even people who seemingly spend all their time scavenging for ammunition to throw at the ESRB and Take Two hadn’t picked up on it. It was already forgotten news by the time the ESRB made their press release, and it was only after that press release that the critics found out.

That’s probably what would have happened too and even if someone like Jack Thompson had stumbled upon it, weeks after it was news, even then nothing might have happened. Remember what came of his (mistaken) claims that the Sims 2 had full nudity behind its blurs which could be turned off by a mod? Nothing. It wasn’t just because he was wrong either. He’d sent his press release out to all the normal places before being corrected and nobody went with the story.

The press just doesn’t work that way. Hot Coffee was billed as explicit sex in the media’s favorite whipping boy, the GTA series. Topless female game characters in a fantasy game, wouldn’t have been half the story. It would never have reached the kind of critical mass where the ESRB would have been forced to do something.

What kudos do you get for acting when no one is calling you to act? Who was going to pat them on the back and say ‘Well done!’. Not the game developers. Not the game publishers. Not the mainstream press. Maybe some gamers and some of the gaming press, but that would be he best you could hope for.

Now the ESRB have handed their critics better ammunition than they could possibly have found by themselves, because the ESRB just made itself look stupid, while at the same time as admitting that it fucked up again.

If they were pressured into doing this, as they were with Hot Coffee, it would still be stupid, but doing it by themselves? Suicide. It boggles the mind.

And you know something?

I don’t even think that’s the real story. If I’m wrong, the ESRB is still stupid. If I’m right, they’re monumentally stupid.

See, if someone else had slipped hidden content by them, that still wouldn’t be their fault, it’d again be the fault of the company that did it… but what’s easy to overlook in the press release and follow up stories, is that it wasn’t just the unlockable nudity being added to the content descriptor on the M label.

‘More detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating’ is actually the first reason given for the M label. It sounds like Oblivion may well have gotten an M rating even without the ‘bra fillers’ being on display. Infact, pulling up the games listing on their website reveals that the Xbox 360 game is missing the ‘nudity’ content descriptor that the PC version now has, and both are now rated M.

Think about that for a moment. Missing content that you have to mod or hack the game to find is one thing, but missing content that was right there in the game? That’s a lot harder to blame on the developer.

Oblivion is a big game, and furthermore, a game that plays very differently depending on the way you approach it. To see everything the game has, well, it’s not exactly feasible. Critics of the game don’t understand that, because they haven’t played it, but it’s true enough. To get one person’s opinion on all the content in the game would be hundreds of man hours. So instead what happens, is videos are made that are ‘representative’ of the game, ensuring that it’s most extreme content is too disclosed.

Bethesda claim that they followed all the guidelines of the ESRB in their submission, and furthermore that no attempt was made to get a T rating as opposed to an M rating.

Either Bethesda are lying and the ESRB is easily fooled, or they’re telling the truth and the ESRB got the rating wrong.

With a film review, you hand over the film and the body can watch it to choose what that film should be rated. How do you fool such a system? Anyone wanting to say that the ESRB is inherently flawed now has some wonderful evidence. The developer can just leave out some of the sicker things that you may be able to do in a game and get a lower rating with the ESRB none the wiser until it’s too late.

It’s possible to finish Postal 2 without even discovering that you can stick a shotgun up a cat’s anus to use it as a silencer. It would be child’s play to leave such details out of any submission to the ESRB.

Personally, I think the ESRB got the rating of the game wrong and is trying to use this whole nude patch mod thing to distract from that, thinking that it’d shift the blame away from them.

If the game had been rated M in the first place this nude patch would be a tiny issue, another drop in the story about the content descriptors on M rated games not always being consistent… another story that came nowhere near reaching critical mass.

America being the country it is, will unlikely see beyond the controversy of the nude content. Whether or not it was the ESRB’s hope to deflect blame away from themselves by bringing it up in discussing the rating change, the entire debacle makes the ESRB look fundamentally flawed at worst, and seriously inept at best.

This issue was a sleeping dog.