Welcome to the Next Level of the videogame biz, where if you don't grovel and adopt ratings, some senator will rip your head off.
There was never a problem with Pong. That crude table-tennis ball bouncing across the screen was about as violent as a Hare Krishna on Prozac, and roughly as exciting.
So maybe the problem started with Pac Man. We happily made the critter devour other members of its species. Just a game. Hindsight being 20/20, we can now see that this nonchalance was unforgivable. We never pondered the social implications of the portrayal and encouragement of mindless cannibalism. It's entirely possible that Jeffrey Dahmer played too many hours of Pac Man as an impressionable teen.
Nowadays, with the manufacturers of interactive games grossing more than the movie industry, the problem is big. Huge. Out of control. Violent games such as Doom, Night Trap, and Mortal Kombat are corrupting the minds and morals of millions of American children.
So what do you do? Easy.
You elect people like Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) and Joe Lieberman (D- Connecticut) to the US Senate.
You applaud them when they tell the videogame industry that it's made up of irresponsible purveyors of gratuitous gore and nefarious nudity.
You nod contentedly when the senators give the industry an ultimatum: "Either you start rating and stickering your games real soon, or we, the government, will do it for you."
You are pleasantly surprised by the industry's immediate white flag: a rating system that is almost as detailed as the FDA-mandated nutrition information on a can of Campbell's.
You contend that that is, in fact, a perfect analogy: all you want, as a consumer, is honest product labeling. Campbell's equals Sega equals Kraft equals 3DO.
Finally, you shrug when someone remarks that it may not be a good idea to equate soup with freedom of speech.
Set it on fire
Lately, violence in the media has become the crise du jour. A year ago, Attorney General Janet Reno told Hollywood executives that they had better start toning down the acts of aggression in television programs, or she would have federal agents raid the executives compound and set the whole goddamn place on fire. (Well, almost.) Surfing the wave of indignation and despair over what many see as an explosion of violent crime (despite the fact that the violence graph has actually been pretty flat for years), senators then grilled emissaries of the video- and computer-game industry in a hearing in December 1993. The industry was bluntly ordered to devise a rating system that, in Capitol Hill-speak, was to be "totally voluntary."
Politically and financially, this was a smart move. Make that a masterstroke. Says Sloan Walker, an aide to Senator Lieberman: "He wanted to do it without government interference, without the government having to run a big rating effort and then pay for it." The whole thing, of course, was about as voluntary as a 10-year-old finishing his plateful of spinach after Dad threatens to cram the stuff down the kid's throat. To continue the metaphor: Dad then makes Johnny pay for the spinach and laughs. Hard.
Industry bigwigs, when first confronted with congressional scorn for many of their products, muttered that they were being sufficiently sensitive and responsible already. Some of the manufacturers - most notably Sega - had already adopted a rating system of their own, roughly similar to that of the Motion Picture Association of America. But they apparently feared the public relations fallout if they did not do more. What would consumers think if the industry created the perception that it was unwilling to disclose the potentially objectionable content of its games? So Sega, Nintendo, and most of their allies, or competitors, never went head-to-head with their critics in Washington.
No sex lives
Not that plenty of annoyance wasn't voiced around corporate coffee machines. Certainly, there were numerous gripes on electronic bulletin boards, such as these remarks made in game developers and players forums on CompuServe:
> "Only people who don't have computers want software ratings. It's like those people with no sex lives who want to dictate others' sexual morality."
> "What about the game Hangman? Talk about a gory concept; guess a word and hang somebody. We're talking about pixels, not flesh and blood. The problems of this world are not caused by videogames. They're all due to Beavis and Butt-head."
> "These people in Congress are all liberals. Imagine what the Right will do."
> "Once again, the govern-ment is forcing the unwilling to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful."
Karen Crowther, president of Redwood Games Inc. and spokesperson for an umbrella group of shareware publishing associations, is suspicious of the Senate's motives. "Congress is on a holy war against violence and offers ratings as a simplistic cure to misdirect the public's attention from the very real social problems of endemic poverty, discrimination, damaged social and familial support systems, and economic hopelessness."
But that kind of talk never made it to the crucial third hearing on video- and computer-game violence in late July 1994 (there had been a second "progress report" hearing in March). No Mortal Kombat ever took place on the Senate floor. Indeed, the whole affair seemed more like Super Mario Brothers at the Love-In. The pusillanimous comments at the hearing astounded anyone who had expected reluctance, defiance, or political strife. Industry executives praised the senators for their "leadership," for giving them a "wake-up call," and for being "an inspiration." Then, the two factions of the interactive-game business - cartridge and CD-ROM games manufacturers united as IDSA, the Interactive Digital Software Association, and PC game makers, operating jointly with the Software Publishers Association - presented two rating systems that now exist concurrently. Both were implemented in the early fall, with rated products scheduled to hit store shelves in November, just in time for the annual Christmas shopping spree.
Lieberman and Kohl were duly impressed. "This is a huge American success story," said Kohl (while chiding the industry in the next breath for not coming up with one uniform rating structure). "You've met the challenge," added Lieberman, sounding like a dean addressing an auditorium of fresh- faced graduates. "You have created the most informative and comprehensive rating system of any entertainment medium in this country."
Clearly, the industry had outdone itself in what many call a laudable demonstration of corporate responsibility. "These self-policing measures are a confirmation of the fact that the business has gone from a cottage industry to one that has annual revenues of US$5.5 billion to $6 billion," explains Gregory Fischbach, chair and CEO of Acclaim Entertainment Inc., whose Mortal Kombat had drawn the ire of the senators last December. "We've been very much a part of the creation of the system, and I think the results are very good."
But others aren't so quick with their hurrahs. They believe that politicians who bully artists, authors, and their companies into self- censorship run afoul of the First Amendment. They also hold that the battle has yet to begin.
Fault line
Robert Peck, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, believes the game industry's rating system is built on a constitutional fault line, that it's a structure waiting to implode the moment someone gives it a good kick. Why? Because the First Amendment not only protects speech; it has also been interpreted by the Supreme Court to be an absolute shield from government-compelled speech. "This system is a response to the threat of Senators Lieberman and Kohl that they would enact legislation requiring labels, unless the industry did something to preempt them," says Peck. "The game manufacturers are being required to engage in speech that they would otherwise not engage in, by virtue of the fact that they didn't [uniformly] label these games themselves, earlier. These ratings have the government's fingerprints all over them."
A parallel conflict arose in a six-year-old Supreme Court case, Riley v. National Federation of the Blind. According to Peck, in this instance, the state of North Carolina required that any charitable solicitation include details on how much money was going to professional fund-raisers, and how much was actually going to the charity. Although this information would have benefitted charitably inclined citizens, the Court viewed the requirement as compelled speech and struck it down.
"If something as innocuous as that is ruled a First Amendment violation," reasons Peck, "I have no doubt that this rating system would have the same constitutional flaw."
Every time a new medium comes along, the impulse exists to regulate it. "It's sad, really," says Mike Godwin, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit watchdog group that guards against attacks on civil liberties in cyberspace. "It's true with printing presses, which were licensed by the state for centuries before we got a free press; it's true with radio and movies. Government always has trouble coping with new media. And then, over time, people begin to realize that these media really do deserve First Amendment protection."
Godwin believes that no one could make a constitutionally sound case for regulating any medium on the basis of its supposed lack of social or artistic value. In other words, Game Boy's Super Battletank may be shorter on intellectual content than Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, but it's all the same to the law of the land: they're protected in equal degrees.
But why not give consumers information about the products they're thinking of buying or renting? "The problem is that media are not merely a product," argues Godwin. "They're modes of expression. There's no First Amendment that applies to the selling of food or manufactured goods. However, there is one with regard to the selling of entertainment."
Images are dangerous
But some people believe the senators have been far too benign and that the industry is not going far enough in policing itself. Brian Stonehill, director of the media studies program at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the upcoming book What to Watch For: A Handbook of Visual Literacy, makes a distinction between ideas and experiences. Books, he says, are a reflection of ideas, whereas playing a videogame is more of an experience - however based on ideas the game may be.
"I think we should allow both categories as much First Amendment protection as we can give them, but freedom of speech is not an absolute given. We have no right to holler fire in a crowded theater; there are libel and slander laws that prevent people from recklessly saying anything they want. The law basically says that you have to be responsible in exercising your freedom of speech."
Stonehill, who would advocate a rating system that alerts parents to sexist and racist content, in addition to providing descriptors like "violence" and "nudity," worries specifically about visual media. He maintains that "there is a vast difference in susceptibility to printed text" on the one hand, and images on the other. "The mediation of print means that people have achieved literacy in order to get at whatever's in the text. But when you deal with visual media, you've done away with the mediation of print and gone directly to something that any illiterate, any child, has access to. Visual material is more direct and realistic, and therefore inherently more dangerous."
It is the same argument that critics used to cast doubt on the virtues of motion pictures before World War II and to vilify comic books, once widely presumed to do moral damage to young readers. (The argument even prompted a Senate investigation that drove comics underground in the early '50s.) In fact, that kind of finger pointing has been around for many centuries, argues James Twitchell, an English professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in his 1989 book Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture. "Violent stories will always seem shocking to an older generation which had drawn its myths from a previous medium, but if one will listen closely, the same story will be endlessly told. The fantasies one generation considers escapist and worthless - "trash" - the next generation lines up to see."
Twitchell argues that this dates back at least as far as the bread-and- circus days of the Romans, and that it has remained a consistent, somewhat tiresome tug of war ever since. "Those who now cry that Stephen King's fiction travesties the novel forget that the novel itself was not so long ago accused of subverting literature," he writes. Critics of popular culture today are the spiritual descendants of the Victorian critics of popular print, issuing similar dire warnings. "To wit: the medium corrupts consciousness, the work ethic, natural desires, concentration, and culture itself. Somehow the dreck of the masses is changing the quality of an otherwise benign culture," mocks the author.
Twitchell, who focuses especially on modern horror literature, believes that what is commonly considered "the flotsam of modern culture" contains meaningful information. "However incomprehensible it may be, any entertainment with such a large and enduring audience is self-evidently important.... Preposterous violence is fun. Whatever inheres in these crude circuses is something that won't be soaped away with rating systems, revisions, or outright censorship."
Ratings, however, are just fine with Brian Stonehill. And the government has every right to insist on them, he says. "The profit motive, left to itself, is going to harm the national interest. That happens whether you're dealing with the robber barons or with the people in the oil industry who have no concern for the environment. The government's been elected by the people to represent the public good. It's too easy to think of those elected officials as some Big Brother enemy. I think it's certainly acceptable for Congress to hold the game industry's feet to the fire on this."
But ACLU lawyer Robert Peck says it's only a matter of time before someone sues and has the ratings declared unlawful. "This present labeling system isn't going to be the end of it. I think some games are going to be negatively affected, saleswise, and the producers of those games will probably bring a lawsuit. We will then see that this system will be invalidated, and we will subsequently move to the next controversial approach on this."
No rating, no sale
The present rating system being voluntary, what's going to happen to games that, for whatever reason, are released without a rating? They're going to bomb, as far as Wal-Mart, Toys 'R' Us, and other retailers are concerned. Those stores will not carry unrated games, period. They may also elect not to sell certain games that have received the most restrictive or "severe" rating. "Anything with a strong sexual content, we will not carry," says Chuck Kerby, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager of electronics.
Kerby is not clear on how far Wal-Mart should go in applying "community standards" to the store when it comes to enforcing ratings. What's a sales clerk to do when kids who look like they're 13 want to buy a game rated for "mature" consumers? "Asking for proof of age is going to be cumbersome," sighs Kerby. "And we don't want to prevent the sale."
Bob Finlayson, director of marketing and public relations for the Video Software Dealers Association, acknowledges that it's a sticky issue. "Video stores have computer systems to track all their members, and they can just add the age right in there. With a mass merchant, it becomes a much more difficult situation. Short of requiring proof of age or having a parent accompany the kid to the store, I don't know what the solution is." Senator Kohl insists that the ratings will be less than effective if they are not enforced at the retail level. "There will have to be some effort at the store to see that the ratings are observed," he warned the industry at the July hearing.
Does that mean that the Senate could mandate additional restrictions on games, that it will introduce more Draconian measures to keep kids' minds smut-free? "Frankly, that's a concern," says Sloan Walker. "It depends on whether the current industry response [the rating system] turns out to be accepted, understood, and enforced in the real world."
A novel approach
In the '20s, movie studios began to feel the heat from various religious and social organizations threatening boycotts of films not deemed sufficiently wholesome. The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency eventually got 10 million Americans to sign a pledge that they would not see movies the Church had labeled inappropriate. "It led to a lot of stupidity," says Garth Jowett, a movie scholar who wrote Film: The Democratic Art, a social history of moviegoing in the US. "The Legion of Decency would take offense, for instance, at any portrayal of a divorced person looking happy and ban its followers from seeing films that contained such a scene." Nonetheless, politicians, seeing its electoral potential, according to Jowett, introduced a string of bills that sought to heighten cinematic moral standards. To keep customers happy and to keep would-be federal censors at bay, the film industry then started to regulate itself - first in the early '30s, then later with the present rating system, implemented in the late '60s. History, it seems, has a habit of repeating itself.
In addition to movies, the entertainment industry now also stickers compact discs that contain strong language, a practice it grudgingly started in the late '80s partly in response to the efforts of the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore. Rating videogames is the next step in the war over kids' minds.
But why stop there? Byron Dorgan thinks we shouldn't. Senator Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, would like to have the Federal Communications Commission provide a report card for every TV program prior to broadcast, identifying the levels of violence it contains. But let's go further. Let's rate art exhibitions. Let's rate radio talk shows. Let's rate books.
I pose the question in a telephone interview to Joel Federman, director of research at Mediascope, an organization funded by the Carnegie and California Wellness foundations. The LA-based nonprofit is conducting a three-year study on TV violence for the National Cable TV Association. Federman is very much in favor of videogame ratings.
Then you're also for rating books?
That's the first time I've been asked that question. Books usually have jackets that describe what the book is about.
Interactive games and videocassettes of films come in descriptive packaging also.
I'll think about that one.... [After an eternity of 30 seconds] good question. Because when you start to think it through ...
If I had kids, I might rather see them play Mortal Kombat than read a Bret Easton Ellis or Clive Barker novel.
Right. [A 17-second silence.]
You want to think about it and call me back?
To be honest, I'm not sure I would have a better answer for you. You may have caught me in a logical ... I don't know. I need to think about that one. My gut reaction is that I don't think rating books is a good idea. And where the logic of one ends and the other begins, I'm not quite so sure. I think that books ... It's a tough one, because books and videogames can both present ideas. And you don't want to create a regulation of ideas. However, book jackets do present information, and...
If I turn over any game package on an Egghead shelf, it will tell me what kind of game it is. That information is just as reliable or unreliable as the blurb on a book jacket.
Right.
I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just attempting to think this through. There would be a public outcry if any politician started advocating stickering books. That would be seen as a First Amendment infringement.
Right. You see, the...[a 9-second pause] The whole issue about, the whole issue of the First Amendment is...[another 20 seconds of silence].
I call Federman back a day later to ask him for some information unrelated to the question he was struggling with. He doesn't appear to have found an answer to the book rating issue in the meantime. At least he doesn't bring it up.
Violence in, Violence Out?
The premise behind putting warning stickers on games is that screen violence contributes to actual violence. After decades of research, the jury is still out on this point - though studies emphasizing such a link are becoming more numerous. In some experimental settings, children who watch violence on film or TV have been shown to behave more aggressively immediately afterward. But short-term aggression might easily dissipate and have no last-ing effect. Other studies show that children who are more aggressive than their peers watch more violent television - but it could be that they were more aggressive to begin with and watch violent programs to partly satisfy their impulses. What is needed are conclusive data on the long-term effects of exposure to media violence.
Rowell Huesmann of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with other researchers, has attempted to tackle the issue by assessing the level of aggression and the intake of violent TV programs in 409 subjects over time. When the children were first interviewed, in 1960, they were all third-graders. They were reinterviewed in 1970 and 1982. The researchers found that, at least for boys, early TV- violence viewing correlated with self-reported aggression at age 30, especially in cases that involved alcohol. Still, the scientists acknowledge that drawing causal conclusions is risky. "Childhood aggression is most often a product of a number of interacting factors - genetic, perinatal, physiological, familial, and learning. In fact, it seems most likely that severe antisocial aggressive behavior occurs only when there is a convergence of many of these factors."
Others more bluntly state their reservations. "To make the connection between screen violence and real violence, you've got to be a polemicist with an agenda," says Gilbert Geis, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine. "I don't think there's any scientific evidence worth looking at. It's arguable whether TV and videogame violence has any nasty effects on kids. You can argue the reverse - that it keeps them at home and off the streets." Geis says the problem with the studies - including the one quoted above - is that they involve relatively small groups of children, and that they contain "static" factors that weren't controlled or looked at. "It could be that the children watched those violent shows while, or because, their parents weren't at home," argues Geis. "In which case, their aggressive behavior may be the result of their anger over that."
Firsthand experiences recalled by game players and developers suggest that screen violence can both mitigate and exacerbate tendencies toward real aggression. "If I had a bad day at school, I would head down to the arcade, kill a couple of opponents in Mortal Kombat, and feel a lot better," says Cliff Bleszinski, a 19-year-old developer for Epic MegaGames. "Whereas, if someone has a bad day and plays Mortal Kombat and loses, he or she might get angrier. I've seen people kicking the machine or whacking the side of it." Bleszinski believes that anything could trigger someone with a violent streak, and that videogames are being unfairly singled out. "If someone's going to explode, who knows what'll light the fuse? It could be not getting pickles on a burger." n
"It's arguable whether TV and videogame violence has any nasty effects on kids. You can argue the reverse - that it keeps them off the streets."
Beware! This Game Contains Alcohol, Tobacco... and Gambling!
So what are these vignettes and symbols that you're suddenly seeing on computer games and videogames? Two ratings boards, representing two competing parts of the industry, are bringing you "buyer beware" notices.
> The Interactive Digital Software Association, an umbrella organization for 12 cartridge/CD-ROM game manufacturers, including Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Philips, Acclaim, and Sony, has appointed child-development expert Arthur Pober as executive director of the brand new Entertainment Software Rating Board. The board, touted as an independent organ, now has a pool of more than 60 demographically diverse part-time raters. These reviewers, after receiving a day's worth of "orientation and training," will work in teams of three - in round-the-clock shifts, whenever industry demand peaks - to assign the ratings that Pober developed. They'll do this based on videotapes or demo disks that include the most graphic scenes from the game being rated. The process as intended will take about a week to complete and cost the maker of the game US$500. As this issue of Wired goes to press, the association is working on a sliding price scale to allow small companies to submit their games to the board also.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board's ratings fall into five categories: early childhood (ages 3 and up); kids to adults (ages 6 and up); teen (ages 13 and up); mature (over 17); and adults only. Each of these categories can have several descriptors, such as "mild animated violence," "comic mischief," "realistic blood and gore," "use of tobacco and alcohol," and "contains gambling." Sega's previous ratings (GA, MA-13, MA-17, with GA standing for general audience and MA meaning mature audience) have been discontinued.
> Software Publishers of America, which represents the makers of computer games, has introduced a system that rates violence, nudity and sex, and profanity on a scale of one to four.
There are no age recommendations.
The group's ratings, which will be implemented by an independent Recreational Software Advisory Council, are assigned by a computer program that calculates the outcome based on an electronic questionnaire that the game maker fills out. Turnaround time is two days. Broad-distribution retail products are rated for a fee of $500; shareware authors pay as little as $25.
Both the Entertainment Software Rating Board and the Recreational Software Advisory Council can rerate a product and order the maker to resticker it if the game contains nudity or violence that was not disclosed during the initial rating process. In some cases, the makers could be slapped with a fine.
Congress prefers the Interactive Digital Software Association's system. Senator Joe Lieberman made no secret of it, promising to "do anything I can" to encourage the merging of the two systems. The Software Publishers of America resists adopting the Interactive Digital Software Association's system, however, citing antitrust concerns. Karen Crowther, a spokesperson for shareware and educational-game authors affiliated with the Software Publishers of America, says that senators got "hoodwinked by a bunch of foreign, billion-dollar corporations [such as Sony, Nintendo, and Sega] out to crush their US competition."
