Should more games be rated AO?

[GotchayeX]

I think there's some confusion here. There's no law in the US stating that sexually explicit games can't be sold. The console companies and retailers, however, believe that it's generally a losing decision to carry those games - if parents find out that Walmart is selling AO-type games, they might stop shopping at Walmart.

Ratings serve the same purpose as game reviews. I don't have the time to try every single game that comes out, and parents don't have the time to carefully examine every single game that their kids want to buy. Reviews give me an indication of quality and ratings give parents an indication of propriety. A parent who uses ratings isn't being a bad parent - it's unrealistic to expect much more.

To get back to the original point:

Gears of War rated M, Manhunt 2 rated AO: assuming a certain level of economic rationality, these two games are rated differently because consumers of ratings would want them to be rated differently. This makes sense to me. Gears of War is bad, but I'd let my kid play that long before I let him play Manhunt 2. My girlfriend thinks that Gears of War is somewhat disgusting, but she finds the concept of Manhunt 2 evil. I don't think I'd be allowed to own the second game. And, of course, the vast majority of parents in the US would rather their kids play Gears than have them see Hot Coffee.

The highest rating is always going to be radioactive. Parents understand that the medium has the potential to portray things that they don't want their kids seeing, and they know that the most restrictive rating is going to contain works with content that they object to.

You need an AO rating to differentiate games that parents should be careful about letting their kids experience from games that virtually all parents would want to keep away from their children.

Of course, in any system like this, there's going to be a fairly arbitrary line. And companies are going to toe that line as long as it's rewarding to do so. However, getting rid of AO ratings wouldn't change that; you'd just make M radioactive and start companies on trying to toe the T-M line.

Perhaps it'd be better to have two levels of AO rating and to scrap E, T, and M in favor of 3-18, but that sacrifices simplicity and would open the ESRB up to charges of bias.