There's a lot of misconceptions about what this bill actually means, and whether or not it can logistically be done. Some people claim that it is a violation of free speech. Others claim that the time involved would simply make it an impossible task. Neither are true. In this article, we take a look at the common misconceptions about the bill, and why it isn't as outlandish as some seem to believe. This is not a defense of the bill. I'm not saying that the Truth in Video Game Ratings Act is a good thing, only that the flaws are more subtle than just a matter of free speech and the time involved. The true issues are more complex, and have to do with whether or not such changes would or would not degrade the rating system's accuracy. That's not what this article addresses; if we want to discuss the true flaws in the bill, we first have to catch our breaths and examine the realities of a complicated issue. That means objecting with something besides, "It's impossible."
Popular Misconceptions:
1.) The Truth in Video Game Ratings Act is a violation of free speech:The Federal Trade Commission is responsible, among other things, of making sure companies use fair and non-deceptive sales practices when selling a product. The bill doesn't make it against the law to rate a game without playing from beginning to end; instead, it makes it against the law to rate a game on partial information if that label is going to be used in the advertising and selling of the game. This means that if the ESRB is going to require that their rating appears on a game package, or use it during advertising on TV, the ESRB would have to have played the game in entirety. In other words, if a company is going to use a rating to sell games to consumers, you have to make sure it's accurate as determined by the FTC.
2.) It's impossible to review every game in entirety because there are too many games, and each would require a huge number of hours to play.
Again, this is one of the most common arguments against the Truth in Video Game Rating Act, and it's simply not true. Even Penny-Arcade, who I hold in high regard, failed to run the numbers on this issue before coming out with comics like this. Let's look at the numbers involved before we declare that, "It's impossible."
Lots of Numbers:
According to a search on the ESRB's website, they've rated 9624 games between the Xbox, Playstation 2, GameCube, Xbox 360, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, PSP, Nintendo DS, and Windows PC. Most games take between 20 and 40 hours to complete; if equipped with developer provided hints, I imagine that number would come down, but for the sake of argument let's say that the average game takes 30 hours to complete. At 30 hours per game, that's 288,720 total hours of gameplay spread over 10 years, starting as early as 1995. For the sake of being conservative, though, let's say that all 9624 games were released between the launch of the PS2 in 2000 and today in 2006. Dispersed equally across six years, that's 1604 games per year, far above the ESRB's statement that it reviews more than 1,000 games a year. If you pay reviewers $10 dollars per hour to complete each hour of the game, it would cost roughly $481,200 in labor costs per year, distributed across the 50 to 75 on-call or part-time employees required to rate games in a timely fashion depending on the season. Include an additional $500,000 for overhead and training, and I'd guess you could probably rate every game already rated by the ESRB in a timely manner for about one million dollars per year.That's a fairly reasonable sum for regulating an industry that generated nearly $7 billion dollars in the U.S. in 2005. So what if my numbers are wrong? Let's say that the average game takes 150 hours to rate instead of 30, and we pay our skilled raters $25 per hour. That means labor costs would top $6 million, plus an additional $1,000,000 added for overhead. That's $7 million dollars. A large amount of money? Yes. An insurmountable sum that's so vast it's impossible to even consider? Not really.
If the game industry really wants to avoid government regulation, I suggest that the individual gamer stop complaining about how difficult the task of rating games is and offer a compromise. Perhaps we could rate games based on a quick run through of the main game, combined with developer provided examples of the game's most extreme content. Too many people are reacting by throwing their hands in the air and declaring that the worst case scenario is impossible, when in fact there are middle grounds if we're willing to consider them.