October 11, 2019 • 34 mins
What is the ESRB? What procedure does the ESRB follow to rate games? What do the different ratings mean? Join the guys as they demystify the inner workings of the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and I love all
things tech in. Today's episode is a classic episode that
originally published on November nineteenth, two thousand and twelve. It's
(00:26):
titled tech Stuff Gets an E s r B Rating
and I talked about E s r B ratings not
too long ago. But in this episode, Chris Palette and
I actually talk about the e s r B rating system,
where it came from, how it's used, and to get
a deeper understanding of what it's for and you know
why it exists. I hope you guys enjoy we're doing
(00:50):
an episode about the e s RB. Okay, so are
you okay? I am okay. It's the Entertainment Software Rating
Board and this this is actually a request that was
sent to us by a couple of different listeners who
wanted to know more about this system. It's history, why
do we have it, does it work? What's it all about?
So in general, the E s r B. Sorry Alfie,
(01:14):
he has r V. What's it all about Alfie. The
E s r V is a it's a rating system
for video games, and it's it's a rating system not
for the quality of the game, but what is the content,
how the content of the game shapes the game, and
whether or not that content is um uh suitable for
(01:35):
different age groups. So just running through the different ratings
really quickly. Uh. The E s r B has ratings
for e C, which is early childhood. That's games that
are suitable for ages three and older. Younger than three,
we just typically say these are people who probably can't
process what the heck is going on anyway, so it
really doesn't matter what it is, but not really appropriate
(01:58):
in any case. Get that two year old off my Xbox. Uh,
E is for everyone, which is actually not everyone. It's
really content that's suitable for ages six and older. Keeping
in mind that content that's EC early childhood probably has
gameplay elements that most people all over the age of
(02:20):
six wouldn't be terribly interested in. Um. I say most
because there are exceptions. I mean, I'm not going to
pass judgment on Chris if he wants to play lots
of e C games. There's eight ten, ten plus, which
is everyone ten and older, so against slightly more restrictive
than just the E T four teen uh M for
(02:43):
mature meaning people who are seventeen or older uh and
AO AO which is adults only, which has content in
it that should only be played by people of eighteen
years of age or older according to their rating according
to the rating A and each of these each of
(03:03):
these ratings have their own criteria as to you know,
what what constitutes a T rate rating as opposed to
an M rating. And in general, what we're talking about
here are types of content that might include things like
gambling that that will up a E. S R B
rating on a game to a higher one to like
(03:25):
M or whatever. H violence, blood, gore, sexual content, strong language,
drug use, this kind of stuff sort of the same
things that you would see with the Motion Picture Association
of America with their rating system for movies. In fact,
there are a lot of parallels. And you might say,
all right, so we have this rating system, Uh, how
(03:46):
did that get started? And really to to understand that,
you have to go back into the history of video games,
I would argue in a way that you'd have to
go back into the history of entertainment content because I
think e s RB is, well, it's a consortium really,
(04:06):
and and the thing is, I think they we're paying
attention to what had happened to people in other industries
as well, right It just before the before the early nineties,
it was kind of a moot point only because video
games were fairly primitive as far as graphics are concerned.
(04:29):
So it was not easy to graphically represent something that
would be objectionable. Uh, not that people didn't try, and
not that there aren't exceptions, because there are, I'm thinking
of one right off the top of my head for
the Atari Twenty Days, but you could not realistically represent
things like uh, graphic violence or sexual content before the
(04:55):
sixteen bit era. It was just really the consideration was
that the eight bit era and earlier, everything was so
blocky and so pixelated that it didn't really resemble reality.
It was more like seeing something in a cartoon. So uh,
you know, you might watch a cartoon as a kid
of Wildly Coyote and the roadrunner, and the road runner
(05:17):
does something and Wildly Coyote suffers a terrible injury, and
there are some people who would argue that that could
be harmful to kids, uh, seeing how it shaped me
and who I am. Well that's anecdotal anyway. And Chris, uh,
you know, don't worry. I'm not going to do anything
with this enormous mallet behind me. Um he he he. Well, yes,
I and you know that there were some exceptions. I
(05:38):
do bear a striking resemblance to my character from Adventure
on the right. Just a block, because I am a block,
just a just a block, just one pixel block, but
a giant pixel. Uh. Once we got into the sixteen
bit era, we started to have more realistic, more fluid graphics,
and there was you know, the the population that was
(06:01):
playing video games was beginning to grow older. You know,
you were you had people who had started playing video
games as kids on systems like the Atari or the
Ninteno Entertainment System or whatever, and so they were continuing
to play video games as they got older, and their
interests began to um go into more what we call
(06:23):
mature subjects. So just like people who watched movies, you know,
they might want to go see an R rated movie
or something, uh, same sort of thing. And so the
video game publishers began to cater to that audience. I mean,
you've got to remember also the people who were developing
video games. They were video game players, you know, when
they were kids. And we're talking about the early nineties here.
(06:44):
The people who played video games in the very early
eighties were now the people who were making video games
in the nineties. Their tastes had matured, and so you
started to see video games that were depicting violence in
a more realistic and graphic way than ever before, and
that began to raise some concerns in the minds of
(07:05):
certain people. UH. Some of those people held quite a
bit of influence, people like UH, the Senator Joe Lieberman
UH and Senator Herb Herb Cole. They both were concerned
and they had hearings in the United States Senate about
video game violence and how that affected children and whether
(07:28):
or not in fact, video games were contributing to the
corruption of society. This is not a new thing at all.
We have had politicians worry about various forms of entertainment
corrupting the youth and ruining everything. And that's why apple
pie doesn't taste as sweet. It's why you can't walk
(07:49):
down the street at night. It's why you have to
lock your doors when you leave in the evening. It's
it's why you you never have the paper because your
neighbor always steals it. It's it's it's the perp. It's
actually the reason why everything is terrible. Now I'm exaggerating
for effect. I didn't know if you were you were,
you know, well no, but um but yeah, I mean.
(08:13):
And then it's not just politicians, of course, their parents associations.
There are just concerned citizens who draw conclusions that a
form of entertainment and the its popularity among a certain
group might in fact influence that certain group to behave
in a negative way or to be desensitized against violence
(08:34):
for example. Exactly. Yes, so not necessarily they'll go out
and hit somebody over the head with a mallet, But
if they see someone else hit someone over the head
with a mallet, they won't necessarily spring to action. Um yeah.
There there are concerns, and there have been lots of
different studies with very different outcomes about whether or not
(08:54):
violence in media affects people in a real way beyond
you know, beyond like a visceral reaction. Does it have
a lasting impact on a person's personality. Those are questions
that still have not been fully answered because there are
a lot of studies out there with conflicting results. I
know what I believe, but but there are results the
(09:16):
conflict with what I believe. So well, as it turns out,
it may be one of those frustrating situation where it
may depend on the individual person, right, Well, in which
case I would argue that that's a person that's a
person issue, not a not an industry issue, right because
it's it's one of those things you can make the
argument of, well, if this one person who was affected
by this one type of media were to instead have
(09:38):
fixated upon another type of media, we'd be having the
same discussion, but we'd be having it about music. And
this discussion has been about music. It has been about television,
it has been about film, it's been about novels. It's
been about classical music. I mean, any form of entertainment.
You can imagine. It's gone through this experience of people
talking about, you know, that novel, that new fangled way
(10:01):
of putting words together and creating fanciful fictional stories is
ruining everything. Oh yeah, that that Actually there were people
who said that novels we're bringing about the downfall of society. Well, hey,
I recently read that that Plato I think it was,
had rebelled against the written words. He said, no, it's
(10:22):
because writing things down means that you are sapping your
own ability to think that was the idea. It's it's
the same argument about Google making us stupid, because everything
that we need to know is on the web now,
so we don't need to remember it in our our
meat space heads. Um. So yeah, I mean, anyway, like
we the point of that whole thing is just to
(10:44):
say video games are not unique in this situation. This
has gone through multiple venues, multiple forms of media. But
in this case you had a lot of pressure coming
from the United States government for something to be done
in the video game industry. Within the industry itself or
the ultimatum was, if you guys don't get together and
(11:06):
figure out a way of taking care of this, then
we're gonna do it. We being the United States government,
and the industry was like, did not want that to happen.
They did not want to have some sort of federal
regulation in place over the video game industry, and so
it was imperative to come up with some sort of
industry based ratings system that could be demonstrably proven to
(11:29):
be as objective as possible, so it's not you know,
it's not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes or anything. Uh.
And to have some sort of enforceable policy. Yeah, those
were all important issues. Yeah. And and again they're they're
taking their their their cues from other similar or other
entertainment industries, like the Motion Picture Association of America with
(11:52):
with movie ratings several decades prior, and of course the
Comics Code from comic books after Frederick Wortham's uh um
Seduction of the Innocent um. Wow. But yeah, I mean,
these these industries self regulated. They said, okay, okay, you
know what, we'll get together. We'll form a group, and
we will come up with a rating system that helps
(12:14):
people identify what kind of content to you know, will
be in the package when you when you do this.
And yeah, I mean there were there were certain games
in particular, I think some you know, like Mortal Kombats.
That's the one. The Mortal Kombat, I think more than
any other video game, has been cited as the the
genesis of this discussion. I mean there are other ones
(12:35):
to like Doom that was another big one, domm Night
Trap for home games, Lethal Enforcers, which was, as I recall,
a light gun based game. So I mean, yeah, these
these were games that had a lot of violence in them.
Of course, by today's games standards, if you're talking about
a truly, truly violent game in today's standards, they might
(12:56):
seem quaint in comparison. Yeah, but but you know, that
was what caused these conversations to happen, and as a result,
the games industry are actually different. Companies within the industry
all began to suggest ratings systems, and in fact, there
were quite a few. In the earliest days. There were
several competing One. Sega came out with one, the Video
(13:17):
Game Rating Council. Uh. Yep, Video Game Rating Council was
from Sega. There was the three D O suggested one. Uh.
They they had the Recreational Software Advisory Council formed by
Software Publishers Association, and then there was one called the
Interactive Digital Software Association, which again was a uh it's
(13:41):
a collection, it's a collection of software companies that were
uh advocating for a particular rating system, and that I
D s A. It's eventually became the Entertainment Software Rating
Board e s r B. As we now know it,
that got present it to Congress, and in uh Congress
(14:05):
approved the form the formation of the s E s
R B, and they you know, it was formally made
the rating system for American video games. So if you
pick up a video game in America, a video game case,
there's a very good chance, in fact, an overwhelmingly good chance,
that you will see a little black box with white
(14:27):
white inside, and then there's a black letter that indicates
what the rating for that particular game is UM and
and that's become the standard essentially. And here's the thing
is that there's there's no The reason for this again
is so that the consumer has an idea of what
type of content is going to be in that game. Uh,
(14:48):
it's it's not specifically meant to dictate two retailers what
they need to do with each type of game. Like
in other words, there's no rule that says, okay, anything
that is rated T or or higher in the on
the maturity scale like T or M or a O
(15:09):
cannot be three feet off the floor. It has to
be higher up than that. Like, there's no rule about that.
There's no there's no specific policy in place or law
in place that says you have to be a certain
age to be able to buy a game. The rating
is there as a guide to say this is what,
this is who the game is intended. You know, we
(15:31):
mean this for people who are seventeen or older or
eighteen or older. Chris and I have more to say
about the s r B rating system, but before we
get to that, let's take a quick break. There was
the United States Supreme Court found that that you cannot
(15:53):
restrict mature or adults only titles to specific age groups
to be cause video game content falls under the realm
of free speech, which cannot be infringed upon by the government.
Now that doesn't mean that the stores can't have policies,
because the stores are not the government. In fact, that
was the whole reason why this board was formed, was
(16:15):
so that they could keep that separation between government and business.
So a an actual retailer, if you were to go
to a video game store, they might have a policy
that says, we do not sell uh any game that
is ranked M or AO to anyone under the age
of seventeen, and we will ask for I D. And
(16:36):
that's their policy, and it's perfectly fine. The government can't
restrict it, but a store can and UH also go
ahead and say it. AO games very rarely get carried
in stores because it's kind of the same thing as
the n C seventeen rating for films. Films that get
an NC seventeen rating very very rarely get any sort
(16:59):
of relief in most theaters. You might have a few
independent theaters that will run in C seventeen movies, but
in general they do not get any sort of wide
release at all. It's very rare when that happens. So
the same sort of thing with AO games. So getting
an AO rating. If you are a game publisher and
you develop a game and you submit it to the
e s r B and you get an A O rating,
(17:21):
your first reaction might be, we need to change this
because no one's going to carry our game in stores
and we're not going to make any money. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
they don't They don't necessarily play all of the games.
Actually they don't. They don't play the games at all. Well,
they do have in house testers, according to the s
r B, who do go through it um and as
(17:41):
a result of UH the whole hot Coffee incident, they
are supposed to at least disclose everything that's in the
in the package that you could get even if it's hidden. Okay,
So in order to in order to understand what Chris
has just said, you know, we have to have some
background here. First of all, the general way that a
game manufacturer submits a game to the s r B
(18:04):
E s RBS UH general way of testing a game
doesn't necessarily involve playing it. It can involve playing it,
but to play a game and to really get a
sense of what the content is all about can take
hours and hours and hours of gameplay, so they don't
play every single game that comes into them all the
way through. What they do tend to do, though, is
(18:25):
part of the E s r B ratings processes. They
require a game manufacturer to submit a DVD that has
on it the examples of the most extreme types of
content that game has. So, in other words, you're watching
like a clip compilation of the worst of this game,
(18:46):
worst being in the sense of like the most intense content.
So if if it has any sort of violent content,
or uh, sexually graphic content, or or foul language, anything
like that, anything that would affect the rating, the most
intense examples of that are supposed to be included on
the DVD so that the ratings experts who are trained
(19:09):
in UH the the processes that the E s r
B uses to determine the rating for a game, so
that they can determine what rating applies here. And if
you were to release a game that turned out to
contain content that went beyond what you showed the DVD
(19:29):
in the DVD, you could suffer some pretty stiff fines industry.
UH the industry itself would find you and you could
face a recall which could be very expensive to recall
all the copies of the game. Now that is the
case when when Christmas talking about the hot Coffee incident,
that's specifically talking about it was Grand Theft Auto four right,
(19:52):
I want to say, or Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
Grand Theft Auto s Andreas was specifically what it was.
Uh I owned that game. So this was something that
was originally included in the game, and it was a
mini game, and it was it was a sexual encounter
and it was Ultimately the game designers decided not to
include it in the game, but they didn't remove it
(20:14):
so much as they kind of the code was still there,
but it was inactive. It was sort of like an
Easter egg. Well, yeah, you could get to it if
you if you knew how to either uh, if you
knew how to either alter an Xbox console or if
you're using the PC version, if you were able to
use some software to activate the code, you could get
(20:36):
access to this game. But it was this mini game
within the game, but it was not intended for public consumption,
at least that's what the publisher said. And the problem
was that went outside what they had submitted to the
ratings board, and they had their original rating for that
game was M for mature. That mini game pushed it
(20:58):
over to adults only, and so they ended up doing
a recall and republishing the game without the code in
at all so they could regain that M mature rating. Ah,
if you were to uh submit your game again, you
would send this DVD to the e s r B.
They would have up to well at least three people
(21:20):
looking at it. Those three people would have experience with kids.
That's actually one of the requirements is that they would
have to have some sort of experience, either professional or personal,
with children in order to be able to view the
content and then judge at what age level is this appropriate,
and so it's not just you know, some scientists with
(21:42):
beakers and uh, not that kind of beaker, but with
a like electronic device is saying, well, scientifically, we've determined
that sixteen is exactly the age at which this game
can be sold, and no one under sixteen should ever
play it. It's not that it's uh, it's a little
more subjective than that. In fact, so is in fact
(22:03):
the film rating system. It's not there's no rating system
that I know of that is truly objective, so that
you may find examples of games on the market where
you're thinking, this game is rated T for team, this
game is rated M for mature, and I cannot see
a significant difference in content between the two games. That's
(22:26):
entirely possible. Same with M and A O. You might say, well,
why did this incredibly violent game get a mature rating?
But this game which has a brief UH scene, that's
that's part of the game that has some sort of
sexuality to it that got AO. And again it also
brings into question things like the cultural values like which
(22:50):
this gets discussions all the time. Why do we think
of violence being more acceptable than uh scenes that depicts sexuality?
For example. And I mean there's that's a complicated cultural
question that goes well beyond the scope of UH this podcast.
I mean that it would be a fascinating discussion but
(23:10):
doesn't really play into here. But yeah, if you take
a look, there's there's a list that they maintained that
the s r B maintains of all the games that
have received an AO rating. It's a tiny, tiny list.
There's not many, and almost all of them, in fact,
all of them that I can think of, UH have
(23:33):
strong sexual content as one of the components of the game,
and except for one, was gambling and it was actual
gambling and that's what got it an AO rating, and
the rest were strong sexual content which gave it the
A O rating, Whereas there was I think only one
game that I can think of that merited and initially
merited an AO rating based solely upon violence, which was
(23:56):
The Punisher, as I recall, and it was it just
it had such graphic depictions of violence and and torture
scenes that the game publisher ended up going back and
in order to avoid an AO rating, they changed. There
was there was like some interrogation scene I think that
was so intense that that was what was the real problem.
(24:16):
That was the crux of it. So they changed it
from color to a black and white uh image for
that particular sequence, and that was enough to knock it
back down to mature, which is kind of interesting. I
mean again, that's a philosophical discussion that I think needs
to happen and has happened in the past, but needs
to continue to happen. But as outside the scope of
(24:38):
our our show, Yeah, but there aren't There aren't many
for AO and they're almost all PC games. WHOA. I
have to interrupt the episode here because Chris was about
to say something that was going to make this m
for mature. We're gonna take a time out so he
can think about what he did. Well. The according to
(25:03):
the the E s RB, there were one thousand, thirty
two ratings given them were rated E for everyone, um
were everyone ten and older? Were Team were mature. That
actually really surprises me. But maybe it's because it's the
type of games I play which tend to be in
(25:24):
that mature range, because they tend to have a lot
of violence in them, so that that knocks it up
to mature pretty quickly. Um then, and games have gone
a lot more complicated with a big hammer and knocks
it right or up there. But games have got a
lot more complicated than when when the e s RB
first launched these these ratings, games were somewhat less complex
(25:47):
in the sense that not only only were they graphically
more simple, but you didn't have to worry about things
like online components so much. You know, the this was
the era where online gaming was starting to be I'm
a thing, but it was it was pretty rare. Today,
of course, it's common for games to have online components.
So now you will also have other elements included with
(26:10):
your basic rating, which includes the content descriptors, which tell
you why in a very broad sense, the game is
rated a particular way. So I might say, you know,
M for strong, for for violence and blood and gore,
something like that. But there's also what they call interactive elements.
These are features that a game might have that could
(26:34):
uh change the experience of playing that game, but it's
outside the scope of the content itself. This is stuff
like the game has some sort of social element to it,
like it might share personal information about you when you
play this game. Well, that's something that you would want
to know. It doesn't have anything to do with the
content of the game, but because it could share your
personal information, you probably want to know that before you
(26:55):
buy the game, or that it may also allow for
or online play with other gamers. And now again, uh,
an online game might be the least objectionable thing in
the world. It might be a simple puzzle game that
has no objectionable content and would be rated E for
everyone based on the the gameplay itself. But if it
(27:18):
has that online component, then again, adults kind of need
to know because you go online and people do not
necessarily behave the same way that the content would suggest.
So you might have the most foul mouthed, awful person
playing a puzzle game with you, and uh. And you know,
you can't blame it on the game. It's the person
(27:39):
who's doing it. But you know, by including that interactive
element on the box, the person buying the games, like, Okay,
if I play it this way, I can't expect that
sometimes I'm going to encounter material that could be objectionable. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's all subjective, which is that's the and that's
the trickiest art. You know. You you, like I said,
(28:01):
you can have two different you could submit the same
game to two different fully trained groups of people who
that's their job is to uh to put a rating
to a game and get two different results. And it's
because it is subjective. There's you know, it's not like
you count up the number of times someone gets punched
(28:22):
in the face and that determines whether it goes to
from T to M or or whatever. Um. Yeah, so
it's it's a little I mean, but again, this this
is all about the software industry monitoring themselves so that
there's not some sort of government agency doing it for them. Yeah.
Ultimately it's it's in the industry's best interest to do
(28:47):
its own policing so that they can avoid any imperial entanglement,
right right, right, I thought I detected your stench as
sin as I came on board. Um they yes that
no more chili. Uh yeah, it's it's one of those
things where where you know, if the industry didn't do it,
(29:08):
it was gonna get done to them. And again, these
these ratings are guidelines so a store can develop certain policies.
But ultimately, like you know, you could buy games online.
That's another issue. Downloadable content that can change a game
because what comes in the package when you buy it
from the store, could be very simple and yeah, like
(29:30):
you could have a game where it's fairly violent but
not terrible, you know. So so let's say get a
mature ratings, so it's it's bad enough, so they say,
all right, seventeen and older. They that we're gonna limit
it to seventeen or older. And then you have downloadable
content that has much more intense content in it. Then
you might have people say, way, now this really needs
to be adults only. Now that that causes problems. That
(29:52):
makes it more complicated. So yeah, I mean, it's it's
it's a complex issue. I also kind of it does
make me wonder at what level do they say we
need to put this as adults only? It goes beyond
mature because I've played some games that have had some
pretty intense content in it, and you know, not that
(30:13):
I'm advocating that those games get reassigned a different rating,
but it just makes me wonder, really, where where is
the where's the line? You know? And again I suspect
that's the strong sexual content that's really the line. Um
that's just a based on anecdotal experience, So it's not
you know, don't take it to the bank or anything.
(30:35):
But based on some of the incredibly violent games I've played,
where you can do some pretty awful stuff, it does
make me wonder, all right, where's the limit. I don't
I don't understand where the this divider is. Yeah, it's
it's understandable because it's you know, there's with it being subjective,
there's no clear cut book of stuff that people are
(30:57):
judging it by. Now, I would say, if you are
a parent and you're listening to this podcast, pay attention
to those ratings on the video game covers and think
about that, you know, and think about the influence that
might have on a kid, or just think if that's
if that's really something that you think your your kids
should be getting into. I mean, I think I think
(31:19):
parents do need to take a lot of responsibility for
this and pay attention to what their kids are getting into, because, um,
you know, it's better to know upfront than to be
surprised later on. And uh, I mean, if you're cool
with your kid playing mature games, then that's a personal
decision and I'm not going to argue with you one
way or the other. I don't have kids, so I
(31:40):
don't feel like I have any groundstand on when it
comes to that sort of discussion, but just be aware.
As vilified as it is in some circles, I do
think that having the ratings available to people makes it
a little easier to tell sort of the situation you're
getting into when you when you pick up a game. Um,
and there are I'm sure there are quite a few
(32:02):
adults who who are buying games for themselves who's sort
of like, you know, you just see you can glance
at the game, you go, oh, that looks interesting, and
then you see the thing and you might say, you
know what, if this is mature, there's probably a lot
of violence the word, or if you're an adult, you
might look in and say, oh, you look at the
team that's not gonna Yeah. It goes the other way too, right,
like if you have people who want to play really
(32:23):
intense games, they're like, oh, this looks cool, and then
you're like, oh, it's t for teen that's not intense enough.
Just like you know, I hear this all the time
from people who are fans of horror movies and a
horror movie comes out and it's rated PG or PG
thirteen and they think, oh, well, then it's not worth
seeing because it's not gonna you know, personally, I think
that you can do a lot within that rating by
cranking up tension and terror. Uh you know, it doesn't
(32:47):
necessarily mean that it's an inferior movie just because it
has that rating, but that's that's one of those things
like you know, you go out and you buy a game,
or you're going to buy a game. You see it's
ray for everyone. You're like, yeah, I could get that,
or I could get blood, guts and gore or seven
the torturing, which is him, let's get that one instead,
and has nothing to do with the quality of the
(33:08):
content in a sense of whether it's a fun game
to play. It just has to do with the actual content.
So um, yeah, don't treat these ratings as uh as
as a statement of the actual quality of the game itself.
That would be a mistake as well, because you could
have a game that's rated imflemature that's nearly unplayable, just terrible,
(33:32):
and another game that's E for everyone that might seem
like it's just a very you know, kind of simple,
silly game, but be really genuinely fun to play. So
don't take the ratings as any sort of comment on
what the gameplay experience will be like. Alright, guys, that
wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you
(33:52):
enjoyed it, and if you have any suggestions for future
episodes of the show, why why don't you just write
me let me know what is email addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com or pop on over
to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're
gonna find an archive of every single episode we've ever published.
(34:12):
Over there. You will also find links to where we
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want to hear over there if you like. And of
course there's also a link to our online store, where
any purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it and I will talk to you
again really soon. Y text Stuff is a production of
(34:38):
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and I love all
things tech in. Today's episode is a classic episode that
originally published on November nineteenth, two thousand and twelve. It's
(00:26):
titled tech Stuff Gets an E s r B Rating
and I talked about E s r B ratings not
too long ago. But in this episode, Chris Palette and
I actually talk about the e s r B rating system,
where it came from, how it's used, and to get
a deeper understanding of what it's for and you know
why it exists. I hope you guys enjoy we're doing
(00:50):
an episode about the e s RB. Okay, so are
you okay? I am okay. It's the Entertainment Software Rating
Board and this this is actually a request that was
sent to us by a couple of different listeners who
wanted to know more about this system. It's history, why
do we have it, does it work? What's it all about?
So in general, the E s r B. Sorry Alfie,
(01:14):
he has r V. What's it all about Alfie. The
E s r V is a it's a rating system
for video games, and it's it's a rating system not
for the quality of the game, but what is the content,
how the content of the game shapes the game, and
whether or not that content is um uh suitable for
(01:35):
different age groups. So just running through the different ratings
really quickly. Uh. The E s r B has ratings
for e C, which is early childhood. That's games that
are suitable for ages three and older. Younger than three,
we just typically say these are people who probably can't
process what the heck is going on anyway, so it
really doesn't matter what it is, but not really appropriate
(01:58):
in any case. Get that two year old off my Xbox. Uh,
E is for everyone, which is actually not everyone. It's
really content that's suitable for ages six and older. Keeping
in mind that content that's EC early childhood probably has
gameplay elements that most people all over the age of
(02:20):
six wouldn't be terribly interested in. Um. I say most
because there are exceptions. I mean, I'm not going to
pass judgment on Chris if he wants to play lots
of e C games. There's eight ten, ten plus, which
is everyone ten and older, so against slightly more restrictive
than just the E T four teen uh M for
(02:43):
mature meaning people who are seventeen or older uh and
AO AO which is adults only, which has content in
it that should only be played by people of eighteen
years of age or older according to their rating according
to the rating A and each of these each of
(03:03):
these ratings have their own criteria as to you know,
what what constitutes a T rate rating as opposed to
an M rating. And in general, what we're talking about
here are types of content that might include things like
gambling that that will up a E. S R B
rating on a game to a higher one to like
(03:25):
M or whatever. H violence, blood, gore, sexual content, strong language,
drug use, this kind of stuff sort of the same
things that you would see with the Motion Picture Association
of America with their rating system for movies. In fact,
there are a lot of parallels. And you might say,
all right, so we have this rating system, Uh, how
(03:46):
did that get started? And really to to understand that,
you have to go back into the history of video games,
I would argue in a way that you'd have to
go back into the history of entertainment content because I
think e s RB is, well, it's a consortium really,
(04:06):
and and the thing is, I think they we're paying
attention to what had happened to people in other industries
as well, right It just before the before the early nineties,
it was kind of a moot point only because video
games were fairly primitive as far as graphics are concerned.
(04:29):
So it was not easy to graphically represent something that
would be objectionable. Uh, not that people didn't try, and
not that there aren't exceptions, because there are, I'm thinking
of one right off the top of my head for
the Atari Twenty Days, but you could not realistically represent
things like uh, graphic violence or sexual content before the
(04:55):
sixteen bit era. It was just really the consideration was
that the eight bit era and earlier, everything was so
blocky and so pixelated that it didn't really resemble reality.
It was more like seeing something in a cartoon. So uh,
you know, you might watch a cartoon as a kid
of Wildly Coyote and the roadrunner, and the road runner
(05:17):
does something and Wildly Coyote suffers a terrible injury, and
there are some people who would argue that that could
be harmful to kids, uh, seeing how it shaped me
and who I am. Well that's anecdotal anyway. And Chris, uh,
you know, don't worry. I'm not going to do anything
with this enormous mallet behind me. Um he he he. Well, yes,
I and you know that there were some exceptions. I
(05:38):
do bear a striking resemblance to my character from Adventure
on the right. Just a block, because I am a block,
just a just a block, just one pixel block, but
a giant pixel. Uh. Once we got into the sixteen
bit era, we started to have more realistic, more fluid graphics,
and there was you know, the the population that was
(06:01):
playing video games was beginning to grow older. You know,
you were you had people who had started playing video
games as kids on systems like the Atari or the
Ninteno Entertainment System or whatever, and so they were continuing
to play video games as they got older, and their
interests began to um go into more what we call
(06:23):
mature subjects. So just like people who watched movies, you know,
they might want to go see an R rated movie
or something, uh, same sort of thing. And so the
video game publishers began to cater to that audience. I mean,
you've got to remember also the people who were developing
video games. They were video game players, you know, when
they were kids. And we're talking about the early nineties here.
(06:44):
The people who played video games in the very early
eighties were now the people who were making video games
in the nineties. Their tastes had matured, and so you
started to see video games that were depicting violence in
a more realistic and graphic way than ever before, and
that began to raise some concerns in the minds of
(07:05):
certain people. UH. Some of those people held quite a
bit of influence, people like UH, the Senator Joe Lieberman
UH and Senator Herb Herb Cole. They both were concerned
and they had hearings in the United States Senate about
video game violence and how that affected children and whether
(07:28):
or not in fact, video games were contributing to the
corruption of society. This is not a new thing at all.
We have had politicians worry about various forms of entertainment
corrupting the youth and ruining everything. And that's why apple
pie doesn't taste as sweet. It's why you can't walk
(07:49):
down the street at night. It's why you have to
lock your doors when you leave in the evening. It's
it's why you you never have the paper because your
neighbor always steals it. It's it's it's the perp. It's
actually the reason why everything is terrible. Now I'm exaggerating
for effect. I didn't know if you were you were,
you know, well no, but um but yeah, I mean.
(08:13):
And then it's not just politicians, of course, their parents associations.
There are just concerned citizens who draw conclusions that a
form of entertainment and the its popularity among a certain
group might in fact influence that certain group to behave
in a negative way or to be desensitized against violence
(08:34):
for example. Exactly. Yes, so not necessarily they'll go out
and hit somebody over the head with a mallet, But
if they see someone else hit someone over the head
with a mallet, they won't necessarily spring to action. Um yeah.
There there are concerns, and there have been lots of
different studies with very different outcomes about whether or not
(08:54):
violence in media affects people in a real way beyond
you know, beyond like a visceral reaction. Does it have
a lasting impact on a person's personality. Those are questions
that still have not been fully answered because there are
a lot of studies out there with conflicting results. I
know what I believe, but but there are results the
(09:16):
conflict with what I believe. So well, as it turns out,
it may be one of those frustrating situation where it
may depend on the individual person, right, Well, in which
case I would argue that that's a person that's a
person issue, not a not an industry issue, right because
it's it's one of those things you can make the
argument of, well, if this one person who was affected
by this one type of media were to instead have
(09:38):
fixated upon another type of media, we'd be having the
same discussion, but we'd be having it about music. And
this discussion has been about music. It has been about television,
it has been about film, it's been about novels. It's
been about classical music. I mean, any form of entertainment.
You can imagine. It's gone through this experience of people
talking about, you know, that novel, that new fangled way
(10:01):
of putting words together and creating fanciful fictional stories is
ruining everything. Oh yeah, that that Actually there were people
who said that novels we're bringing about the downfall of society. Well, hey,
I recently read that that Plato I think it was,
had rebelled against the written words. He said, no, it's
(10:22):
because writing things down means that you are sapping your
own ability to think that was the idea. It's it's
the same argument about Google making us stupid, because everything
that we need to know is on the web now,
so we don't need to remember it in our our
meat space heads. Um. So yeah, I mean, anyway, like
we the point of that whole thing is just to
(10:44):
say video games are not unique in this situation. This
has gone through multiple venues, multiple forms of media. But
in this case you had a lot of pressure coming
from the United States government for something to be done
in the video game industry. Within the industry itself or
the ultimatum was, if you guys don't get together and
(11:06):
figure out a way of taking care of this, then
we're gonna do it. We being the United States government,
and the industry was like, did not want that to happen.
They did not want to have some sort of federal
regulation in place over the video game industry, and so
it was imperative to come up with some sort of
industry based ratings system that could be demonstrably proven to
(11:29):
be as objective as possible, so it's not you know,
it's not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes or anything. Uh.
And to have some sort of enforceable policy. Yeah, those
were all important issues. Yeah. And and again they're they're
taking their their their cues from other similar or other
entertainment industries, like the Motion Picture Association of America with
(11:52):
with movie ratings several decades prior, and of course the
Comics Code from comic books after Frederick Wortham's uh um
Seduction of the Innocent um. Wow. But yeah, I mean,
these these industries self regulated. They said, okay, okay, you
know what, we'll get together. We'll form a group, and
we will come up with a rating system that helps
(12:14):
people identify what kind of content to you know, will
be in the package when you when you do this.
And yeah, I mean there were there were certain games
in particular, I think some you know, like Mortal Kombats.
That's the one. The Mortal Kombat, I think more than
any other video game, has been cited as the the
genesis of this discussion. I mean there are other ones
(12:35):
to like Doom that was another big one, domm Night
Trap for home games, Lethal Enforcers, which was, as I recall,
a light gun based game. So I mean, yeah, these
these were games that had a lot of violence in them.
Of course, by today's games standards, if you're talking about
a truly, truly violent game in today's standards, they might
(12:56):
seem quaint in comparison. Yeah, but but you know, that
was what caused these conversations to happen, and as a result,
the games industry are actually different. Companies within the industry
all began to suggest ratings systems, and in fact, there
were quite a few. In the earliest days. There were
several competing One. Sega came out with one, the Video
(13:17):
Game Rating Council. Uh. Yep, Video Game Rating Council was
from Sega. There was the three D O suggested one. Uh.
They they had the Recreational Software Advisory Council formed by
Software Publishers Association, and then there was one called the
Interactive Digital Software Association, which again was a uh it's
(13:41):
a collection, it's a collection of software companies that were
uh advocating for a particular rating system, and that I
D s A. It's eventually became the Entertainment Software Rating
Board e s r B. As we now know it,
that got present it to Congress, and in uh Congress
(14:05):
approved the form the formation of the s E s
R B, and they you know, it was formally made
the rating system for American video games. So if you
pick up a video game in America, a video game case,
there's a very good chance, in fact, an overwhelmingly good chance,
that you will see a little black box with white
(14:27):
white inside, and then there's a black letter that indicates
what the rating for that particular game is UM and
and that's become the standard essentially. And here's the thing
is that there's there's no The reason for this again
is so that the consumer has an idea of what
type of content is going to be in that game. Uh,
(14:48):
it's it's not specifically meant to dictate two retailers what
they need to do with each type of game. Like
in other words, there's no rule that says, okay, anything
that is rated T or or higher in the on
the maturity scale like T or M or a O
(15:09):
cannot be three feet off the floor. It has to
be higher up than that. Like, there's no rule about that.
There's no there's no specific policy in place or law
in place that says you have to be a certain
age to be able to buy a game. The rating
is there as a guide to say this is what,
this is who the game is intended. You know, we
(15:31):
mean this for people who are seventeen or older or
eighteen or older. Chris and I have more to say
about the s r B rating system, but before we
get to that, let's take a quick break. There was
the United States Supreme Court found that that you cannot
(15:53):
restrict mature or adults only titles to specific age groups
to be cause video game content falls under the realm
of free speech, which cannot be infringed upon by the government.
Now that doesn't mean that the stores can't have policies,
because the stores are not the government. In fact, that
was the whole reason why this board was formed, was
(16:15):
so that they could keep that separation between government and business.
So a an actual retailer, if you were to go
to a video game store, they might have a policy
that says, we do not sell uh any game that
is ranked M or AO to anyone under the age
of seventeen, and we will ask for I D. And
(16:36):
that's their policy, and it's perfectly fine. The government can't
restrict it, but a store can and UH also go
ahead and say it. AO games very rarely get carried
in stores because it's kind of the same thing as
the n C seventeen rating for films. Films that get
an NC seventeen rating very very rarely get any sort
(16:59):
of relief in most theaters. You might have a few
independent theaters that will run in C seventeen movies, but
in general they do not get any sort of wide
release at all. It's very rare when that happens. So
the same sort of thing with AO games. So getting
an AO rating. If you are a game publisher and
you develop a game and you submit it to the
e s r B and you get an A O rating,
(17:21):
your first reaction might be, we need to change this
because no one's going to carry our game in stores
and we're not going to make any money. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
they don't They don't necessarily play all of the games.
Actually they don't. They don't play the games at all. Well,
they do have in house testers, according to the s
r B, who do go through it um and as
(17:41):
a result of UH the whole hot Coffee incident, they
are supposed to at least disclose everything that's in the
in the package that you could get even if it's hidden. Okay,
So in order to in order to understand what Chris
has just said, you know, we have to have some
background here. First of all, the general way that a
game manufacturer submits a game to the s r B
(18:04):
E s RBS UH general way of testing a game
doesn't necessarily involve playing it. It can involve playing it,
but to play a game and to really get a
sense of what the content is all about can take
hours and hours and hours of gameplay, so they don't
play every single game that comes into them all the
way through. What they do tend to do, though, is
(18:25):
part of the E s r B ratings processes. They
require a game manufacturer to submit a DVD that has
on it the examples of the most extreme types of
content that game has. So, in other words, you're watching
like a clip compilation of the worst of this game,
(18:46):
worst being in the sense of like the most intense content.
So if if it has any sort of violent content,
or uh, sexually graphic content, or or foul language, anything
like that, anything that would affect the rating, the most
intense examples of that are supposed to be included on
the DVD so that the ratings experts who are trained
(19:09):
in UH the the processes that the E s r
B uses to determine the rating for a game, so
that they can determine what rating applies here. And if
you were to release a game that turned out to
contain content that went beyond what you showed the DVD
(19:29):
in the DVD, you could suffer some pretty stiff fines industry.
UH the industry itself would find you and you could
face a recall which could be very expensive to recall
all the copies of the game. Now that is the
case when when Christmas talking about the hot Coffee incident,
that's specifically talking about it was Grand Theft Auto four right,
(19:52):
I want to say, or Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
Grand Theft Auto s Andreas was specifically what it was.
Uh I owned that game. So this was something that
was originally included in the game, and it was a
mini game, and it was it was a sexual encounter
and it was Ultimately the game designers decided not to
include it in the game, but they didn't remove it
(20:14):
so much as they kind of the code was still there,
but it was inactive. It was sort of like an
Easter egg. Well, yeah, you could get to it if
you if you knew how to either uh, if you
knew how to either alter an Xbox console or if
you're using the PC version, if you were able to
use some software to activate the code, you could get
(20:36):
access to this game. But it was this mini game
within the game, but it was not intended for public consumption,
at least that's what the publisher said. And the problem
was that went outside what they had submitted to the
ratings board, and they had their original rating for that
game was M for mature. That mini game pushed it
(20:58):
over to adults only, and so they ended up doing
a recall and republishing the game without the code in
at all so they could regain that M mature rating. Ah,
if you were to uh submit your game again, you
would send this DVD to the e s r B.
They would have up to well at least three people
(21:20):
looking at it. Those three people would have experience with kids.
That's actually one of the requirements is that they would
have to have some sort of experience, either professional or personal,
with children in order to be able to view the
content and then judge at what age level is this appropriate,
and so it's not just you know, some scientists with
(21:42):
beakers and uh, not that kind of beaker, but with
a like electronic device is saying, well, scientifically, we've determined
that sixteen is exactly the age at which this game
can be sold, and no one under sixteen should ever
play it. It's not that it's uh, it's a little
more subjective than that. In fact, so is in fact
(22:03):
the film rating system. It's not there's no rating system
that I know of that is truly objective, so that
you may find examples of games on the market where
you're thinking, this game is rated T for team, this
game is rated M for mature, and I cannot see
a significant difference in content between the two games. That's
(22:26):
entirely possible. Same with M and A O. You might say, well,
why did this incredibly violent game get a mature rating?
But this game which has a brief UH scene, that's
that's part of the game that has some sort of
sexuality to it that got AO. And again it also
brings into question things like the cultural values like which
(22:50):
this gets discussions all the time. Why do we think
of violence being more acceptable than uh scenes that depicts sexuality?
For example. And I mean there's that's a complicated cultural
question that goes well beyond the scope of UH this podcast.
I mean that it would be a fascinating discussion but
(23:10):
doesn't really play into here. But yeah, if you take
a look, there's there's a list that they maintained that
the s r B maintains of all the games that
have received an AO rating. It's a tiny, tiny list.
There's not many, and almost all of them, in fact,
all of them that I can think of, UH have
(23:33):
strong sexual content as one of the components of the game,
and except for one, was gambling and it was actual
gambling and that's what got it an AO rating, and
the rest were strong sexual content which gave it the
A O rating, Whereas there was I think only one
game that I can think of that merited and initially
merited an AO rating based solely upon violence, which was
(23:56):
The Punisher, as I recall, and it was it just
it had such graphic depictions of violence and and torture
scenes that the game publisher ended up going back and
in order to avoid an AO rating, they changed. There
was there was like some interrogation scene I think that
was so intense that that was what was the real problem.
(24:16):
That was the crux of it. So they changed it
from color to a black and white uh image for
that particular sequence, and that was enough to knock it
back down to mature, which is kind of interesting. I
mean again, that's a philosophical discussion that I think needs
to happen and has happened in the past, but needs
to continue to happen. But as outside the scope of
(24:38):
our our show, Yeah, but there aren't There aren't many
for AO and they're almost all PC games. WHOA. I
have to interrupt the episode here because Chris was about
to say something that was going to make this m
for mature. We're gonna take a time out so he
can think about what he did. Well. The according to
(25:03):
the the E s RB, there were one thousand, thirty
two ratings given them were rated E for everyone, um
were everyone ten and older? Were Team were mature. That
actually really surprises me. But maybe it's because it's the
type of games I play which tend to be in
(25:24):
that mature range, because they tend to have a lot
of violence in them, so that that knocks it up
to mature pretty quickly. Um then, and games have gone
a lot more complicated with a big hammer and knocks
it right or up there. But games have got a
lot more complicated than when when the e s RB
first launched these these ratings, games were somewhat less complex
(25:47):
in the sense that not only only were they graphically
more simple, but you didn't have to worry about things
like online components so much. You know, the this was
the era where online gaming was starting to be I'm
a thing, but it was it was pretty rare. Today,
of course, it's common for games to have online components.
So now you will also have other elements included with
(26:10):
your basic rating, which includes the content descriptors, which tell
you why in a very broad sense, the game is
rated a particular way. So I might say, you know,
M for strong, for for violence and blood and gore,
something like that. But there's also what they call interactive elements.
These are features that a game might have that could
(26:34):
uh change the experience of playing that game, but it's
outside the scope of the content itself. This is stuff
like the game has some sort of social element to it,
like it might share personal information about you when you
play this game. Well, that's something that you would want
to know. It doesn't have anything to do with the
content of the game, but because it could share your
personal information, you probably want to know that before you
(26:55):
buy the game, or that it may also allow for
or online play with other gamers. And now again, uh,
an online game might be the least objectionable thing in
the world. It might be a simple puzzle game that
has no objectionable content and would be rated E for
everyone based on the the gameplay itself. But if it
(27:18):
has that online component, then again, adults kind of need
to know because you go online and people do not
necessarily behave the same way that the content would suggest.
So you might have the most foul mouthed, awful person
playing a puzzle game with you, and uh. And you know,
you can't blame it on the game. It's the person
(27:39):
who's doing it. But you know, by including that interactive
element on the box, the person buying the games, like, Okay,
if I play it this way, I can't expect that
sometimes I'm going to encounter material that could be objectionable. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's all subjective, which is that's the and that's
the trickiest art. You know. You you, like I said,
(28:01):
you can have two different you could submit the same
game to two different fully trained groups of people who
that's their job is to uh to put a rating
to a game and get two different results. And it's
because it is subjective. There's you know, it's not like
you count up the number of times someone gets punched
(28:22):
in the face and that determines whether it goes to
from T to M or or whatever. Um. Yeah, so
it's it's a little I mean, but again, this this
is all about the software industry monitoring themselves so that
there's not some sort of government agency doing it for them. Yeah.
Ultimately it's it's in the industry's best interest to do
(28:47):
its own policing so that they can avoid any imperial entanglement,
right right, right, I thought I detected your stench as
sin as I came on board. Um they yes that
no more chili. Uh yeah, it's it's one of those
things where where you know, if the industry didn't do it,
(29:08):
it was gonna get done to them. And again, these
these ratings are guidelines so a store can develop certain policies.
But ultimately, like you know, you could buy games online.
That's another issue. Downloadable content that can change a game
because what comes in the package when you buy it
from the store, could be very simple and yeah, like
(29:30):
you could have a game where it's fairly violent but
not terrible, you know. So so let's say get a
mature ratings, so it's it's bad enough, so they say,
all right, seventeen and older. They that we're gonna limit
it to seventeen or older. And then you have downloadable
content that has much more intense content in it. Then
you might have people say, way, now this really needs
to be adults only. Now that that causes problems. That
(29:52):
makes it more complicated. So yeah, I mean, it's it's
it's a complex issue. I also kind of it does
make me wonder at what level do they say we
need to put this as adults only? It goes beyond
mature because I've played some games that have had some
pretty intense content in it, and you know, not that
(30:13):
I'm advocating that those games get reassigned a different rating,
but it just makes me wonder, really, where where is
the where's the line? You know? And again I suspect
that's the strong sexual content that's really the line. Um
that's just a based on anecdotal experience, So it's not
you know, don't take it to the bank or anything.
(30:35):
But based on some of the incredibly violent games I've played,
where you can do some pretty awful stuff, it does
make me wonder, all right, where's the limit. I don't
I don't understand where the this divider is. Yeah, it's
it's understandable because it's you know, there's with it being subjective,
there's no clear cut book of stuff that people are
(30:57):
judging it by. Now, I would say, if you are
a parent and you're listening to this podcast, pay attention
to those ratings on the video game covers and think
about that, you know, and think about the influence that
might have on a kid, or just think if that's
if that's really something that you think your your kids
should be getting into. I mean, I think I think
(31:19):
parents do need to take a lot of responsibility for
this and pay attention to what their kids are getting into, because, um,
you know, it's better to know upfront than to be
surprised later on. And uh, I mean, if you're cool
with your kid playing mature games, then that's a personal
decision and I'm not going to argue with you one
way or the other. I don't have kids, so I
(31:40):
don't feel like I have any groundstand on when it
comes to that sort of discussion, but just be aware.
As vilified as it is in some circles, I do
think that having the ratings available to people makes it
a little easier to tell sort of the situation you're
getting into when you when you pick up a game. Um,
and there are I'm sure there are quite a few
(32:02):
adults who who are buying games for themselves who's sort
of like, you know, you just see you can glance
at the game, you go, oh, that looks interesting, and
then you see the thing and you might say, you
know what, if this is mature, there's probably a lot
of violence the word, or if you're an adult, you
might look in and say, oh, you look at the
team that's not gonna Yeah. It goes the other way too, right,
like if you have people who want to play really
(32:23):
intense games, they're like, oh, this looks cool, and then
you're like, oh, it's t for teen that's not intense enough.
Just like you know, I hear this all the time
from people who are fans of horror movies and a
horror movie comes out and it's rated PG or PG
thirteen and they think, oh, well, then it's not worth
seeing because it's not gonna you know, personally, I think
that you can do a lot within that rating by
cranking up tension and terror. Uh you know, it doesn't
(32:47):
necessarily mean that it's an inferior movie just because it
has that rating, but that's that's one of those things
like you know, you go out and you buy a game,
or you're going to buy a game. You see it's
ray for everyone. You're like, yeah, I could get that,
or I could get blood, guts and gore or seven
the torturing, which is him, let's get that one instead,
and has nothing to do with the quality of the
(33:08):
content in a sense of whether it's a fun game
to play. It just has to do with the actual content.
So um, yeah, don't treat these ratings as uh as
as a statement of the actual quality of the game itself.
That would be a mistake as well, because you could
have a game that's rated imflemature that's nearly unplayable, just terrible,
(33:32):
and another game that's E for everyone that might seem
like it's just a very you know, kind of simple,
silly game, but be really genuinely fun to play. So
don't take the ratings as any sort of comment on
what the gameplay experience will be like. Alright, guys, that
wraps up this classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you
(33:52):
enjoyed it, and if you have any suggestions for future
episodes of the show, why why don't you just write
me let me know what is email addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com or pop on over
to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're
gonna find an archive of every single episode we've ever published.
(34:12):
Over there. You will also find links to where we
are in social media, so you can reach out on
Facebook or on Twitter and let us know what you
want to hear over there if you like. And of
course there's also a link to our online store, where
any purchase you make goes to help the show and
we greatly appreciate it and I will talk to you
again really soon. Y text Stuff is a production of
(34:38):
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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