Famicom Dojo Podcast: Video Game Ratings Are Useless

I believe employees at Target and Walmart are required to check the ID of someone buying a M-rated game, but I don’t know if they ever explain the ratings to parents. Education about what the rating mean has always been one of the ESRB’s bigger stumbling blocks. I remember they teamed with Penny Arcade to do some promotional adds explaining the ratings, but I think those only ran in Game Informer. I’m not sure how many parents were reading that, and I would assume that most of the ones who did know the rating system already.

Now while the game ratings aren’t legally enforced in the States, there are some countries that do. In particular, PEGI is legally enforced in a couple European countries, but I don’t know often that comes up.

There’s along one rating system you missed: the USK (Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle). As you might guess, that’s the rating system used by Germany, and is a lot stricter than any other rating system (which is part of the reason why a lot of games get heavily changed for release there). I think they might even be one of the few European countries that doesn’t officially recognize PEGI, since the official PEGI website doesn’t list Germany on their country list.

Actually, if you ever wanted to revisit this topic you could discuss whether rating systems may actually have harmful effects on the medium. Since most realtors won’t carry AO-rated games, the rating is basically a death sentence. Plus since you have to pay to get a game certified, it can provide a barrier to entry for indies, or even known developers if they want to rerelease games that came out before there were rating boards.