On the Hill and in Court, a Shootout Over Ratings

Retailers are free to establish their own policies for enforcing the ratings, according to the ESRB.

Pat Vance, the head of the ratings board, says the group has conducted surveys showing that there is an 83 percent awareness of the game industry's ratings system among consumers. By comparison, the movie ratings system has about 90 percent awareness, she said.

Vance said the video game industry is a target largely because it still suffers from a perception that games are for kids, even though the age of today's average gamer is over 30. "I think a lot of people who propose this sort of legislation have never purchased a game or don't play them," she said.

Brownback has a Nintendo GameCube-playing 8-year-old, though the senator certainly doesn't play games. At best, he said, video games make people sedentary; at worst, he believes, violent video games may lead to violent behavior.

"I think the consumer really needs to know the impact of these things," he said. "I would like to see an entity that has independence from the video game industry, not dependent on them, and have some standardization."

The game industry could argue that its ratings system isn't terribly different from the movie industry's -- but Brownback said he also finds the movie industry's system to be "inadequate and suspect."

Not surprisingly, the game industry would rather not have the government get involved.

Jeff Brown, head of corporate communications at game publisher Electronic Arts, said Brownback has legitimate concerns. "We're very receptive to their input," he said, "but we don't think having government getting involved makes any more sense than it would for movies or television."

A lot of this falls on the heels of a controversial move by Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Ronald Friedman, who agreed this month to watch someone play Bully, the latest release by gamemaker Rockstar, to assess its content for violence.

I played it a few hours this week, and it seemed relatively harmless, especially compared with just about every other game Rockstar has put out. Bully is nowhere near as spectacularly violent as recent games such as the gang-oriented Saints Row -- which itself is a rip-off of Rockstar's most famous franchise, Grand Theft Auto.

Bully, with kids who beat one another down with baseball bats and slingshots on a regular basis, is about as offensive to me as an issue of Mad magazine.

But the Bully brouhaha isn't over yet: The National Institute on Media & Family has called for a boycott, and school districts are speaking out against the title, which was rated T, for teens, by ESRB.

Meanwhile, politicians and gamemakers are butting heads so frequently lately that there's a news site dedicated exclusively to the subject, the aptly named GamePolitics.com. For people who care about games, the site is becoming a must-read.

Fun fact: One of the main catalysts for the game ratings system was a game about vampires that featured actress Dana Plato of "Diff'rent Strokes" fame and was produced by former Washington Post music writer Tom Zito.

Alas, the game, called Night Trap, is occasionally remembered only on "worst games ever" lists these days.