Personally, I’m not sure I believe children will be scarred for life if they see a virtual bare breast before the age of 17. But, some parents apparently disagree, and I’m glad to see that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board is doing a good job of keeping such parents abreast (so to speak) of what’s in the latest video games. When it was discovered that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion could be modified to remove the female players’ tops, it was quickly yanked from the shelves for re-labeling:
When game publishers submit upcoming releases to the ESRB, they also must include videos of a game’s most intense sexual or violent content. Because games like Oblivion can be played for dozens of hours without players seeing everything in them, the organization depends on publishers to send them the most potentially objectionable content.
The company said that it did not hide anything from the ratings group and that its pre-release submission on Oblivion was “full, accurate and comprehensive.”
Bethesda blamed the partial nudity of some characters on tampering by third parties who have modified the game’s art files and said it appeared in only Oblivion’s PC version. The company said it did not “create a game with nudity and does not intend that nudity appear in Oblivion” and added that it was taking steps to protect the game’s art archive from tampering.
Local game designer Brian Reynolds, head of Big Huge Games Inc. in Timonium, Md., said, “It would be a disaster for us” if the ESRB re-designated one of his titles after its release.
“That’s something you never want to see, games getting pulled off shelves,” he said.
Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said pulling games and re-stickering them is an expensive process.
“Many people see the ESRB as a tool of the industry–but, in fact, developers fear it,” he said. “They are tough as nails.”
Tough as nails? Don’t tell that to Hillary Clinton. It might get in the way of her grandstanding.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Comments on this entry are closed.