[LINK] US games rating by machine

[Jan Whitaker]

Busy Job of Judging Video-Game Content to Be Ceded to Machines
By SETH SCHIESEL
April 18, 2011

The little E’s, T’s and M’s that appear on the 
covers of video games get there the old-fashioned 
way: People working for the Entertainment 
Software Rating Board look at the games, decide 
how gory, sexy or potty-mouthed they are, and 
bestow an age-appropriate rating accordingly.

That was then. This is now. Starting on Monday 
the ratings board plans to begin introducing 
computers to the job of deciding whether a game 
is appropriate for Everyone, for Teens or for 
Mature gamers (meaning older than 16). To do this 
the organization has written a program designed 
to replicate the ingrained cultural norms and 
predilections of the everyday American consumer, 
at least when it comes to what is appropriate for children and what isn’t.

Faced with an explosion in the number of games 
being released online, the board plans to 
announce on Monday that the main evaluation of 
hundreds of games each year will be based not on 
direct human judgment but instead on a detailed 
digital questionnaire meant to gauge every subtle 
nuance of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug 
use, gambling and bodily function that could possibly offend anyone.

The questionnaire, to be filled out by a game’s 
makers (with penalties for nondisclosure), is 
like a psychological inquest into the depths of 
all the things our culture considers potentially unwholesome.

Offensive language, for instance, is broken down 
into six subcategories: minor profanities, 
epithets, scatological vulgarities, racial 
obscenities, sexual vulgarisms and a final 
category devoted to one particular three-letter 
word that refers to both a beast of burden and, 
colloquially, to a part of human anatomy. 
(Interestingly, the survey does not ask about 
religious slurs, perhaps because those are 
relatively rare in popular Western culture.)

The sexuality category is fairly straightforward 
— basically, if there’s sex, how much of it can 
you actually see? — as are the sections on 
gambling and drugs. And surely every consumer is grateful that

the portion on bodily functions makes a point to 
ask separately about flatulence sounds, 
“whimsical depictions of feces,” realistically 
depicted feces and the “act of human (or 
humanlike character) defecation visually depicted.”

This is the sort of stuff that major 
international corporations generally like to know 
about before they offer a mass-market media product for sale to the world.

As the Supreme Court prepares to release its 
potentially groundbreaking decision on a 
California law that intends to regulate the sale 
of video games (an announcement is expected any 
week now, and potentially as early as Monday), it 
may bear remembering that Justice Potter Stewart 
found it impossible to reduce obscenity to a 
definition, declaring, “I know it when I see it.”

And yet in this digital age it is inevitable 
perhaps that a group that is paid to sort 
creative entertainment endeavors into neat and 
tidy categories based on content would eventually 
start outsourcing its mission to computers. After all, major companies,....

More at the website:
http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/#/Technology//www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/arts/video-games/video-games-rating-board-questionnaire.html


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the 
world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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