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OPINION: ESRB's 'Includes Random ltems' Label Solves Nothing
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OPINION: ESRB's 'Includes Random ltems' Label Solves Nothing
Earlier this week, the ESRB introduced a new label as part of its rating system, called "Includes Random Items." This label is meant to account for in-game purchases constituting a random nature, such as card packs, gacha games, and yes, loot boxes. In truth, this label is merely a weak Band-Aid and does nothing to address root cause. It solves nothing.
Comments
It's deliberate avoidance of the loot box label and saying that they did this because they wanted to account for loot boxes and all similar mechanics is just lame. What other similar mechanics? Loot boxes that are called happy unicorn crates?
They're just going along with the industry practice of calling loot boxes anything but loot boxes to make them seem like even more harmless benign things. This is just another version of "we call them surprise mechanics."
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I think the danger is in the T rating. Saying it’s suitable for children 13 and up. So yes in this case I think they could actually be doing more harm than good.
I’m fine with allowing developers doing whatever they want regarding mechanics, but I think this should NEVER be marketed to kids (13 is a kid) and they should have to list odds.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Let's go back in time nearly thirty years and recall where game ratings came from. At the time, video games generally meant on either a Nintendo or Sega console. Parents were sometimes scandalized to learn that their kids were playing games like Mortal Kombat that had gratuitous blood everywhere. The parents typically weren't gamers themselves, and didn't have time to monitor every single thing that their kids would ever do in a game. But they wanted their kids to stick to less scandalous fare.
At the time, the Internet barely existed, and few people had access. Downloading games pretty much wasn't a thing. In order to get a new game, you had to have a physical cartridge (or later CD). Kids largely couldn't do this on their own, especially younger ones, and needed parents to buy games for them. So parents largely had control of which games their kids could play, at least in their own home. And parents wanted a way to screen out games that were excessively sexual or violent.
Sega and Nintendo took two wildly different approaches. Sega introduced a ratings system for games on their consoles. Any game that would be released had to be rated, and then parents could look at the rating and decide accordingly.
Nintendo instead insisted that all games on their consoles were appropriate for all ages. They heavily censored games on their consoles to make it so. Thus, you could buy Mortal Kombat for SNES, but the "blood" was clear--at least unless you also bought a Game Genie to change the color of the blood to something else. Nintendo would allow Wolfenstein to have a rocket launcher cause a fiery, red explosion if it hit a wall, but not if it hit a person, as that looked too much like blood. Game developers sometimes tried to slip things past Nintendo. One game by Square had a mob that was a book flipping quickly, and if you paused the game at the right time, you could see one of the pages that it flipped past was a naked baby.
It wasn't just parents who were concerned. There were also politicians who wanted to cater to such parents. There were calls for government censorship of games, and the industry wished to avoid that. Ultimately, Nintendo's censorship was untenable, and Sega's approach won out.
The gaming industry formed the ESRB to have a universal rating system to rate games and tell parents what was in their games. Instead of having one rating system for games on Sega consoles, a totally different one for Nintendo, and yet another for Sony and their newfangled PlayStation, the entire gaming industry would settle on a common rating system and try to make it comprehensible to parents. If you want to keep the most gratuitous sex and violence out of your home, it would be sufficient to check the rating and not let your kids play anything rated M (or the rare AO). Stricter parents (or those with younger children) could also frown on games rated T.
A lot has changed since then, of course. Game consoles are still around, but a lot of gaming has moved to PCs, and more recently, to phones. Most games are downloaded now, and physical media to install a game is fairly rare. Many games are "free", so kids can get access without needing a parent's car or even a parent's credit card. The barriers to developing and releasing a game are much lower, so many more games launch in a given month than used to. Many games don't get an ESRB rating at all.
The ESRB is thus a lot less important than it used to be. One could dispute that it was ever all that important, but its influence has certainly waned. And in an era where nearly any device connected to the Internet can readily access outright pornography, some of the parental objections from decades past seem downright quaint.
The ESRB carries on with its mission of trying to give parents who are not gamers some easy access to information about the games that their kids are playing in much the same way that movie ratings do. One of the modern concerns is with games that find ways to trick kids into spending vastly more money than their parents expected. And so the ESRB needed a way to warn parents who had no notion of what a "loot box" is which games might do this. That's where this content descriptor came from. The ESRB isn't trying to obfuscate anything. They're trying to concisely describe things to parents who aren't gamers themselves.
What labels?
Even calling them "loot boxes" in the first place is a whitewashing of the gambling it really is. So no this is a shit addition to the "in game purchases" warning that is designed to mislead.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I know lots of people that read them, myself included. Family guy that want to look after my family. I use sites like kids-in-mind.com to also keep them safe and many other tools like these. These things matter, if someone has a gambling problem they are trying to fight, this label will help them know what games to avoid. Im very happy to see this.
The fundamental objection to loot boxes is that people pay real money to get random items, is it not? In game purchases of random items is pretty good for a short description of loot boxes, I think.
Getting people who are unfamiliar with the mechanic to understand why it is so insidious takes a much longer explanation. That's probably going to require stories like this one in non-gaming media:
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/kendrick-perkins-children-accumulate-16000-of-fortnite-charges-on-his-credit-card/
They know what loot boxes are. They know what they do to addictive personalities including children. They know they work exactly the same way that slot machines work. And they also know that using gambling as a much more explicit and honest descriptor would alarm more parents and result in lower sales. Hence the more sanitized version of "random items."
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Instead of worrying about wording, eliminate the root cause: get rid of loot boxes
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The issue is that the ESRB have proven that can’t and won’t do anything, as I indicate in the article. They need to regulated from an outside independent body. And loot boxes must be eliminated through that regulation.
Root cause is already sufficiently addressed - there are treatment programs for the former and hefty bills to pay for the laziness/irrisponsibility/stupidity of the latter.
This perspective fails to take into account those who have genuine addiction problems. Loot boxes may be fine for you, but they're not targeting people like you (or me) who know exactly what loot boxes are. They're a gambling mechanic and prey on folks with legitimate addictive issues, in addition to people who don't know better like children and uninformed parents.