Paper Abstract - Pierre Wilhelm

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ABSTRACT

Videogame Ratings and Regulation in the United States

Pierre Wilhelm

The entertainment industry has been under relentless political fire and pressure since the beginning of modern visual mass media, starting with film. Over the time, technological advances shifted the focus of legislators' attention from film to television, and now to videogames.

The ability of electronic media of mass entertainment to build large audiences, particularly for genres that feature anti-social activities, generated concern about possible deleterious short-term and long-term (cumulative) effects at the societal level caused by massive exposure/use (in terms of percentage of the population and amount of exposure time per person). Children have always been regarded as the most vulnerable segment of the audience because of their easy and rather uncontrolled access to electronic entertainment, their limited knowledge and critical thinking skills, and their comparable large amount of leisure time-all of which make them easy to attract, keep hooked to entertainment media, and ultimately influence through the media fare they use.

The population categories that felt directly responsible for children's development (parents, professional educators, medical doctors) organized the lobbies that exerted political muscle to get legislative action in support of what they perceived to be children's interests neglected by the market forces, which only catered to children's need for entertainment. In order to prevent dramatic restrictions from outside the market (through legislation), the industry rushed to self-regulate. Based on the largely unfounded assumptions of responsible adult choice and parental control over children's entertainment activities, and glorifying freedom of speech and individual choice in the market, the entertainment media established the practice of ratings or advisory content labels supposed to guide parents' (children's) choice for "age appropriate" content. This practice left appropriateness to be defined mostly by the changing tastes and standards of the public, who usually cries foul only when outraged or severely hurt, that is, post factum, under extreme circumstances, and seeking correction/redress through the legislative and judicial systems. Given the tendency of reparatory measures to lag behind harmful realities, a question of interest to the contemporary public is, How can the lag and risk be minimized in the case of videogame effects?

The present study prepares the ground for answering this question by examining the videogame rating initiatives in the United States in a complex environment where interest groups pressure the legislative body using ammunition provided by academic research conducted mostly in the cultural-critical vein of the television-era tradition or in the cutting-edge (cut-throat) technology arena supported by the major market suppliers. Some consideration is given to the political and economic background (war and recession conditions) that set current priorities in the U.S. videogame effects debate, research, and policies. The paper discusses U.S. Congress hearings and legislation, the opinion trends in industry journals, and findings of literature reviews and meta-analyses of videogame research. The paper tries to account for the typically American "politically correct" marketing scheme of videogame fare, in which product information loading is used to tune up consumer and legislator judgment.

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