Legal Constraints and Ratings

As of March 2010, in the U.S. there is no federal law against the sale of violent video games to children in the United States. Several of the states have passed laws intended to control sale of violent video games, but in all cases the courts have ruled them unconstitutional on the grounds that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the laws restricting sale of violent video games are construed by the courts to restrict speech.

However there is a system of self-regulation governed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). The ESRB is a self-regulatory body for the interactive entertainment software industry established in 1994 by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), formerly the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA). ESRB independently applies and enforces ratings, advertising guidelines, and online privacy principles adopted by the computer and video game industry. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings are designed to provide information about video and computer game content, so consumers can make informed purchase decisions. ESRB ratings have two parts: rating symbols suggest age appropriateness for the game, and content descriptors indicate elements in a game that may have triggered a particular rating and/or may be of interest or concern.

Game Ratings & Descriptor Guide

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings are designed to provide concise and impartial information about the content in computer and video games so consumers, especially parents, can make an informed purchase decision. ESRB ratings have two equal parts: rating symbols suggest age appropriateness for the game and content descriptors indicate elements in a game that may have triggered a particular rating and/or may be of interest or concern.

To take full advantage of the ESRB rating system, it's important to check both the rating symbol (on the front of the box) and the content descriptors (on the back).

ESRB Rating Symbols

            EARLY CHILDHOOD

Titles rated EC (Early Childhood) have content that may be suitable for ages 3 and older. Contains no material that parents would find inappropriate.

            EVERYONE

Titles rated E (Everyone) have content that may be suitable for ages 6 and older. Titles in this category may contain minimal cartoon, fantasy or mild violence and/or infrequent use of mild language.

            EVERYONE 10+

Titles rated E10+ (Everyone 10 and older) have content that may be suitable for ages 10 and older. Titles in this category may contain more cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language and/or minimal suggestive themes.

            TEEN

Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.

            MATURE

Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

            ADULTS ONLY

Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.

            RATING PENDING

Titles listed as RP (Rating Pending) have been submitted to the ESRB and are awaiting final rating. (This symbol appears only in advertising prior to a game's release.)

ESRB Content Descriptors

    * Alcohol Reference - Reference to and/or images of alcoholic beverages

    * Animated Blood - Discolored and/or unrealistic depictions of blood

    * Blood - Depictions of blood

    * Blood and Gore - Depictions of blood or the mutilation of body parts

    * Cartoon Violence - Violent actions involving cartoon-like situations and characters. May include violence where a character is unharmed after the action has been inflicted

    * Comic Mischief - Depictions or dialogue involving slapstick or suggestive humor

    * Crude Humor - Depictions or dialogue involving vulgar antics, including “bathroom” humor

    * Drug Reference - Reference to and/or images of illegal drugs

    * Fantasy Violence - Violent actions of a fantasy nature, involving human or non-human characters in situations easily distinguishable from real life

    * Intense Violence - Graphic and realistic-looking depictions of physical conflict. May involve extreme and/or realistic blood, gore, weapons and depictions of human injury and death

    * Language - Mild to moderate use of profanity

    * Lyrics - Mild references to profanity, sexuality, violence, alcohol or drug use in music

    * Mature Humor - Depictions or dialogue involving "adult" humor, including sexual references

    * Nudity - Graphic or prolonged depictions of nudity

    * Partial Nudity - Brief and/or mild depictions of nudity

    * Real Gambling - Player can gamble, including betting or wagering real cash or currency

    * Sexual Content - Non-explicit depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including partial nudity

    * Sexual Themes - References to sex or sexuality

    * Sexual Violence - Depictions of rape or other violent sexual acts

    * Simulated Gambling - Player can gamble without betting or wagering real cash or currency

    * Strong Language - Explicit and/or frequent use of profanity

    * Strong Lyrics - Explicit and/or frequent references to profanity, sex, violence, alcohol or drug use in music

    * Strong Sexual Content - Explicit and/or frequent depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including nudity

    * Suggestive Themes - Mild provocative references or materials

    * Tobacco Reference - Reference to and/or images of tobacco products

    * Use of Drugs - The consumption or use of illegal drugs

    * Use of Alcohol - The consumption of alcoholic beverages

    * Use of Tobacco - The consumption of tobacco products

    * Violence - Scenes involving aggressive conflict. May contain bloodless dismemberment

    * Violent References - References to violent acts

 NOTE:

When a content descriptor is preceded by the term "Mild," it is intended to convey low frequency, intensity or severity of the content it modifies.

Content descriptors are not intended to be a listing of every type of content one might encounter in the course of playing a game. For more detail about how ESRB assigns content descriptors, go to http://www.esrb.org/ratings/faq.jsp#12.

 Online Rating Notice

Online-enabled games carry the notice "Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB." This notice warns those who intend to play the game online about possible exposure to chat (text, audio, video) or other types of content created by other players (e.g., maps, skins) that have not been considered in the ESRB rating assignment.

 For more helpful tips and resources, go to http://www.esrb.org/about/resources.jsp

About Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is a self-regulatory body established in 1994 by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). ESRB independently applies and enforces ratings, advertising guidelines, and online privacy principles adopted by the industry.

Important! The Lion & Lamb Project

Lion & Lamb is a national grassroots initiative by parents for parents, providing information about the effects of violent entertainment, toys and games on children's behavior. The organization works with parents, teachers, day care providers, and others to advocate a simple message: violence is not child's play.

FAQs on Violent Video Games and Other Media Violence (continued) by Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D.

Source: Video Game Special Edition

Topics: Children and Television, Children and Video Games, Disadvantages of Video Games, Monitoring What Video Games Your Children Play

1. For your 2003 article on The Influence of Media Violence on Youth (1), you and a distinguished group of media scholars selected by the National Institute of Mental Health reviewed 50 years of research on media violence and aggression. What have been the main research steps, and what are the main conclusions?

Most of the early research focused on two questions:

   1. Is there a significant association between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior?

   2. Is this association causal? (That is, can we say that violent television, video games, and other media are directly causing aggressive behavior in our kids?)

The results, overall, have been fairly consistent across types of studies (experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal) and across visual media type (television, films, video games). There is a significant relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior. Exposing children and adolescents (or “youth”) to violent visual media increases the likelihood that they will engage in physical aggression against another person. By “physical aggression” we mean behavior that is intended to harm another person physically, such as hitting with a fist or some object. A single brief exposure to violent media can increase aggression in the immediate situation. Repeated exposure leads to general increases in aggressiveness over time. This relation between media violence and aggressive behavior is causal.

2. What have researchers focused on in more recent years? How does exposure to media violence increase later aggressive behavior?

Early aggression researchers were interested in discovering how youth learn to be aggressive. Once they discovered observational learning takes place not only when youth see how people behave in the real world but also when they see characters in films and on television, many began to focus on exactly how watching such violent stories increases later aggression. In other words, more recent research really focused on the underlying psychological mechanisms. In the last 10 years there also has been a huge increase in research on violent video games. Based on five decades of research on television and film violence and one decade of research on video games, we now have a pretty clear picture of how exposure to media violence can increase aggression in both the immediate situation as well as in long term contexts. Immediately after consuming some media violence, there is an increase in aggressive behavior tendencies because of several factors.

   1. Aggressive thoughts increase, which in turn increase the likelihood that a mild or ambiguous provocation will be interpreted in a hostile fashion.

   2. Aggressive (or hostile) emotion increases.

   3. General arousal (e.g., heart rate) increases, which tends to increase the dominant behavioral tendency.

   4. Youth learn new forms of aggressive behaviors by observing them, and will reenact them almost immediately after wards if the situational context is sufficiently similar.

Repeated consumption of media violence over time increases aggression across a range to situations and across time because of several related factors.

   1. It creates more positive attitudes, beliefs, and expectations regarding aggressive solutions to interpersonal problems. In other words, youth come to believe that aggression is normal, appropriate, and likely to succeed.

   2. It also leads to the development of aggressive scripts, which are basically ways of thinking about how the social world works. Heavy media violence consumers tend to view the world in a more hostile fashion.

   3. It decreases the cognitive accessibility of nonviolent ways to handle conflict. That is, it becomes harder to even think about nonviolent solutions.

   4. It produces an emotional desensitization to aggression and violence. Normally, people have a pretty negative emotional reaction to conflict, aggression, and violence, and this can be seen in their physiological reactions to observation of violence (real or fictional, as in entertainment media). For example, viewing physical violence normally leads to increases in heart rate and blood pressure, as well as to certain brain wave patterns. Such normal negative emotional reactions tend to inhibit aggressive behavior, and can inspire helping behavior. Repeated consumption of media violence reduces these normal negative emotional reactions.

   5. Repetition increases learning of any type of skill or way of thinking, to the point where that skill or way of thinking becomes fairly automatic. Repetition effects including learning how to be aggressive.

3. Is there a difference between the effects of TV/film violence versus Video-Games violence?

Most of the research has focused on TV/film violence (so-called "passive" media), mainly because they have been around so much longer than video games. However, the existing research literature on violent video games has yielded the same general types of effects as the TV and Cinema research. At a theoretical level, there are reasons to believe that violent video games may have a larger harmful effect than violent TV and film effects. This is a very difficult research question, and there currently is no definite answer. But, recent studies that directly compare passive screen media to video games have been tend to find bigger effects of violent video games.

4. Is that why there have been so many school shootings by kids who play lots of violent video games? Can such games turn a normal, well-adjusted child or adolescent into a school shooter?

No, that would be an overstatement, one that mainstream media violence researchers do not make. The best way to think about this is the risk factor approach. There are three important points to keep in mind.

    * First, there are many causal risk factors involved in the development of a person who frequently behaves in an aggressive violent manner. There are biological factors, family factors, neighborhood factors, and so on. Media violence is only one of the top dozen or so risk factors.

    * Second, extreme aggression, such as aggravated assault and homicide, typically occurs only when there are a number of risk factors present. In other words, none of the causal risk factors are "necessary and sufficient" causes of extreme aggression. Of course, cigarette smoking is not a necessary and sufficient cause of lung cancer, even though it is a major cause of it. People with only one risk factor seldom (I’m tempted to say “never”) commit murder.

    * Third, consumption of media violence is the most common of all of the major risk factors for aggression in most modern societies. It also is the least expensive and easiest risk factor for parents to change. In sum, playing a lot of violent games is unlikely to turn a normal youth with zero or one or even two other risk factors into a killer. But regardless of how many other risk factors are present in a youth’s life, playing a lot of violent games is likely to increase the frequency and the seriousness of his or her physical aggression, both in the short term and over time as the youth grows up.

5. Are some social groups more susceptible to the negative effects of violent video games than others? Are some groups immune to these effects?

There is some research suggesting that individuals who are already fairly aggressive may be more affected by consumption of violent video games, but it is not yet conclusive. Similarly, video game effects occasionally appear to be larger for males than females, but such findings are rare. Most studies find that males and females are equally affected, and that high and low aggressive individuals are equally affected. One additional point is worth remembering: Scientists have not been able to find any group of people who consistently appear immune to the negative effects of media violence or video game violence.

6. How important is the distinction between realistic violence versus fantasy violence?

7. Aren't there studies of violent video games that have found no significant effects on aggression?

Yes, such studies do exist. In any field of science, some studies will produce effects that differ from what most studies of that type find. If this weren't true, then one would need to

perform only one study on a particular issue and we would have the "true" answer. Unfortunately, science is not that simple.

As an example, consider the hypothesis that a particular coin is "fair," by which I mean that upon tossing it in the air it is equally likely to come up "heads" as "tails." To test this hypothesis, you toss it 4 times, and it comes up heads 3 times (75% heads). I toss it 4 times and get 2 heads (50%). My two graduate students toss it 4 times each, getting 4 tails and 2 heads (0% heads, 50% heads, respectively). Is the coin fair? Why have different people gotten different results? Well, part of the problem is that each of us has conducted a "study" with a sample size that is much too small to produce consistent results. We each should have tossed the coin at least 100 times. Had we done so, each of us would have had about 50% heads (if the coin was truly a "fair" coin). But we still wouldn't have gotten the exact same results. Chance plays some role in the outcome of any experiment. So even if all the conditions of the test are exactly the same, the results will differ to some extent. Of course, in the real world of science, the situation is much more complex. Each study differs somewhat from every other study, usually in several ways.

Given that scientific studies of the same question will yield somewhat different results, purely on the basis of chance, how should we go about summarizing the results of a set of studies? One way is to look at the average outcome across studies. This is essentially what a meta-analysis does. And when one does a meta-analysis on the video game violence research literature, the clear conclusion is that the results are quite consistent. On average there is a clear effect: exposure to violent video games increases subsequent aggression. This has been found for each of the three major research designs (experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal), for youth and for young adults, and for youth in North American, Japan, and Western Europe.

Some of the few contradictory studies can be explained as being the result of poor methods. For example, one frequently cited that failed to find a video game effect did not actually measure aggressive behavior; instead, it measured arguments with a friend or spouse. That same study also failed to show that participants in the “high video game violence” condition actually played more violent games than participants in the “low video game violence” condition. In fact, when you separate studies into those that were well conducted versus those that had major flaws, you find that the well conducted studies found bigger average effects of violent video games on aggression than did the poorly conducted studies. Some well-conducted and some poorly-conducted studies suffer from a too small sample size. But the main point is that even well conducted studies with appropriate sample sizes will not yield identical results. For this reason, any general statements about a research domain must focus on the pooled results, not on individual studies.

8. But what about the claims made by the media industries and by some other media violence experts, who say that the existing research evidence shows no effects of violent media?

The various entertainment media industries have lots of money to spend on trying to convince the general public and political leaders that there is nothing to worry about. And they do spend large sums on this. Unlike the research community, which has no vested interest in the topic, the media industry is very concerned about profits and will do almost anything to protect those profits. A recent book by James Steyer titled "The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media's Effect on Our Children," reveals much about how this works in the U.S. 3 I suspect that most people would be shocked by many of the revelations contained in this book. I personally have witnessed media industry lobbyists lie about a factual issue, watched them get caught in that lie, and then seen the same lobbyist deliver the same lie to a different group a year later. So, one must distinguish between real vs. industry supported experts.

9. But haven't other media violence experts also claimed that there is no valid scientific evidence linking media violence to aggression?

Yes, and no. The media industries seek out, promote, and support "experts" who will make such claims. There are several such "experts" who have made their careers by bashing legitimate research. Examining their credentials is quite revealing. Many do not have any research training in an appropriate discipline. Of those who do have advanced degrees in an appropriate discipline (for example, social psychology), almost none of them have ever conducted and published original media violence research in a top-quality peer-reviewed scientific journal.4 That is, they have never designed, carried out, and published a study in which they gathered new data to test scientific hypotheses about potential media violence effects. In other words, they are not truly experts on media violence research. Again, to get at the truth, one must distinguish between actual vs. self-proclaimed (and often industry-backed) experts.

10. Are there any evaluations of the media violence research literature done by groups who have the appropriate expertise but who are not themselves media violence researchers?

Interestingly, a number of professional organizations have asked their own experts to evaluate the media violence research literature. One of the most recent products of such an evaluation was a "Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children," issued by six medical and public health professional organizations at a Congressional Public Health Summit on July 26, 2000. This statement noted that "...entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, particularly in children." The statement also noted that the research points "...overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children." The six signatory organizations were: American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Psychiatric Association. Along the same line, several reports by the U.S. Surgeon General have concluded that exposure to media violence is a significant risk factor for later aggression and violence. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have specifically addressed the violent video game issue; both concluded that playing violent video games is a causal risk factor for later aggression against others, and called for a reduction in exposure of youth to this risk factor.