Is The ESRB Too Lenient?

When one looks at a game cover, they’re generally looking for a synopsis of what the game is about or at the stylistic cover art to get a sense of what it’s about. Parents, on the other hand, are looking toward the bottom to see if their children should be playing the game or not. This is thanks to the establishment of the ESRB in the 1990s after kids got their hands on Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, which were ruled in courts as detrimental to the youth.

When I was growing up, I was allowed to play Halo: Combat Evolved from a young age, despite its Mature rating from the ESRB. When a neighbor let me borrow Medal of Honor: Allied Assault though, my mom made me give it back. Her justification? “It’s okay for you to shoot aliens, but not to shoot humans.” Flash forward to modern times, where children play Fortnite at its T for teen rating, where humans are being shot at, and imagine how my childhood brain would have processed that.

In modern times, it’s up to question whether the content within T-rated games should actually be accessible to teens. Take Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed for example. In this title, you can detach human heads with your anal probe weapon, moments before you make advances toward a scantily-clad Russian vixen and clearly insinuate sex with her. Meanwhile, Halo was rated M in 2001 for shooting invading aliens. The variance is staggering in retrospect, and one has to wonder if past games made concessions to meet the T rating and appeal to a wider audience.

It’s no secret that mature themes are commonplace in video games, and they continue to be in modern times. If one is browsing the thousands upon thousands of Steam titles, not everything has an official rating from the ESRB. There’s nothing adults can do to stop their kids from stumbling upon very adult games on the most popular PC gaming platform, due to Steam letting just about anything fly onto their digital shelves without a necessity for a disclaimer.

As a kid who was raised watching R-rated movies with a dad who just said “nice” whenever something gratuitous happened on-screen and put in the minimal effort to shield me from adult themes, you could say I’m desensitized to the vast majority of mature-level themes that a game could present. That doesn’t mean that the ESRB should let murder, blood, and sexual gratification fly within T-rated games that could heftily influence a generation that is glued to their screens.

Perhaps times have changed and violence and blood have become the norm. Perhaps kids don’t flinch or shudder at the sight of gratuitous violence, gore, or sex. It’s not up to me to say if seeing these things in video games, which are typically an escape from an upsetting reality, should be held back to a Mature rating, but it’s certainly obvious that the ratings of the ESRB have changed in recent decades. It’s worth taking a detailed look into if you’re concerned about what your kid is experiencing in their downtime.