Lair Developer (Factor Five) Slams ESRB

[Brutal 4ngel]

It's a good read, and very true seeing how the ESRB has been acting as of late.

If you're trying to reference a climate of paranoia -- a situation where folks are nervous about speaking their minds and everybody lives in fear of seemingly arbitrary and ever-changing rules -- then you could do worse than name dropping Senator Joe McCarthy. His anti-communist witch hunts and slandorous accusations ruined many a good career in the 1950s.
Factor Five president Julian Eggebrecht wasn't shy about drawing that comparison in talking about his frustration with the (as of late) heavy handed approach the ESRB has been taking in their recent attempts to police the content of video games. Speaking at the GCDC in Leipzig, Eggebrecht took the opportunity to vent his anger about the current climate of restrictiveness and the perceived imperative to self-police which he feels is present in the game development community today.

"I would be happy if in games we could talk about homosexuality but we're not even at the point where we can admit that humans have heterosexual relationships and that is a real problem" said Eggebrecht. "It tends to show that games are not being seen, even by our own ratings boards, as an artform."

Eggebrecht's speech was extremely critical of the double standard between video games and other forms of media, such as movies. During the speech, he referenced examples culled from his experiences in developing recent PS3 dragon-riding fantasy game, Lair -- which, he says, contains an easter egg in the form of a coffee pot (a play on the infamous GTA Hot Coffee scandal).

"Everyone thought [the coffee pot] was hilarious...but we couldn't call the cheat 'Hot Coffee" because that would imply we were mocking the authorities investigating Hot Coffee. If you cannot have satire about these things, that is approaching the realm of McCarthyism."

The Factor Five president then went on to describe how the ESRB had forced his company to substantially rework the camera mechanic for Lair because of the board's fears that younger gamers might use the power of full camera control specifically to view objects like gibs and gore 'up close and personal'.

PC World's Matt Peckham quotes verbatim from Eggebrecht's rant: "Interestingly as the ESRB got better at manipulating the camera they found more to critique -- effectively turning Factor 5's development process into a hoops game about blood, giblets (flying chunks of flesh), and a kind of quantitative referendum on how many constitute "A Chunk Too Far."

The net result of all this foolishness is that Factor Five was forced through an extremely costly and "hugely problematic" series of revisions at the ESRB's request because it felt that a Teen rating was incompatibile with all the flying chunks. Presumably some of this messing around and constant revision might have contributed to Lair's oft-heard criticism of being unevenly polished.

"On the one hand [the ESRB] objected to [the gibs]" says Eggebrecht "But they let us through with a Teen even though you can use fire - you can set up to five, six thousand people on fire. They burn, they run around and they scream, but of course that wasn't a problem. There was no blood."

"[The ratings process is] a charade. It's a flat out bizarre system...It makes it even harder for games than movies because we don't have the intermediate ratings. [The ESRB won't] really tell you what they will object to - they just say 'well, follow the standards that have been set before', which is a problem if you want to push the envelope"

"I want to see a game with real sexual content in a store here in Germany" announced the Factor Five Prez. "I don't think it will happen unless we really recognise games as an artform. How [San Andreas] can be drawn off the shelves based on a cheat in which you can barely see something that might be interpreted as a sexual act - as an Easter Egg no less - is absolutely beyond me, when at the same time movies have been pushing the envelope for a long time."

In closing, the president called on the ESRB to finally get its act together and instate a new rating for a class of game which falls between T (13+) and M (17+). "[i]t is time to wake up and make it happen."

"I hope that we actually can prove that this is an artform. Show me something that proves on all levels that games are indeed an artform - push the violence, but also push the sex, and push it in an artistic way where it's not really gratuitous, but where it gets my thinking brain going."

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3162105

[Dark SoliloQuy]

I totally agree.

that was a good read angel.

the only thing i have heard recently besides this about the ESRB is that they were giving the developers of Manhunt 2 a really hard time...they gave them an ADULT ONLY rating...basically forcing the developing team to rework the whole game to get the M rating...its bullshit really.

[Mofogo]

yeah games ratings suck, at least I don't have to worry about not being able to buy them aside from the fact that the AO rating doesn't come out in most big stores.