Re: Comments on 'A call for a vote on the Rating System.'

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Erik Greenwald wrote:

> 1 and 2 are addressed by another commentry and I think chris brings up good
> points about trademark issues and legal liabilities.

Yes - that's certainly an issue.
 
> >   4) Each game is rated by it's author - and peer pressure will be the
> >      only mechanism to pursuade people to change inappropriately rated
> >      games.  Our web site would contain a disclaimer that makes it clear that
> >      since we do not personally rate the games, we can't be held responsable
> >      games that are inappropriately rated and that it's still the duty
> >      of parents to check OGRE-rated material before passing it on to their kids.
> 
> I wonder if places like happy penguin would be willing to institute a mechanism
> for people to vote on age level ratings. They do it for 'game quality', so they
> already have the code for it I'd imagine, that lets the rating be decided by
> a decently broad range of people

If you look at Happy Penguin, you'll see that most games are voted on by only two
or three people.  That's not enough to be useful IMHO.  Also, you need the game
to be rated when it hits the attention of the public - not a month afterwards
when votes have been tallied and a rating allocated.  Finally, as an OpenSource
Author, I don't want to have to keep changing the icon on my web site everytime
someone else votes a bit differently on HappyPenguin.

> >   5) We encourage members of cultures who do not approve of the ESRB system
> >      or who have special ratings needs to design and promote their own
> >      parallel systems.
> 
> parallel and exclusive, or parallel and simultanious? I'd think the encouragement
> should be worded in a way to denote simultanious, but if that persists, we might
> end up with a dozen seperate ratings on a piece of software?

Only if the OpenSource authors can be pursuaded to adopt whatever other systems
are out there.  Personally, if some Chinese rating system appeared for OpenSource
games, I'd probably ignore it on the grounds that I have no idea what age range
the Chinese people would regard my game as being suited to.
 
> maybe we should use the lgdc poll mechanism, that'll allow automatic tallying
> and privacy. Might also be possible for us to vote per article, with yes/no/abstain?

Well, maybe that would have worked better - I didn't want a protracted poll of
the general public - just a quick reaction from this mailing list.

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