From GamePolitics: FTC finds it hard to buy M-rated games after all.

GamePolitics has posted a breaking news article about the latest FTC report on the ease of purchasing violent video games if you are a minor. Their underaged shoppers were apparently only able to purchase M-rated video games on average 20% of the time, as opposed to a 35% average for R-rated movies. You can read the article hence: BREAKING - FTC Study Shows Massive Improvement in Video Game Rating Enforcement

As a former educator (and current volunteer educator), I am overjoyed. The issue has never been the fact of the rating system, but the enforcement. As this is largely a voluntary effort, the burden lay on the sellers (no matter how much we say "parents are to blame!") to enforce the rating in order to give it legitimacy.

The fact that violent content affects children on a temporary basis is not in dispute with me. I've watched popular violent movies turn a normally peaceful playground into a line of kids needing minor first aid due to everyone "pretending to be Aragorn" or whatnot. If a parent took their child to go see a violent movie - or purchased for them a violent game - then right on, I'm not standing in their way (I took my toddler son with me when I watched Fellowship of the Ring - he fell asleep about 10 minutes in). If a parent is putting trust in a rating system to perform as advertised, then I say it's our duty as an industry to not pay lip service to this.

In the end, the video game industry is facing a lot of the societal pressures that movies did in its early days - that industry was pushing the bounds of good taste and propriety, and the general public was uneasy with this. The early adopters and free-thinkers lashed back at having to restrict movies, but in the end a working system appeared that allowed our society to give a large degree of freedom to the art. Thus it shall be with gaming, I think. As the initial generation of gamers become parents and decision-makers, and as the next generation grows up with games taking as large a role in their cultural upbringing as movies, a lot of these issues will become part of the background of life.

The first steps, however, are the hardest - as long as our industry keeps a fair rating system in place and helps enforce it, we have nothing to worry about.