The ESRB Rating System

ESRB Rating System

One of the influential variables considered to contribute to inconsistencies in professional online video game reviews is the rating the video game receives on the ESRB scale. Funded by the video game industry, the video game industry trusts the ESRB rating system to make accurate reviews for video games in the United States (Felini, 2014). The ESRB system detects 30 content descriptors that include violence, nudity, vulgar language, and sexual references (Leaczniak, Carlson, Walker, & Brocato, 2017).

Leaczniak (2017) determined that 88% of parents that buy video games for their children, value the ESRB rating system in its use and efforts to help parents reduce the exposure to violence in younger generations. Their

However, Leaczniak’s cross sectional, online poll targeted adults who have children ages eight to twelve, shows that ESRB ratings assist parents and caretakers to supervise, monitor, and limit violence exposure in younger children (Leaczniak et al., 2017). Leaczniak’s study further emphasized the importance of the ESRB rating system, and how parents can use this rating system to control inappropriate content for children, which can result in a change in video game preferences the adults, and in turn change the amount of revenue video game developing companies get can change (Leaczniak et al.,

The action game genre diverges into multiple video game sub-genres. These sub-genres become their own genres. These action game sub-genres include first-person shooter games, such as Halo, Overwatch, and Call of Duty, and real-time strategy games, such as Command in Conquer, Starcraft, and Super Commander. Clarke, Lee, and Clark (2017) found that the video game genres consist of a broad definition that molds to the video game playing community's opinion. Video game categories consist of five meta-categories. These meta-categories are time, space, player structure, controls. An example of this is when Clarke and her team tried to find a genre for Minecraft. When searching the internet to find what video game genre Minecraft classify as several categories showed up across several websites. These genres ranged from Action-Adventure to Fantasy to Sandbox and Simulation (Clarke et al.,