THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407310043
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Hoping to head off federal intervention in their industry, the nation's largest video game makers have jointly introduced a rating system to warn consumers of graphic violence or explicit sexual content in their products.
Industry officials said Friday that games will be labeled with rating icons that will explain whether the games are appropriate for different age groups. Text describing the game's content will be printed on each package or cartridge.
However, parents buying personal computer software likely will have to face a second set of ratings, which also were unveiled Friday by computer game makers.
Lawmakers and child-development experts cheered the release of the ratings but said development of a single set of labels would serve consumers best.
``With a rating system, parents will have at least a fighting chance to control what comes into their homes,'' said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., who has spearheaded the drive for video game ratings since the release of controversial games such as ``Mortal Kombat,'' which contains scenes showing a martial-arts fighter tearing the spine out of an opponent.
Industry officials projected that 40 percent of the games sold this Christmas season and virtually all games sold next fall will carry the ratings. But the labels will not apply to games already in stores.
Still, announcement of the ratings comes as a crucial step for an industry struggling to maintain credibility with parents. A Nintendo spokeswoman said that about 40 percent of American households have a Nintendo game machine, and she estimated that 20 percent of the most popular games are somewhat violent.
Lieberman and Sen. Herbert Kohl, D-Wis., introduced legislation earlier this year to set up a national commission to regulate the industry, but they said they would withdraw the plan if game makers were to police themselves.
The threat of federal regulation sent Sega, Nintendo and other game makers, who sell about $5 billion worth of cartridges and compact disc games annually, scrambling to develop their own warning labels, but industry officials said they now plan to fold the individual rating plans into one.
However, officials from the Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents Nintendo, Sega, Acclaim and other video game publishers, have been unable to reach an accord with the Software Publishers Association, which represents computer game makers, on how the ratings should work.
Under the IDSA-backed system, game makers would submit videotapes, story boards, scripts and other material detailing the most extreme content of their games to panels of three ``demographically diverse'' people, each of whom must be at least 21 years old, at the newly created Entertainment Software Rating Board in New York.
In the SPA-designed plan, reviewers would not view videotapes of game content and would not label the games according to age groups. Instead, computer game makers would respond to questionnaires about their products from a new Recreational Software Advisory Council and attest that they answered honestly.
Toys R Us and Wal-Mart, the nation's two largest retailers of video games, have vowed to sell only rated products, and a Wal-Mart official said Friday that the company will not carry any sexually explicit games. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
KRT
NEW RATINGS SYSTEM
SOURCES: Interactive Digital Software, news reports, The Software
Publishers Association
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB