Our little survey

While the ESRB ratings system is now fully entrenched in the video/PC game industry, it's a bit of a crap shoot when movies and TV shows are released to DVD if they actually use their own ratings on the box. We did an informal survey of three Greenville, SC, retail stores (a Wal-Mart, a Target and a Best Buy store) to see how both video/PC games and DVDs are rated in stores. First we checked if the ESRB label was on the boxes of video and PC games. Our results shows that of the thousands of games on display at the three stores on their shelves, only THREE games we saw did not have the ESRB rating symbol. Two of those games were value priced puzzle titles akin to Bejeweled with the other being a kids-themed Backyard Football collection from Atari. All of the remaining video and PC games had the ESRB rating on the front of the box and the rating and content descriptions of those games on the back. In addition both the Target and Best Buy stores had displays showing what the ESRB ratings system meant and during our time in the Target store a video in their nearby TV department showed an ESRB commercial. Overall, we found that you simply could not get away from the ESRB ratings symbols in the stores we checked out.

That is certainly not the case when we looked at the DVDs on display at those same stores. As most of you may know, movies that are released to DVD frequently come out in rated and also in "unrated" versions with extra material that was not in the original theatrical release - and there were plenty of those titles available in the three stores we surveyed. Hostel, The Ring Two, Basic Instinct, The Grudge, Dodgeball, White Chicks, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Day of the Dead and Doom were just some of the titles that were released in unrated versions with no other content descriptions. Other movies, such as the recent budget title Demon Hunter that contain extreme violence and some nudity, are released directly to DVD with no rating or content descriptions. DVDs have caught on with TV shows as well with whole seasons now being released for a number of past and current shows. However, the majority of DVD TV show collections on sale at the stores we surveyed were unrated.

There are some exceptions; we found that the Alias and Desperate Housewives DVD collections in those stores we surveys do have the original TV rating they received on the back of the box. Queer as Folk, the Showtime gay themed series, has a "May Contain Some Adult Material" content description on the back of the box. DVD collections of MTV shows like Jackass and Comedy Central shows like South Park have a warning in the back of their boxes clearly stating that the DVD contain mature and adult content. However, TV shows that have at least some degree of adult content such as The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Shield, Nip/Tuck, Sex and The City, The OC, 24, The L Word, Over There and NYPD Blue have no rating or content descriptions at all in their DVD collections. Even if a movie or TV show had a rating, they were always on the back and in very small text compared to the large ESRB boxes found on video and PC games. Finally there was no display for the MPAA or TV Parental Guidelines in any of the stores, compared to the Target and Best Buy ESRB displays. In short, when you buy a DVD the chances are good that you are picking up a product that has not gone through a ratings system and indeed will be promoted as being unrated.