ELSPA’s New Traffic Light Ratings for Video Games

So just in case some parents haven’t quite got the idea of age ratings on video game boxes after they firstly simplified it into the modern PEGI ratings system of giving games symbols based on their content (fear, drugs, sex, etc), and then secondly made the age rating on the front of the box big enough to make even the most unattentive parent take notice, ELSPA today announced that they’re going to take their previous system which lasted the whole of, oh, five or so years, and give it colours based on a traffic light in order to “combat any confusion previously felt by consumers”. Full press release here: http://www.elspa.com/?i=7718&s=1111&f=49

Seriously? Here’s just one of my favorite quotes from the press release: “The new system has been designed to give parents ‘at a glance’ indicators of the age appropriateness of any game’s content” – there are so many things wrong with this sentence, it makes my blood boil. The most important one, however, is “at a glance”. At a glance? If the parent can’t see from a simple glance the age rating of a video game and the basic jist of what the game’s about, then really there’s no hope for the rest of their parenting skills. For example: Jimmy, aged 10, wants Mummy to buy him Resident Evil 4: not only is the game called “RESIDENT EVIL 4″, there’s a masked shilhouette on the front cover with a chainsaw on top of a red backdrop with black trees. The PEGI symbols on the back show a spider, a fist and a speech bubble with “&£$@!!” in it, quite clearly for strong language. As if this wasn’t already an apt reminder to the parents that this may not be suitable for young Jimmy, the huge (and I mean HUGE) rating sticker on the front quite clearly says 15, and if parents don’t manage to cotton out what that means, they need a visit from social services pronto.

Would putting some colours on the front really make that much of a difference? It is fairly obvious here that the core weakness in the chain here are the minority of consumers who either a) don’t care about the ratings system, which is fair enough (I myself was a player of Alien3 back in 1993, this being before ratings though), or b) are the kind of consumer who can’t work out how the front belt stops at Sainsbury’s and then goes off on one nice complaining train. Not that I’m bitter or anything. And if “92% of customers thought its traffic light labelling was easy to understand”, I’d guess 95% of those people thought that the original ratings system was easy to read. I weep for the remaining 8%.

 

I’m Watching You…

It’s been said that there are 4,200,000 security surveillance cameras in the UK – that’s one for every fourteen people here. While this does, of course, pose major issues surrounding the boundary between protection and privacy, it also opens up windows of any location armed with a webcam as surveillance which is linked up to the online network.

So how would one go about looking through these cameras? Hacking? Transmodulating frequencies and cross matching amplitudes in order to transcorrelate a modulated image? No, good sir – our good friend Google, home of such phenomena as ‘Googlebombing’ (the act of influencing the ranking of a Google search result – for example, the phrase ‘French military victories’ brought up “Your search – French military victories – did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?”), can dig up these surveillance devices and give you a glimpse inside. Try it now: type in “inurl:/view.shtml” into the Google search engine and watch as it produces page upon page of results similar to “Axis 2120 Network Camera 2.40″. Now, click one of these and you could be watching anything really – plane runways, cafes, Russian towns, bars, Japanese dams, roads, boats… it goes on really.

Is it a breach of privacy? In some ways, sure; if you were the couple in a pub on the 15^th July (which brandished a scarf declaring support of Woking FC) at about 1pm who bought two pints of lager, then now’s the time to know that I saw you. For everyone else (and probably said couple), is that not worrying? The Orwellian fantasy of an eye in every life monitoring what we do is becoming reality – that is, if society’s views on security and privacy become so blurred that the populace believe that constant security is the answer to our troubles – despite a senior police officer denouncing their effectiveness in crime situations (as of May 2008, only 3% of all street robbers were caught and sentenced using CCTV evidence).

“CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure,” Detective Chief Inspector, Mick Neville, talked about the failings of the practical uses of CCTV at the Security Document World Conference in London. “Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.” So the question must be asked, do people mind being watched by CCTV cameras if their practical use is not effective enough to be truly useful?

However, wide open networking without security on surveillance systems is hardly commonplace nowadays – it’s not like you can Google-spy on Area 51 or MI5, and to be honest, the places which can be seen are mostly mundane and just about interesting enough to stop your work for a few minutes while a boat sails by a holiday resort. Besides, the practical uses for Google CCTV ‘hacking’ are few and far between, and, while they may not have meant to be left wide open, serve as a sort of looking glass to areas of the other side of the globe, and can be seen as a simple distraction and a change of vista from our own landscape – the fact that they’re open surely serves as a signal that their overall importance in society in not paramount for the people. It is obvious that the intentions for such security devices are not meant to be looking through by prying eyes, and raises the question of just how safe continuous watching really is. 1984, anyone…?