[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: A call for a vote on the Rating System.



My vote is YES.

Although I'm not sure yet on all points:
On Saturday 15 September 2001 16:16, Steve Baker wrote:
>   2) We have FIVE icons:  EC, E, T, M, AO  corresponding to the ESRB
> definitions for Early Childhood, Everyone, Teens, Mature and Adult-Only.  I
> suggest we drop the NR (Not Rated Yet) icon because with a self-rated
> system it's unnecessary.
There will always be a need for a NR, at least implicitely. Imagine a games 
collection and a common mechanism to browse them "by rating".

>   3) Our system is named "OGRE" and the icons are some kind of cute ogre
>      of an appropriate age holding a banner or wearing a T-shirt or
>      something that prominently displays the key letter(s).  We ask
>      people to link that icon to our web site at which the letters are
>      explained in simple terms.
So someone must prepare language-specific dynamic pages. Using the system 
e.g. Debian uses, that is getting the language from the browser, doesn't 
always work if you embed the pages in an application-specific help browser, 
so a given ...help.php?lang=foo should work.

>   5) We encourage members of cultures who do not approve of the ESRB system
>      or who have special ratings needs to design and promote their own
>      parallel systems.
This is the point where I'm currently thinking about either attaching the 
rating to the game itself, or to the environment.

For the upcoming GGZ release, we have currently 20 game servers and about 30 
clients. Although one game normally represents one room, there may be more 
rooms hosting that game. So a server hoster could decide to have small 
moderated rooms rated with E, and another one with let's say T.
Also this eleminated the discussion about culture-specific ratings, but in 
parallel introduces the risk of detaching the rating from the game.
Right now I don't see any games which offer both a children mode and a bloody 
mode, but this may be the case in some months.

Advice is needed here. You guys can decide on the next bunch of commits :-)

Josef

-- 
The MindX Open Source Project: Fighting proprietary games
GGZ now! - The GGZ Gaming Zone: http://ggz.sourceforge.net
ggz.morat.net | ggz.snafu.de | jzaun.com | mindx.sourceforge.net/europeone