Family Media Guide launches PSV-centric ratings site
Family Media Guide, purporters of the
PSV ratings system (Profanity, Sex, and Violence) has launched a website for its ratings system, detailing the content of popular movies, video games, and television shows so parents can be warned. The web page also features a feature outlining appropriate movies for a "Girls-Only
Sleepover," as well as "Spooky
Games for Halloween" (all family-friendly, of course). The website seems a little too biased against the entertainment industry,
but maybe that is its intended purpose – to act contrary to its outlook on the ESRB and MPAA systems. Still, it could be a pretty useful tool and is still growing into itself. Let's take a tour of the web site, shall we? You must be at least 18 years old to enter the site, which is written rather inconspicuously on the front page.
Visit ?Ask the Expert,? and Dr. Vic Strasburger is asked to give an intelligent analysis of the recently announced Steven Spielberg-Electronic Arts joint venture. His
response includes name calling such at bozos
(directed at Rockstar) and ?geniuses? (his quotations; directed at developers of first-person shooters) and features such on-topic comments as ?witness the fact that the armed services use variants of [first-person shooters] to train new recruits how to kill.? He continues by plugging PSV ratings as the future of parental advisement.
The search engine will hopefully be working soon, but right now, if you leave the Keyword search blank and just choose PSV ratings, you will
always
get Mario Power Tennis and Fat Albert?s Halloween Special as the top choices for video games and movies, respectively
(yes, Mario Power Tennis is the top choice if you are looking for red-lighted profanity, sex, and violence). Hopefully,
this will get fixed soon, so that movies and games with actual sex and violence can be discovered.
So what does each product page look like? For movies (take
Doom, for example), there is a listing of every single profanity used and the number of times it is used, followed by ?profanity examples in context?
- quotes from the film itself. Doom was rated yellow for sex because in one scene towards the end of the movie (for literally a split second), you can see an exposed breast of a corpse on the ground. The violence portion of the review details every violent scene in the movie, as well as a mention of tobacco usage and supernatural discussions. Strangely enough, needle usage was not mentioned at all.
In all seriousness, this could be a good tool for parents, but the Ask the Expert feature needs someone who will actually act like an expert and not an activist. The previews seem pretty thorough and serve as a way for parents to know exactly what they are getting into and can choose exactly what they want their child to avoid. What do you think of the website? Any constructive criticism?
[via Next Generation]