Respect the Ratings: GameStop unveils new campaign
In an effort to promote ratings awareness (and garner a little PR while they're at it), GameStop has launched a new campaign, Respect the Ratings, aimed at helping parents understand more of what their children are playing.
The campaign's website is a meager four pages but is designed with the time-strapped parent in mind. Featured on the website are ratings explanation, genre classifications, and even a glossary of popular phrases so that parents can "crack the code" of the gaming language. We're impressed by the selection of terms, including troll, patch, and lamer. However, some more spelling variants would've been amusing: while they do have both "owned" and "pwned," why not include pwnt, pwnz, and 0wnz0rd? And Leetspeak is all well and good, but the deduction-challenged adult might not connect the term with 1337.
The Resources page offers a comprehensive list of links to peruse, including many gaming sites (CVG, GameSpot, GameRankings), safety-oriented sites, and main ESRB page. We'd like to see a news tab that gives a personal feeling to the site and coerces return visits. We're not expecting full-blown coverage (leave that to us), but maybe a weekly post that gives a brief highlight on the news to keep parents up to date on some of the news that the gaming kids love to use.
