The Shield of the Programmer and the Protector of the Children: Recommendations for the Improvement of the ESRB.

The following research was conducted in order to analyze the ESRB, the self regulatory body for the video game industry, for the sake of improving the system in order to better protect children from violent imagery while maintaining the speech rights of the game programmers. The history of video games, with focus on technological development and controversy, is used to lead into the main body of research. The primary research looked into social scientific and legal studies and concluded with six recommendations that are given to improve the current system. The six recommendations are increasing the size of the reviewing group, adding an appeals system, changing the punishment system, adding a player-based watchdog group, putting video clips online for parents, and adding a new rating category. The recommendations function to resolve problems in specific areas such as enforcement, parental informing, and online issues. The research supports these recommendations by analyzing other successful self-regulatory media organizations such as the MPAA, RIAA, and NARC.