Sidney Fussell is a freelance writer, occasional stand-up comedian, and full-time gamer.

In preparation for the January press conference in which President Barack Obama would issue his executive orders concerning gun regulation, Vice President Joe Biden met with representatives of several games companies, many of whom make the military shooter-themed games repeatedly indicted in “debates” on causes of gun violence. Initial reaction was extremely apprehensive, the industry norm following the 1999 Columbine tragedy, which launched an entire generation of scholarship dedicated to linking video game use and violent behavior and created the recurring trope of gamers as potentially dangerous sociopaths.

The industry has long been haunted by the lazy, causal link between video games and mass murder. The defenders of the industry are acutely aware that as long as video games dominate conversations of national violence, there is no reflection on the culpability of state and corporate sponsored real violence. Instead, virtual violence became a diversionary tactic to avoid such a discussion — the perfect parent-scaring, ratings-grabbing scapegoat. But this has produced a grievous lack of introspection within the industry. Industry defenders wholesale reject any connections between games and gun violence, cutting off internal industry criticism, while, simultaneously, the developers they defend flood the market with the very image the industry is trying to condemn: the white male shooter. White men with guns are everywhere in video games, across all platforms and genres. This industry standard of dismissing its own complicity in gun-violence combines with a similar media standard of privileging white male violence – creating a dangerous, racist double standard the video game industry must confront.

Researcher and game designer Daniel Greenberg, in an Atlantic piece, says the gaming industry must include internal criticism as part of its defense against media mischaracterization: “Why don’t more people in the games industry … defend our work? So many stories that ran on TV and in the press were one-sided because they lacked … industry response. But rather than calling for a full-throated defense, many in the industry surprisingly called for further disengagement.” Given the media’s misinformed commentary driven coverage following Columbine, industry reticence is perhaps understandable but Greenberg warns disengagement will only further damage gaming’s public image: “the public is bound to view…isolationism as a tacit admission of video game culpability in real-world violence.” The industry itself needs to lead the charges for more research, not as an act of contrition, but because countering scapegoat narratives circulating in the media requires factual evidence.

Certainly internal industry criticism and defense is key in renegotiating the industry’s public image, but Greenberg, newsmedia and the nation at large continue to obscure the white male shooter. Author David Sirota discusses this in a Salon piece, asking “Is it time to profile white men?” Sirota reasons that “because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to [profiling white men] because as opposed to people of color … white men … are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way.” Sirota’s piece continues by saying conversations on gun violence should be afforded the proper complexity by including mental health and media violence as factors, but these topics arise only to obscure the privileged status of white male violence: “The demographic at the center of it all is white guys…the one group that gets to avoid being [profiled], which means we are defaulting to a … conversation [that] treats perpetrators as deranged individuals, rather than typical and thus stereotype-justifying representations of an entire demographic.” White male violence, and only white male violence, must be explained via external reasons, never internal.

Clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson said as much in a Forbes interview in 2011. Ferguson told Forbes: “There’s a certain type of racism in place with these killings. When shootings happen in an inner city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things happen in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed.” Video games serve as prime scapegoats because so many white men play them and they fit a narrative that centers discussions of white male violence on external causes.

It’s a narrative this industry both encourages and benefits from. White male violence is omnipresent in the industry across genres and platforms, and assertions such as Greenberg’s fail to address industry complicity in this double standard. The next time you stand in any retail outlet selling video games, count how many box covers are variations of a white man holding a gun.  Count how many games, regardless of story or design, center on a white man rewarded for violence. The first person shooter genre is especially notable here for consistently topping year end worldwide sales charts, moving millions of copies and saturating consumers with images of the white male shooter.

This image is key because even moreso than television or movies, everything in a videogame is intentional. Games are created from the ground up by (overwhelmingly white and male) publishers, engineers, illustrators, marketers, programmers and designers. The omnipresence of the white man with a gun is not incidental, it is purposeful. The industry purposely adopted this cultural meme, benefiting from the norms rationalizing white male violence, using it to increase their games’ sales and social acceptability.

None of this is to say the gaming industry is either causing or condoning gun violence. Instead, it is to say that it benefits from a racist cultural norm that itself obscures the potential causes of gun violence. Greenberg is right to call for transparency, research, and internal criticism from the industry, but an unraced, ungendered, nonstructural examination will be ineffective in uncovering either real or virtual linkages to violence. Certainly, the current media climate isn’t conducive to industry introspection, but video games are in the unique position of reversing the timbre of the “national conversation” on gun violence by being the first entertainment entity to both acknowledge and question a pervasive double standard with clear connections to real-life gun violence.

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John Riccitiello said he was hoping he wouldn’t get a question today on video game violence and the Newtown, Conn., shooting. But an analyst asked it, and the chief executive of Electronic Arts responded with some frank and passionate comments.

“We were stunned and horrified by the violence in Connecticut and Colorado and many other places over the years,” Riccitiello said during EA’s earnings conference call. “But there has been an enormous amount of research done in the entertainment field” where researchers are looking for a link between video game violence and violence in real life.

“They haven’t found any,” he said.

Still, in the wake of these mass shootings, politicians such as Vice President Joe Biden have said that the federal government’s research agencies should investigate a possible link. Riccitiello said he did not see any slowdown in the market as a result of the new concerns about game violence in the wake of Newtown.

Riccitiello pointed out that people in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada consume as much or more violent video games or violent media than in the U.S., but they have much smaller violent crime rates. He said “hundreds of studies have been done” and no links have been uncovered — a fact that he said swayed the U.S. Supreme Court in its ruling that favored the game industry. The court ruled that banning the sale of violent video games to minors was an infringement of free speech.

“Having said all of that, with humility about the world we live in, given fingerpointing in the media, you could say we have a perception of a problem, and we do have to wrestle with that,” Riccitiello said. “We are a responsible, mature industry, and we intend to be part of the solution. Our media reaches every American. That can be used as a voice for good.”

He said that the game industry’s lobbying group, the Entertainment Software Association, will further address how games can be part of the solution, “not the butt of the joke.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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As Vice President Joe Biden contemplates regulations for gun control and possible curbs on video game violence, we should take note that one of the most successful games of 2012 was a peaceful title called Journey.

Journey might not have sold as much as Call of Duty: Black Ops II, but it was the top downloadable title on Sony’s PlayStation Network in 2012. In Journey, you play an other-worldly being who traverses desert sands and other treacherous landscapes to reach a high mountain peak. You don’t arm yourself with machine guns, rocket launchers, or other staples of violent games.

It was such a moving experience that it received 11 nominations (including Game of the Year) at the DICE Summit Awards (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) last night from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. That recognition is important as the industry tries to wade through the reactions to the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn.

Journey advances the argument that games can be high art. And as such, they deserve the same free speech protections that other works — books, movies, paintings, or other established media — enjoy. The U.S. Supreme Court validated this line of thinking last year, saying that a California ban on selling violent games to minors was illegal in part because of the restrictions on free speech and because the state had not proved a connection between violent games and real-life violent behavior. I don’t believe we should relitigate this matter even after the latest shootings.

But we as critics could do more to inspire game artists to do the best possible work they can. We don’t have to draw attention to experiences that appeal to the lowest common denominator when it comes to sex or violence. Those games will do well on their own. But we can do a lot more to encourage developers to create the most consequential works of art — games that inspire us with great stories, animations, gameplay, and simple fun. If the administration wants to get involved in that, I would welcome it. President Barack Obama could host the creators of the most imaginative games at the White House.

The awards shows — Spike TV’s Video Game Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards, and the DICE Summit Awards — offer recognition and a spotlight to the creative people who stand out. But wider publicity will help take the message deeper into the public awareness and maybe even spur sales of nonviolent titles. Acknowledgement of the best achievements is a way to steer developers in the direction of being more responsible. If we say to developers that they each might only get to make 10 games in a career, it might inspire them to make something more meaningful than those which only generate the next paycheck.

And I believe that recognizing the very best of the art will weed out many of the games that are considered too violent. I realize that this approach will only go so far. As a voluntary step, it will not be enforceable under the power of law. But that is as it should be in a free society.

But the strategy could be effective. Game developers are and should be free to create what they want. But they should also be responsible, and appealing to their consciences and inspiring them with positive rewards is the right thing to do. You could say that would be a “gamification” of the industry itself, inspiring developers to diversify beyond violent games toward providing different kinds of experiences, like those embodied in concrete, successful titles like Journey. Hell, you could give an “X Prize” with $10 million to the developer who makes the best nonviolent video game.

Some people have run out of patience. They want to use a stick. But I think that a carrot will work better than the stick when it comes to urging creativity in the game industry.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The video game business never has a year without controversy. 2012 was no different in that respect. But the different ways that game companies could get into trouble and draw mass market attention were surprising. The age-old controversies about sex, violence, and other cultural insensitivities surfaced again this year. But game publishers also had to deal with the consequences of being hacked, violating the government’s concerns about military security, and upsetting fans by failing to live up to games-as-a-service obligations in free-to-play games.

Sometimes, the controversies brew up from the bottom as unintended consequences. At other times, it seems like the controversies are intentionally manufactured for marketing reasons, so that the game can rise above the noise and catch the public’s attention. But that’s a double-edged sword, as such marketing can turn off as many consumers as you attract. Whether the controversies are accidental or intentional, it’s clear that when you create entertainment for the public, there are so many ways to get into trouble. Please vote in our poll for the top game controversy, and leave a comment if you like.

Video games take the heat for Newtown shooting

The horrific shootings at Newtown left 20 children and seven adults dead. Though it happened late in the year, this incident revived concerns over excessive violence in video games. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games were protected under the First Amendment. But calls for regulation and studying of a possible link between games and violence went out again in the wake of the shooting. The anti-game-violence crowd got help from an unexpected corner, as the National Rifle Association blamed the shooting on violent video games (and called for armed guards at schools). Greg Fischbach, former chief executive of Mortal Kombat publisher Acclaim Entertainment, predicted that the consequences of the shooting will play out over years for the game industry.

Ex-Navy SEALS disciplined for consulting on Medal of Honor Warfighter

Electronic Arts touted the fact that former elite soldiers gave it advice in the design of its realistic combat shooter Medal of Honor Warfighter. But the company failed to go through the proper channels in getting permission from the government for the consulting. As a result, the Department of Defense punished seven active-duty Navy SEALs who consulted on the game. The SEALs had two months of pay docked and received letters of reprimand. More were under investigation.

Among those who consulted was Matt Bissonnette, who was part of Seal Team 6 team that killed Osama Bin Laden. EA said that it wasn’t aware of any rules that required EA to vet the game with the DoD. It wasn’t clear if any military secrets were improperly divulged in the game. Bissonnette also got into hot water for co-writing the nonfiction account of the raid that killed Bin Laden in the book, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden.

Copycatting called out

Zynga has long been accused of copying other game designs. Electronic Arts finally sued the company this year for allegedly copying The Sims Social with the launch of Zynga’s The Ville people simulation game. EA claimed that Zynga’s team copied many details of The Sims Social. Zynga denied outright copying, and it noted that EA’s SimCity Social was similarly a copy of Zynga’s own city-building game, CityVille, and that CityVille itself has only passing resemblance to EA’s SimCity games on the PC.

In response to similar allegations of copying in a bingo game, Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, claimed that his company has re-imagined past games by making them more social. The result is those games become more popular than ever thanks to sharing with friends on Facebook. EA said that it had to stand up for the industry to stop the rampant copying. Complicating the matter was the fact that The Ville’s designer, Mark Skaggs of Zynga, used to work at EA, as did many other Zynga executives. The issue of copying came up again as Spry Fox sued 6waves for copying not the look of its game, but the game play. That lawsuit was settled. But the EA-Zynga dispute is still pending.

The courts have been clear on the subject. Making a new game in an existing genre isn’t a violation of copyright law. But taking someone’s computer code and claiming it as your own is illegal.

Talent raiding wars

Related to the copycat allegations, big companies also went to war over talent raids. After Zynga hired an EA executive, Zynga alleged that EA’s chief executive John Riccitiello proposed an anti-competitive no-hiring pact or he would threaten litigation. Zynga claimed that was the real reason for EA’s copycat lawsuit. Meanwhile, Kixeye CEO Will Harbin made a hilarious video lampooning Zynga and EA as part of a campaign to recruit talent. But then Zynga sued Kixeye for stealing a game designer. Zynga alleged that Alan Patmore took 763 confidential documents with him when he started his new job at Kixeye. But Harbin blasted Zynga for lashing out while it was “burning to the ground and bleeding top talent.”

Apple cracks down on bot marketers

Early in the year, Apple quietly prohibited mobile game companies from using bots and other marketing tactics that artificially boosted games in Apple’s rankings of its top-performing apps. Animoca alleged that Apple unfairly cracked down on its Pretty Pet Salon game and that communication from Apple was sparse. Our own investigation found that the secrecy around the crackdown left a lot of developers wondering what was OK to do and what wasn’t when it came to marketing games. Game developers feared that if everyone used unfair marketing tactics, then legitimate high-quality apps might never get noticed. But one thing was clear. If you used too many incentives, Apple would start paying attention. Late in the year, Tapjoy again learned a tough lesson about being too aggressive with incentives, this time with web-based offers that apps linked to from within Apple apps. Neither Apple nor Tapjoy elucidated on the matter, leaving developers in the dark.

Hackers disrupt online games

Anonymous taught Sony a big lesson last year as it hacked into both the PlayStation Network and disabled the network for 77 million registered users who could no longer access their online games. It also attacked Sony Online Entertainment. This year, hackers were back with more attacks. Gamigo got hacked and lost control over 8 million email addresses and passwords for its users. And 11,000 Guild Wars 2 players also had their passwords stolen. Zynga’s YoVille social game saw disruption for 1,000 fans after some players began using a vulnerability to steal belongings from other accounts. Game companies that get hit by hackers will find out that consumers will blame the company for lax security as much as they will blame the hackers.

Fan revolts hit Mystery Manor

Game Insight had a tough time dealing with fan outcry after it decided to take away some perks offered to players of the game. Game Insight made the iOS version of Mystery Manor: Hidden Adventure, which was enjoyed by as many as 20 million registered users. The hidden object game was a free-to-pay title where users could play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. But Apple banned a practice that the game had previously allowed: letting friends obtain and trade gifts with other players inside the game. Game Insight had to scramble to comply with the rules and fans objected. A second fan revolt erupted with a second service disruption. Fair warning. Fan revolts are going to be common if game developers decide to change long-standing online games or discontinue them altogether.

Sex chat brings down Habbo virtual world

A British TV station dealt Habbo a severe blow when it blew the lid off a sex chat culture within parts of the virtual world, which has more than 250 million registered users. During the scandal, retailers stopped carrying prepaid cards for Habbo and an investor pulled its support from the company. Habbo had measures in place to stop sexual predators, but it shut down the service to deal with the new allegations. The company reviewed its chat records and found 3.7 percent of members were engaged in inappropriate chat. By the time that Habbo went back online with new measures in place, it had lost about 35 percent of its membership. Chief executive Paul LaFontaine pledged to redouble efforts to protect kids and win more of those users back.

Ex-OMGPOP ignites debate about refusing to work for Zynga

OMGPOP’s Pictionary-style mobile game Draw Something gained a huge number of users early this year, prompting Zynga to buy the New York game company for $180 million. But Shay Pierce, one of OMGPOP’s employees, wrote a blog post about how he didn’t want to work for Zynga, which he viewed as completely antithetical to his professional and creative values. Then OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter tweeted that the one employee who didn’t accept a job with Zynga (Pierce) was the “weakest” one. But Pierce didn’t miss out on much. Draw Something lost millions of users and Zynga had to take a write-off of $95 million because of the diminished value of the mobile game. Zynga’s stock price also cratered as it announced two quarters of weak earnings in a row.

EA and Activision Blizzard spar over Infinity Ward

In 2011, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts squared off over the departures of the founders of Infinity Ward, an Activision-owned studio that built the Call of Duty franchise into a billion-dollar machine. Two co-founders were fired from Infinity Ward as they prepared to exit and set up Respawn Entertainment, a new game studio funded by EA. The lawsuit was headed for a trial this year. Just before the trial, EA and Activision settled the case. But not before there were some interesting disclosures about Project Icebreaker. Activision executive email records showed that executives were hunting for dirt on the co-founders as a pretext to fire them. Activision denied the characterization of the emails.

Mass Effect 3′s ending fiasco

Fans were in an uproar after they played through the entire Mass Effect trilogy, only to be disappointed by the uninspired ending of Mass Effect 3. The fan reaction was so intense that Electronic Arts’ BioWare division decided to come out with an enhanced ending to satisfy gamers. And not long after that, BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk decided to retire from their top positions at EA.

Here’s our poll.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The issue is an important one, as objections to game content could slow down the growth of the industry, and because the video game industry has a big case on game violence before the U.S. Supreme Court.

We’ve now had a look at the questionnaire — which generates an automatic rating of a game for a developer — and we’ll show below some of the interesting examples that, by our own inferences, could get a game into hot water with the ratings board.

The new ratings apply to games submitted to Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game service as well as the Nintendo Wii Shop and DS Shop and the Sony PlayStation Network store. But it’s quite possible the automated system could eventually extend beyond that.

To get a downloadable console game rated, game makers fill out the questionnaire in a lot of detail. Then a computer program will determine the rating for the game, based on the best intelligence on past ratings for games by the ESRB. Thanks to the automation, it is possible — but not absolutely certain — that the new ratings system wil eventually be applied to all sorts of games, including mobile games, social games, and online web games in addition to the online console content for which it is intended today. Online or mobile game makers who thought they could forever escape the more restrictive ratings system of the consoles might find themselves in hot water one day soon.

Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB, said in an interview there is no guarantee the system as devised will be extended to mobile and online games. But the system has been designed to scale up to a much larger number of ratings requests. Vance said that the ratings board came up with the words and types of scenes mentioned in the questionnaire through 15 years of experience rating games. It basically means the questionnaire is a peek into the minds of parents and others who want to protect our kids.

Here are some interesting things to know about the questionnaire: The big touch points are realism, violence, sex, gambling, drugs, and bodily functions. These are the categories of game play that parents are usually concerned about, Vance said.

When it comes to violent games, the questionnaire gets quite sophisticated. For instance, it takes into account a lot of factors, such whether or not a game is played from a first-person or third-person view, said Vance. A game is more likely to be objectionable based on graphic violence if it uses a more gut-wrenching first-person view.

“Perspective is a huge factor in video game ratings,” Vance said.

The game will also be more controversial if it depicts violence against “humans or human-like characters.” Developers can click on a question mark to get an idea of what sorts of images are covered. A zombie in human form or a realistic depiction of a person counts. An elf, dwarf, Vulcan, or Replicant counts as a human-like character. But images of characters such as Medusas, Harpies, or Halo Elites (pictured right) don’t count as human-like. (Evidently, you can blast away at such characters without getting into an argument with the ESRB).

One of the questions notes some complexity to violent situations, such as whether the player is trying to avoid violence in the game play but may incur violence in a failure scenario. It evidently makes a difference in the ratings if the violence is discussed or overheard, but not visually depicted. Another question asks if the violence is depicted from an omniscient camera angle or far away and whether it is directly or indirectly controlled by the player.

The ESRB asks if the game contains “bodily functions (e.g. belching, flatulence, vomiting) used for humorous purposes.” If you answer yes to that question, the ESRB asks you to check on whether it has “mucus, belching, flatulence sounds.” It also asks in a separate question if there is “flatulence (with depiction of ‘flatulence cloud’), whimsical depictions of feces (‘poo coils’), vomiting. Presumably, since these are different categories, one response will get a more severe rating than the other.

The questionnaire also asks if the game has “urination, urine, realistically depicted feces”. And — this one has to be the worst of all reserved for mature-rated or adults-only games — if there is an act of “human defecation visually depicted.”

Language is a sure hot spot as well. The ESRB separates language into six different categories. One is “minor profanities” such as “damn” or “hell.” Another is epithets such as “bastard,” “bitch” or “jackass.” The word “ass” is evidently a category unto itself. Then there are scatological vulgarities: “shit, piss, asshole, dick (i.e. jerk), jerk, or pussy (i.e. wimp).” Racial obscenities is another category. And then there are the sexual obscenities or vulgarisms: fuck, cunt, cocksucker, dick (i.e. penis) and pussy (i.e. vagina).

As for sexual material, the questionnaire asks if the game depicts “provocative outfits” or, in another category, “human buttocks, nipple-less breasts, breasts with minimal coverage (e.g. pasties, long hair). Then there are separate categories for “human breasts with nipples” and “genitalia.”

The questionnaire also asks if there is any “suggestive dialogue, innuendo, or double entendre.” It asks about “overtly sexual situations,” “references to sex or sexuality without descriptive detail,” references to sex and sexuality with descriptive detail,” and “references to coerced or forced sexual activity.”

Clearly, the ESRB put a lot of thought into the questions. Vance said the group tested the ratings questionnaire for months and tried to pare it back from a very large list of questions to those that focused on cultural flashpoints. She estimates the questionnaire’s accuracy is somewhere around 95 percent in terms of how close it matches that of human game raters.

Developers can fabricate answers to these questions if they want, but they have to pay a $500 fee upon submission and they also have to submit a DVD disk with the images from the game on it. If they are found to have misled the ESRB in order to get a better rating, the ESRB will have their game pulled from the online store and they’ll have to go through a resubmission. That’s a pretty heavy stick to ensure developers and publishers play by the rules, Vance said.

[photo credit: scrapetv]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The effort — aided by automatic appraisals from a computer program — reduces the amount of manual labor involved in evaluating whether a game is appropriate for young audiences. And it promises a way for a small industry-funded ratings board to keep up with flood of new online game content pouring into our living rooms. That curation model is necessary because of concerns about children’s exposure to excessive violence in video games, but the automation is necessary to keep up with the flood.

The new ratings apply to games submitted to Microsoft’s Xbox Live online game service as well as the Nintendo Wii Shop and DS Shop and the Sony PlayStation Network store. The issue is an important one, as objections to game content could slow down the growth of the industry, and because the video game industry has a big case on game violence before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ESRB rates games with labels such as “everyone,” “everyone 10+,” “teens,” “mature,” or “adults only.” The agency decides whether games have too much gore, sex, or foul language. To screen a higher volume of submissions for online content, the ESRB will rely on game makers to fill out questionnaires with lots of details on the nuances of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily functions that could potentially offend players.

The ESRB will then use its program to automatically assign a rating to the online game, taking into account the voluntary submission. It will still have a human in the loop. Game companies have to submit a final version to the ESRB, and the human screener will check it to make sure the rating is appropriate. If the game maker leaves out anything important, the game will be pulled from the online store and go through a resubmission process.

Game companies will have to fill out the form carefully, since they don’t want to get caught with the costly process of resubmission, which would throw their marketing plans off schedule. The U.S. Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling soon on a California law that makes it a crime to sell mature-rated video games to minors.

The ESRB is an industry trade group with funding from game makers. It was set up in 1994 to avoid Congressional action on video game violence. While the new rating system extends to the online versions of consoles and handheld game systems, it does not cover the huge number of games on smartphones, tablets and the web. The ESRB rated 1,600 games last year and only 30 percent were online.

Patricia Vance, president of the ESRB, said the new rating process considers the same elements reviewed by human raters. She said the benefit is that the ESRB will be able to scale the system while keeping its services affordable and accessible.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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