Does tobacco use affect a title's ESRB rating?

I think films and games being rates 18+ for cigarettes is ridiculous. if anything, they should clamp down harder on alcohol in games, which is still "funny" by comparison

I can't think of a single game other than Metal Gear Solid that has a cigarette reference.

Wow, I didn't know that smoking automatically caused an R rating.

What about drinking? Does it cause an R rating?

Watch out, soon kissing will cause an R rating.

Unless a game is called "Hyper cancer smoking simulator GO!", it shouldn't make a T game an M game. Nor should it make a PG-13 movie an R movie.

"I can't think of a single game other than Metal Gear Solid that has a cigarette reference."

Plenty of JRPGs have characters that smoke. Cid was a heavy smoker in FFVII. In CAC, one of the criminals has a "stogie." I could go on but I don't think that's really important. Games do have tobacco references often. But here is my deal...

CAN WE PLEASE QUIT VILLIANIZING CIGARETTES? Look, I will readily admit that I don't smoke (which is a lie, I'll have a Cigar from time to time and I do mean like once every 4-8 months). I even laughed as smokers kept bitching about their rights during the banning laws (mainly because smokers were complaining about how their rights should not be effected but I will tell you right now, I have never lit up a Cigar in a public place without the smokers complaining, that, and their amazing ability to never compromise is what lead to the permabans). But here is the deal.

Tobacco is bad for you, all the companies are evil, and if you EVER smoked a cigarette, it wasn't your fault. The antismoking campaign went from education to smear and now everyone is trying so hard to make cigarettes end up a huge villian. I mean, well, I know people who won't let their kids watch All Dogs Go To Heaven just because of the cigarette use. I don't know a single smoker that was somehow misled into thinking cigarettes were anything but unhealthy for you. And this huge conspiracy to villianize tobacco is annoying.

"Every year... tobacco kills ______ of expectant mothers." Find me one doctor that will tell you to keep smoking during pregnancy! "Tobacco companies try to hide the ingrediants of cigarettes." Really? Right on the side of the package. Reading is fucking awesome. "______ die of tobacco diseases each year." Okay... their fault, not the companies.

I don't want the gaming industry to join in the holy crusade against tobacco. I don't want a truth ad in my Ridge Racer.

If someone standing near me can smoke a cigarette in public and I can't do anything about it, I don't see why they should be taboo in films and games. I don't think the ESRB should follow the MPAA's lead.

LOL, go sheppy.

Scapegoats are easier than personal responsibility. That's why TV, games, movies, witches, and whatever else get pointed the finger at.

Kids are going to see people smoking in real life just about anywhere. I don't see how cigarettes should affect the rating at all.

I guess poorly attempting to hide things from kids keeps them safe?

It's better for a kid to see smoking in a game than be subjected to the smoke in real life. That's for sure.

The MPAA is trying to make cigarette smoking an immediate R rating. Here come the political correctness police!!!

Yeah, this is out of control. Those "Truth" ads crack me the hell up. I'd puch every one of those fuckers in the jaw.

At least I can still smoke in my car.

The 75% of movies with even a little bit of smoking that receive an R rating is probably a misleading fact. Those movies with smoking that end up with an R rating probably all have extreme cursing, nudity, and violence that accompany the smoking. The rest of the movies with smoking that don't receive R ratings probably have little or no cursing, nudity, and violence. The MPAA is just trying to make themselves look like good guys because they "crack down" on smoking in movies.

Yes, they should hold themselves to the same standard.
I'm sick of videogames being treated as a lesser medium, and they should be able to eliminate, if not at least greatly limit their references to tobacco and alcohol if they want to avoid that M rating.
Unless it plays a key role in gameplay these substances are unnecessary, and if they do play a key role in gameplay then they should definitely receive the M rating.

Amen #7, those Truth ads piss me off. They're assholes. I would also love to beat the fuck out of those fuckers.

@Angus

It's that kind of thinking that replaced taverns with "Juice Shops" and let's not forget the lead protagonist of Grandia going home, drunk and a frightful mess, off Papaya Juice.

Hollywood? Well, let's just say the MPAA is such a ridiculous amount of hypocrisy and moronic switchabouts that, for any industry, to take their lead is a damn shame. Music industry? Same thing.

But if Video Games are honestly going to step up as a legitimate medium in the eyes of the mainstream, the last thing we can afford right now is to sell out our values so quickly. If , during a cut-scene in Ghost Recon, an enemies position is given away because of the cherry in his cigarette, I don't think a game should get an instant M because of that. Likewise, nobody knew about the CAC stogie because it's soooo damn small that the only time you see it is during the "busting out" sequence that begins the stage.

Now remember the way these things go. Give an inch, they'll take a mile. We give em cigarettes, they'll want them banned completely from games. From there, the alcohol, then religion, then blood and guns, and suddenly we're back to all those rules than kept so many Japanese games from the US during the NES era.

So I say unto thee, no. If the game calls for a villian requesting a last cigarette before execution but he manages to break free, I don't want the game to get an instant M. I mean, hell, do you realize Freaky Flyers would be an M rated game under this idea?

People shouldn't be so afraid of M ratings in games. They are 17+ and should be the equivalent of R ratings in movies. M is nowhere near NC17 or AO.

I can't believe they allow tobacco use in E-rated games though. That seems pretty ridiculous. Can anybody here name an E-rated game with tobacco use off the top of their head?

Why is it that the ESRB can't just use G,PG,PG-13,R,NC-17 like the movie industry (and corresponding ratings for other countries) and hold them to the same standards as movies? That way parents can just let their children play the level of games that they feel comfortable letting them watch on movies? Of course, some R movies are worse than others, and the same would hold true for video games, but at least we can work with parents by creating one ratings system instead of against them.

"Why is it that the ESRB can't just use G,PG,PG-13,R,NC-17 like the movie industry (and corresponding ratings for other countries) and hold them to the same standards as movies? That way parents can just let their children play the level of games that they feel comfortable letting them watch on movies? Of course, some R movies are worse than others, and the same would hold true for video games, but at least we can work with parents by creating one ratings system instead of against them."

Well, here's the deal...

In my hands I have two products. A DVD copy of Snatch and GTA:SA for PS2.

On the package for Snatch, I see no rating on the front, side, but here is one on the back. It's roughly a fifth of the size of the UPC (or SKU for the trendies) and in excessively small print, it tells me that this movie is not only rated R, but also has strong language, violence, and some nudity.

On the package of SA, the front has the M rating just as big as the Playstation Icon and TV standards logo. On the back, in the same amount of space the UPC took up on the other package is the ESRB box with reasons why the game got it's ratings. Blood and Gore (MPAA considers this under violence), Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use Of Drugs.

Amazing how the MPA group two things together and didn't even mention the use of drugs, huh? Look, I readily admit parents need to be better educated but here's the thing. Lack of knowledge is purely ignorance on their behalf. The industry as spent millions upon million holding the ignorant bastards hands and it's making a difference. The ESRB is by far the most strictly maintained ratings system in the US and it's variety of descripters go well above and beyond rival ratings systems. So it's with that knowledge my response to you is this.

"Fuck em. If parents don't know how to use the system by this point, they'll never learn. Plenty of parents praise the system and those that don't are often the horrid people you don't want breeding anyway."

I thought the MPAA cited drug use too? They even do that in TV guide.

The History Teacher


Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

*
Billy Collins

Sheltering kids doesn't always help them.

Working QA for a major publisher, this is one of the things to look out for. There's a whole packet involving what to look for, what to flag, and what to put into the video sent to the ESRB to get a rating. Smoking is absolutely one of them. Even a REFERENCE to drinking or smoking must be flagged (i.e. someone mentions drinking alcohol or smoking without actually doing it).

It's tough to believe that Hollywood is trying to stamp out smoking while every other paparazzi photo you see is of some celebrity lighting up. Luckily the celebrity's "do as I say, not as I do" mantra has kept them going for so long.

Regarding games, as in movies, cigarettes have come to mostly point out the villain. Now I smoke, but I understand how parents think. I can also recognize Newspeak as governed by the nanny state, and just pray that if anyone smokes in any medium, it is taken in context and not just as a heinous act by an evil person.

Marijuana contains 10 times the tar and carcinogenic material, the leading cause of cancer in cigarettes, and yet the media doesn't care about that being advertised around all the time on TV. The fact is, they are against cigarette's because it's big corporations, and liberal politicians have to be against it to ever get voted. Bottom line, we live in a free market society, and the war on cigarettes was unconstitutional, forcing them to pay out, and forcing cigarettes out of media through coercive tactics such as these. I may hate cigarette's and not smoke, but I'm a Libertarian, and it's all about the principles of this country. People make a choice to smoke something. Breathing in smoke from a fire was considered cancer causing, and those people CHOSE to listen to the company that profited off of them instead of all the scientists, they had no right to get reperations. I hate politics sometimes.

Isn't it true that drug use will DEFINITELY garner an "M" rating...yet, this drug (Nicotine) does not..what gives
And...
I have an issue that "pipeweed" only gets a Teen rating.....
http://www.lotro.com/
Now, we all know what that "pipeweed" really is
Dontcha...huh, huh?

I mean did you see how happy those Hobbits got?

*wink