Last week the government chose to adopt the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) age rating system as the sole classification system for games in the UK. Following the announcement, which was made as part of the Digital Britain report, we caught up with Michael Rawlinson, director general of the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, to discuss the legal and physical processes of implementing PEGI, educating consumers about the newly updated system, and the new role that independent regulators like the Video Standards Council will play in the future.
With the government having opted to adopt PEGI as the sole classification system for games in the UK, what’s been going on over the past week and what’s the next step in putting this into practice?
ELSPA has written to key parliamentarians, people that sit on various select committees, ministers and shadow ministers, just to lay out the facts of the PEGI system so that they understand what it is the government has recommended, and so that they understand the changes we want them to work with the government to make part of law later on this year. That process will kick off with the Queen’s speech in the autumn and the legislative process will continue through, and hopefully it will be enacted before the House rises for a general election at some point in 2010.
From a UK perspective, PEGI has announced new colour-coded symbols. They’ll be worked into publisher’s artwork over the next few weeks and we’ll start to see those appearing on packs probably after the summer holidays. And the Video Standards Council is now, I believe, working to ensure that as an organisation it becomes fit for purpose as it takes on these new statutory roles as a designated body under the legislation to officially rate videogames in the UK.
ELSPA and numerous publishers felt that PEGI was the best choice for child protection reasons. Why do you believe that to be the case when the BBFC ratings were already widely recognised and understood by parents, where as the pictorial descriptor symbols PEGI uses are arguably more confusing?
Not only were ELSPA lobbying for PEGI, and the publishers came out in favour of it, but also Tanya Byron, as part of her review last year, laid down nine principles of what she believed a gold standard games classification system should incorporate, and at the Digital Safety conference last week she actually endorsed the government’s decision, so it’s not only the industry [that backed PEGI].
Since Tanya Byron initially recommended the BBFC, how has the PEGI system been improved?
At no point did Tanya Byron recommend the BBFC as the solution. The reality - and she confirmed this at [the Digital Safety] conference - was that this was not the core of her role under the review that she undertook, and she didn’t feel that she had sufficient time to do a thorough and complete process determining what the future ratings system should be.
[Byron's report, Safer Children In A Digital World, proposed a hybrid BBFC/PEGI system, with the BBFC enjoying an extension of its remit to rate games to all titles from 12+ upwards, and BBFC ratings appearing on the front of all game boxes. It recommended that PEGI continue to rate all 3+ and 7+ games and that PEGI equivalent logos (across all age ranges) be featured on the back of all boxes.]
However, she did establish nine principles of an effective ratings system: [they included] that the ratings system should operate both for games sold in a shop and games sold and played online; that there should be a clear set of labels including pictograms and information that made it possible for parents to understand what the classification system was; it was also to be legally enforced for the sale of products to children over the age of 12; the system should have the possibility to refuse to classify games for release into the UK market. The reasons why the enhanced PEGI system was the one the government chose was because it met Tanya Byron’s tests.
I also believe that one should not underestimate the passage of time. The BBFC came into existence in the early part of the 20th century, so it has had a few decades advantage over the PEGI system, which was only established in 2003, and I think the progress of the PEGI system in these first few years has been very good. One of the issues that we have had in the UK has been the confusion of trying to explain to consumers the fact that games could carry a BBFC classification or they could carry a PEGI classification. This decision by the government, once it is enacted, will sweep all of this aside and we will be able to make a very simple message to consumers. When you see the square PEGI rating you know this is interactive gaming content, it’s not a linear film experience.
The pictograms, which have been updated, will now carry a single word descriptor as part of the pictogram, so [for example] the fist will say ‘Violence’ and the speech bubbles will say ‘Bad language’, so it will help parents and consumers understand what they mean.
Thirdly, PEGI will be adding a small box of extended consumer information, so there’ll be a phrase that says ‘Contains moderate violence’ or ‘Contains extreme graphic violence’. One of the pictograms will actually confirm that the game allows online gameplay, and this I believe is a fundamental reason why the government chose the PEGI system. We need that consistency of ratings across Europe to ensure that we get consistency of approach, so that when young people go into an online gaming experience and are interacting with humans in other territories there is a commonality of the content classification.