This post is rated AO for strong reasoning and logic

Rating systems have always really bugged me. I can see the usefulness of them - honest! In a world so incredibly overrun with media - movies, books, TV, games, magazines, radio, etc - it should come as no surprise that everyone needs a little help sorting it all out. Ratings act as a great way for parents to "quick-check" what they can let their kids experience; unfortunately, it is too often used as a "be all and end all" for some. Others takes the ideas of ratings too far and try to drag everyone else down with them, destroying entertainment for the sake of some hackneyed cause like "witchcraft" (as if kids would become Wiccan after reading Harry Potter!) or, in a more recent example, the Church of England suing Sony for having a gunfight against an alien race take place in a facsimile of the Manchester Catherdral in Resistance: Fall of Man. But the church's solution to this (rather silly) "offense" is to pull the game and sue Sony for money? How is this kind of "offensive material" even classified under a rating system? "Rated F: May contain works of fiction that possibly involve real world places".

Where does this madness end? Do we stop making World War II games because the Germans are offended that they are connected to Hitler and always end up losing the war?
(Actually, please do. I'm sick of World War II games already!) Do we stop watching the movie Independence Day because they blow up the White House? I can understand the church's position against violence (all joking about the crusades aside, considering we aren't living in the middle ages anymore - get over it people!), but doesn't it seem like they are grasping here? Resistance isn't exactly "Rated E for Everyone". It's rated "M for Mature" for crying out loud! Basically, you should be behind the wheel of a moving vehicle for over a year before playing this game, and we should ban it because it shows a gun fight in... a church? Is this what the world has come to?

And then, of course, there's Manhunt 2. Now, I haven't played the game. I haven't even played the first one. But, I have seen horror flicks... and those things can get pretty grotesque. I'm a rather empathetic person, so Horrors are about the last thing I'll watch. Ever. I only saw Saw II because it came on HBO one day at school and my roommate wanted to watch it (again). Some parts were pretty bad in terms of just sheer random-acts-of-violence go. Now, I'm not saying that we should start banning Saw - to many people, this is a perfectly valid form of entertainment.

So... what's up with Manhunt then? Sure, the game looks pretty twisted. Killing a guy by drowning him in a toilet after beating him over the head with the seat cover? Yeah, kinda out there. But if someone wants to play that, let them. Given their current "AO" rating (which, for most games, means "contains full nudity") is basically the kiss of death. Why not rate it M? Is there something in there that a 17 year old couldn't be expected to handle that an 18 year old can? Obviously, this is the ESRB sending a message: Tone it down. My message is: Do your job, let people decide. Give it an "M" rating -after all, I don't want an 8 year old playing it any more than you do - but give some people a chance. I'll probably never play it - it's not my kind of game. I'd rather sit down and spend some quality time Catching 'Em All!, but I'm not one to try and shove my standards of violence tolerance down someone else's throat. I enjoy First Person Shooters (even, on some level, Resistance), and those can be pretty violent. So all I ask, ESRB, is that you do your job - rate the games correctly (read: don't use ratings to send a message) and let me decide. Just... don't rate Pokemon "AO" because you can breed them: I need to get my hands on that fire-monkey.