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This weekend I was out shopping for my uncle's Christmas present at a big box retailer and when I was about to leave the PSP aisle I noticed a familiar holiday occurrence: A parent or relative of a gamer, crumpled list in hand, looking a bit lost, scanning the titles and trying to find something, anything the kid wants so they can leave and go look at DVDs or CDs again.

I volunteer to help, and it's like I've thrown a rope to a drowning person. This woman was happy to get some help.

"It's for my nephew," she said, looking at the printed email from her sister, "he wants Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories or NHL 07 for his PSP."

The nephew is 15, and I said that while I've been a very big fan of the GTA series, she should be careful about buying it for him. I give the woman a very quick primer on the ESRB ratings, pointing out games rated E, E 10+, T, and M, along with the descriptors on the back of the boxes giving details. She was taken aback by the list of sins below the M rating on Liberty City Stories, and opted instead for the NHL game.

I'm over 18, why care about the ESRB?
Last week Senators Lieberman and Clinton voiced their support for a new set of ESRB public service announcements. While they won't be in the ads (phew), their support for them is a turnaround for these two vocal critics of the games industry. Astute readers will recall them leading the pack of wolves howling for blood back when Rockstar embarassed themselves and insulted us with their Hot Coffee excuses. I'm very happy to hear that these Senators are getting behind the ESRB. This is a good thing for all of us.

Why should those of us who can play all the M-rated games we want care? Because if the ESRB fails or is beset by regulations and Congressional demands that doom it to fail under an impossible mandate -- as recent attempted laws have tried to do -- then it will crumble and be replaced by hard and fast regulations and outright censorship. Once Congress is involved you can bet that nobody will go on record voting against stopping content that anyone anywhere deems objectionable.

And could you imagine the court cases that would result from trying to understand legal definitions of today's E, T, M, and AO ratings?

I admit the ESRB isn't perfect, and I have my own thoughts on how to improve it, and with luck it will evolve to be a better system. But for now, it's the best we've got and frankly it's almost completely under the radar of the game-buying public. How can we dispose of something entirely when almost nobody buying games even knows it's there?

So next time you see a parent struggling to get games from a list for a child, niece, or nephew, or next time you see a mom or dad getting fooled by their 10-year-old child into buying a Rated-M game, lean over and politely clue them in to the rating system. After all, it's not just going to help them make a slightly wiser game-buying decision, it's going to help you have a more vibrant and diverse game industry.

From Aeropause.