Some thoughts on the NAWTS Spreadsheet

I got bored, so I figured I'd take a look at the NAWTS spreadsheet, and maybe play with statistics a little. The first thing I looked at was the ESRB ratings for the games I have listed, and below are the percentages of my total gaming library for each ESRB rating.

% Games rated E 45.06%
% Games rated E10+ 8.70%
% Games rated K-A 7.91%
% Games rated T 18.97%
% Games rated M 6.32%
% Games lacking rating ("-") 13.04%

The first thing that jumps out at me is the large number of E-rated titles I've experienced. 45%, really? If you include the K-A and E10+ games in that category, it jumps to 61.67%. Almost two-thirds of my gaming history have been appropriate for small children to play!

"T", being the equivalent of the movie industry's favorite rating PG-13, makes up the next-largest category, about 19% of my gaming history. Of course, I've been gaming longer than there's been an ESRB, and that's part of why the "lacking rating" is the third-largest category, making up roughly 13% of the population of my gaming history. Finally, no matter how you slice it, "M" is the least populous category on my shelf, with only about 6% of my gaming history devoted to it.

So, that's interesting and all, but where does it stack up in terms of all games ever? Unfortunately, I can't find data on all ESRB ratings ever. But I did find data on all ESRB ratings for the year 2009, from the ESRB's own website, which I've borred wholesale, below.

Taken from http://www.esrb.org/about/categories.jsp

Surprisingly enough, I match up pretty closely. Six percent of all games were M-rated, 18% T-rated, 60% E rated... Now, the 16% E10+-rated doesn't match up, though that rating only came into existence in 2005, so that may explain why it's underrepresented in my collection. Assuming 2009 is a representative year, and assuming the 13% of unrated games would have been rated according to this representation (which would give about another 7% to my "E" category), then my gaming colection is, statistically, in ESRB terms, completely average.

This is a long way of saying that my gaming history is, statistically speaking, pretty normal and average. I don't know if that's upsetting or invigorating...

For a much deeper look into how ESRB ratings are spread out across different platforms, this article serves quite nicely.

To Repurpose th' Bard in Iambic, and then for One to Ponder its Meaning

All the world's a game,
And all the men and women player-char'cters:
They have their spawn-points and their weaknesses;
And one man in his time is many-class'd.

...

As much as I would love to continue the quote repurposed, I'm tired and my mood ill-suited to creativity. I actually do feel that the world is game-like; rather, my favorite construct for dealing with the world is to consider it in video-game terms.

Take social situations, for example: A person has a Charisma ("CHA") score, which can be modified up and down by various factors, like self-grooming, fashion, even the room's lighting. One person (the player) has an objective; say, to sway a person to his point of view and to take action based on that view. There's some manner of chance involved: no matter how good or bad the situation is, the end result can still surprise you, and this is represented by a Random Number Generator ("RNG"). The other person has some level of social inertia against this idea, representing a modifier to whatever number the RNG comes up with. Finally, the player's goal has a certain innate difficulty to it, represented by the number to best.

Now, so far, that's not video-gaming, that's D&D. Fair enough. But video games feature one thing that D&D does not: strict, pre-programmed dialog options. Every dialog can be represented by a 'tree' of things the player can say, the other person's reaction to it, and what the player can say in return, as far as any programmer or script-writer cares to take it. When confronted with a social situation, attempting to look down the dialog tree beyond your current branch or node is useful. So, too, is the idea that there are only a few real choices in a given social situation in a given moment: while you could, in reality, say anything, generally you only have a few reasonable options, and immediately cutting those potentially infinite options down to a small subset of reasonable ones can help to process them quickly, since, like in many games, there is a time limit to this.

The construct of life-as-video-games is useful elsewhere, but I'll leave this example on its own for tonight. I bring it up now, however, because I feel that it helped me make a bad situation survivable for myself and a few others tonight, and in the long run.