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.